Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandi Dehaven.
Hi Brandi, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I’ve never been able to shake my love for writing. Even so, I tried to be everything else. I enrolled at the University of South Carolina Aiken (USCA) as a Computer Science major before I decided to swap to a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Professional Writing. The change happened in my sophomore year when I failed three core classes. Looking at failure dead on is never easy, but for it to occur that early on in my degree path led me to panicking in my Chevy Spark in broad daylight. Fortunately, an email ‘pinged’ in my inbox. It was Broken Ink, USCA’s on campus literary magazine. It cheered me up immediately because I had completely forgotten that I submitted a few poetry pieces to them. Not only did I get published, but I won an award. It was almost humorous how stark the comparison was. Here I was unraveling and doubting myself, worrying I wasn’t good at anything then boom! Proof that my writing wasn’t bad. In this instance I realized that I was surrounded by people doing what they loved. The peers in the classes I attended loved coding, math, and solving puzzles. I simply didn’t, but I loved writing. So, if I continued down this path that was glaringly wrong for me nothing good would come of it. I would be competing with passion and intelligence, and I was tired of white knuckling through every day. I quit forcing myself to be someone I’m not and never looked back.
Those publications opened so many opportunities for me. I was an opening reader for established authors and organizations such as Evelyn Berry and the, now defunct, Town Square Literary Magazine. I was exposed to how useful writing was and found a niche I loved: grant writing. Before I graduated university I earned my Grant Writing Certificate. A skill which secured the Porter Fleming Grant for Broken Ink’s Getting on the Shelf Literary Event. The event was so well-planned by the students and faculty that Marcus Amaker, first Poet Laureate of Charleston, drove all the way down to Aiken to be on the panel. Finding and applying for this grant was the Hail Mary project that I centered my senior Thesis upon. Again, another first try that I wasn’t expecting to go well surpassed my expectations. This was huge for me and finally gave me the confidence that I could be a writer or at the very least support other writers. I went from barely keeping my head above water to being able to give back to the organizations that guided me to where my passions were. Nowadays, you can find me endlessly hacking at my debut novel on my lunch breaks, at 4am, and right after work.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
In hindsight, it would have been a smoother road if I didn’t give into imposter syndrome. The entire reason for me pursuing a STEM degree in the first place was because I was not ‘the best ever’ writer. I thought that picking up a new skill entirely was better than sharpening abilities around the subjects that I loved. If I had just believed in myself a little more, I could have spent less time trudging through classes that I didn’t end up using and more time working towards the degree, projects, and overall life that would make me happy.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m published in Carolina Muse with my poem Teeth in the Branches. I’m also published in the Waccamaw Literary Journal with my non-fiction short story titled Brief Diary of an Instacart Delivery Driver. I’m proud of this story because it’s one of the most notable times I nailed it in terms of environmental storytelling. It was like boiling a frog when I fed the reader the details of how people were too busy to shop for themselves, the elderly taking Instacart orders for extra income, having to void items that had been recalled, etc. It painted a bleak picture that reflected the first peeps of the supply chain issues back in 2021-2023. Each detail pushed the reader towards the tragic ending. I’m proud of the moments when I successfully cut the fat while still being able to immerse the reader.
A majority of my published pieces are from university-based magazines, but I’m actively working on other projects and finding time to submit to literary magazines as much as I can. The specialty that I am pursuing is horror fiction. I am fascinated with monsters hiding in plain sight. The stories that I’m working on all take place at jobs, and this is no accident. These are places notoriously unleavable when you’re clocked in and what your livelihood depends upon. In the very recent past I was a job juggler and since working takes up a large portion of my time even now, it tends to be my main source of inspiration. Often, I ask myself questions like: what could get me here, where would it hide, and who would it target? Working in professions that starkly differ from one another opens new perspectives and conjures a different answer depending on where you work. It is endless entertainment behind many of the desks I’ve occupied. What sets me apart from others is how I like to play with that perspective. The more I worked on fleshing out my novel, the more I noticed that who delivers the message matters a great deal more than the message itself. In my writing I tend to obsess over this feature and how it drives the story. The idea that horrors can bleed into your everyday life is intriguing to me because it entails that the ‘monster’ is unavoidable. Additionally, what’s scarier than an outright threat? A slow creeping one that you’re trying to warn everyone about but… they don’t believe you!
Any big plans?
I’m saving for an editor and working on the launch of a blog. This novel is my first large project and when it’s finished, I want to rest assured that I researched the topic to death before querying or publishing. I’m looking forward to finding an editor that can critique the book in all the necessary ways so the path from polished draft to a real book is a bit clearer! I feel like I’m knitting a sweater for the sole purpose of unraveling it, only to knit it again. The blog is just for fun things and documenting my life adventures in between. Plus, I want to push back against the outdated sentiment that ‘blogs are dead’ because they’re not!
The change has already occurred. I now have a job with regular hours and lunch breaks. I won’t give you a laundry list of everything I was balancing for four years, but I can say that I have a normal life now when I did not before. Having time to write at all is a first for me. Before, I just stole time from myself. Being able to slow down a little has served me well and has replenished my bandwidth to learn new things. This monster project is a genre, style, and form jump so the refresh was needed to be able to start. However, the final draft before I start searching for an editor is almost complete. I had fun with it every step of the way. The big change from this year and last year is that learning the ins and outs of genres, drafting, and editing, are no longer exhausting. When you have time to breathe, you tend to remember why you love something.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandi.dehaven/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandidehaven/?isSelfProfile=true
- Other: https://substack.com/@brandidehaven
