R.E.M. and a $25,000 house

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By BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star

Thirty-five of her 45 years of life have been in Lincoln, so excuse her if she’s a tad territorial about the place.

Amy Knox Brown saw R.E.M. play at the Drumstick back in the 1980s, earned three degrees from UNL and bought her first house here in 1991.

It only cost $25,000, and no, she assures, it wasn’t a trailer.

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Amy Knox Brown

Amy Knox Brown

Yeah, she’ll grant you life in Nebraska can be predictable, “but there’s also a certain comfort in that.”

As she writes in her opening e-mail: “People who complain there’s nothing to do in Nebraska are people who are incapable of entertaining themselves.”

She’s lived in Los Angeles, Iowa City, Washington, D.C., and now Winston-Salem, N.C.

She met her husband at UNL.

They were teacher’s assistants, office mates. You can figure out where the story goes from there.

“I get the feeling you don’t want to stay in Nebraska the rest of your life,” she once told her husband before he was her husband.

“I don’t,” he said.

“That is a huge problem for me,” she said.

But love conquers, and, as she says with a laugh, “I finally gave up.”

They’ve done well with their travels. He teaches at Wake Forest University and has published two novels and a book of short stories.

She’s an assistant professor at Salem College and will have her own book published in September.

It’s called “Three Versions of the Truth,” a fictional collection of short stories narrated by people who feel comfortable or alienated by where they live. Many of the stories are set in Nebraska.

No wonder her husband sometimes calls her Nebraska’s minister of propaganda.

So what’s the minister think?

Things aren’t always better in your neighbor’s yard, that’s what.

“Lincoln is a college town, and I often found it to be a progressive town,” Knox Brown says.

“Winston-Salem is primarily a business town, really conservative. At times, I’ve found it to be overtly racist, overtly sexist, people always talking about church down here in a way I didn’t experience in Lincoln. There’s a lot of proselytizing down here that I didn’t see in Lincoln at all.”

In Nebraska, she found it easy to make connections with people. There was a certain comradeship that came in just being Nebraskans.

“I think Nebraskans are kind of defensive because we’ve always felt like people thought we weren’t as smart, or hillbillies,” she says.

“So I always felt kind of defensive when people were talking about Nebraska.”

And whatever sameness there was to daily life, she found it more comforting than boring.

For example, everyone just knew that you didn’t go out from 11 to 1 when the Huskers had an afternoon football game.

“But then after 1, there’s no one on the streets,” Knox Brown says.

“Like every football Saturday, there was this pattern I could figure out.”

Sure, there are people who aren’t open-minded about anything in this town, but Knox Brown knows well by now that you’ll find those people in the next town, too.

“I just think people of Lincoln hate change,” she says. “They’re kind of nostalgic, but I’m kind of that way, too.”