Rebecca Brenner’s debut book PAPER HOUSE explores healing from generational trauma

PARK CITY, Utah — Local author Rebecca Brenner’s book Paper House is being published by Wayfarer Books, a publisher that champions poetry and nonfiction that “illuminate darkness, provoke change, and demand accountability from systems of power,” fostering a community of writers who stand outside the mainstream. Paper House is a memoir-in-verse that reconstructs a mother-daughter bond lost to addiction.

Rebecca Brenner’s debut book, forged from her mother’s long-hidden writings, arrives June 25

While navigating early motherhood, Brenner unsealed a long-hidden box of her late mother’s poems and journals—untouched since her mother’s death from opioid addiction. “When I became a mom, I really yearned for her guidance in a way that I had not since she had passed away,” recalls Brenner. “What was very surprising to me, is a lot of grief and unhealed trauma from losing my mom got released after I became a mom.”

As she read, a quiet conversation began—one she scarcely recognized at the time—and she instinctively replied to each fragment with a poem of her own. The resulting memoir-in-verse, Paper House, braids her mother’s voice with Brenner’s present reflections, spanning three timelines to show how addiction’s echo reverberates across generations.

Paper House is equal parts elegy and excavation. Through precise, emotionally charged verse, Brenner confronts inherited trauma, explores the contradictions of love and loss, and demonstrates how language can build new foundations without erasing old scars. The collection invites readers to inhabit unresolved spaces—where grief and hope stand side by side—and to witness the healing that can emerge when old stories are surrendered to silence and space.

Poet, accomplished writer and community organizer

Brenner is a journalist, poet, and mindfulness teacher. Her writing has been featured in TIME, the LA Times, Mutha Magazine, Variant Literature, Tin House, The Rumpus, and others. She is also a journalist and features writer at Townlift.

When she started working on Paper House, she did not consider herself a poet, and didn’t imagine writing a book-in-verse, in fact she would have said “absolutely no way”, so when her responses appeared as poems, she says “I kind of mentally tricked myself by just saying, I’m writing a rough draft or an outline. These aren’t poems, this is an outline. It allowed me to get out of my own way and allow the book to come how it wanted to come. I really think that it wanted to come through sort of this call and response of my mom’s poems with my own poems.”

The book has been a twenty-year labor of love. Over this timespan Rebecca Brenner also studied mindfulness and has been teaching it for two decades. A few years ago, she and Randy Jo Greenberg founded Mindful. Summit County – a nonprofit focused on moving mindfulness beyond self-care into community care. In addition to being President of Mindful. Summit County, she is an elected member of the Leadership Team of Summit Pride, working closely with city, county, and state leaders to ensure equality and safety for the Queer Community.

Her memoir-in-verse, Paper House, will be published by Wayfarer Books June 25^th.