Pandora and Mark Brewer are the most unconventional Mormons, avid movie buffs, and all around engaging people I know. We were Cambridge neighbors when our sons attended grade school together. After Mark finished his PhD. in Japanese History, they moved to the Chicago area to further Pandora’s career at Crate & Barrel. My children and I visited them a few times during Oscar season. Ten years passed until I stayed with them one night during my trip; our first visit as empty nesters.
How will we live tomorrow?
“I am fascinated by how science fiction writers envision life and how it plays out. There is this relationship between narrative that tries to predict the future, portrayed as how we live now; and our current reality, how we lived back then. The author’s role is to help us see the past, today, or tomorrow. It’s always a story; we’re always crafting it.
“I want to be able to bring the future I envision of me as an older person – wise, generous witty – to become a reality. We have to live every day to be the person we want to be.
“When I struggle in life, I find reasons in literature. My genre is science fiction. This makes me feel like I am the protagonist of my own story.
“I am the managing editor of a Mormon Women’s Magazine, Exponent II. It’s all about women telling stories. The point it not the perfect story, but putting your story out there.
Pandora, Brewer, Quilter, Editor, Mother, Wife, Mount Prospect, IL
How will we live tomorrow?
“My initial answer is pretty much the way we live today. However, we have all this private media. We can converse with whomever we want, watch what we want, live in a private world.
“My grandmother was two years old when the Titanic sunk, and twenty-seven when the Hindenburg went down. Neither was culturally significant for her the way we think of these events now. Time has weighted their importance. Twenty years ago I had a landline. Now, I have a cell phone. I don’t know how the change happened; it was just a logical extension. The future will not look that different because it will unfold one day at a time.
“The Victorian novel would be thirty pages long if they had cellphones; all those miscommunications and mishaps wouldn’t have happened. Yet we still have novels, and we still have miscommunications. That’s why Euripides is still relevant. We don’t have what we want; we will never get everything we want. That is what being human is.”
Mark Brewer, Actor, Historian, Father, Husband, Mount Prospect, IL
How Will We Live Tomorrow? 