'A Letter To My Father' at creative workshop

For years, Tina Smith-Brown was the person on the other end of the line at a public telephone who returned your quarter when your call did not go through.

"That's back when there were public phones all over the place that worked and had coin returns," she says.

But six years ago Smith-Brown went into therapy, and the changes wrought there unleashed a torrent of creativity.

This North Philadelphia native still has a day job (with medical benefits) at Verizon. But Smith-Brown, now 47, is also a writer with grants from the Leeway Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts.

She's working on a novel about a therapist treating a Sudanese mother who was brought to this country illegally and is accused of murdering her child.

She's been accepted by the University of Iowa for an intensive weeklong writing seminar. She's doing a workshop in Manhattan at the annual Book Expo America at the end of this month.

And on Saturday morning, Smith-Brown will appear at the 25th annual Celebration of Black Writing Festival, presenting "A Letter to My Father," a workshop on the therapeutic and creative uses of letter-writing.

Where else can emerging writers like Smith-Brown be on the same program with celebrated wordsmiths like Terry McMillan and Sonia Sanchez?

"That's the beauty of the festival," she says. "It will take in and encourage somebody like me, who is just starting out."

Smith-Brown found support for her Leeway application from Lorene Cary, who founded the nonprofit Art Sanctuary in North Philadelphia and runs the Celebration of Black Writing Festival.

Being in therapy was hell, she says, but the resulting freedom from angst, doubt, and repressed anger is priceless.

As a child in the Fairhill projects, Smith-Brown watched the 23 trolley from her bedroom window and listened as her mother, a minister, took the verbal abuse dished out by her father, a man who drank heavily, smoked illegal substances, and operated a grocery store with a numbers operation in the back.

She was a middle child in a family of nine, and as such she learned to be patient, keep her emotions in check, and wait her turn.

Still, she clawed her way through college, graduating from Temple University at 25 with a degree in journalism.

When her oldest sister, Una, died of breast cancer 11 years ago at the age of 35, Smith-Brown stepped in and raised Una's sons, who were then 11 and 5.

And when, after a decade of marriage, Smith-Brown realized she'd been putting up with what to her were threats and insults, she and her husband, Jerome Brown, separated. That changed their relationship for the better, she says. They continue to live separately and plan to keep that arrangement, but they also continue as coparents for Una's sons.

All that - the parenting responsibility, the separation - took a toll in the form of panic attacks. That's when Smith-Brown sought counseling.

"We started pulling off old layers and my writing just came back. I'd always loved writing, but it wasn't until college that I fell in love with creative writing."

As part of the counseling process, Smith-Brown wrote to her father, a letter that took months to compose and which she has no plans to mail.

She also saw a way to use the technique with other women, whether their father-child relationships had been positive or negative.

"A Letter to My Father" is now a hands-on workshop, and through Art Sanctuary Smith-Brown hopes to publish a workbook all women can use.

"This project came out of me realizing we have to address things and not be afraid.

"My father left when I was about 4 and he was gone until I was 11 or 12. When he came back, I really didn't know him. But my mother took him back. I never could figure out why she loved him as much as she did.

"Then I married a man who was abusive to me because that's what I saw."

Why not a letter to our mothers?

"Every woman has a letter in her that is crying to be written," she says. "This was the relationship I had to address."

"Fathers help us develop into the women we are today. And if he's not there for us, we always look for another man to become that father figure."

And then she repeats a line from the poet Anne Sexton, which she plans to feature in her workbook:

"It doesn't matter who my father was," Sexton wrote. "It matters who I remember he was."