For DJ: Remembering Denis Johnson

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CINDY LEE JOHNSON, Denis Johnson’s wife for the last 25 years of his life, says that she found this untitled poem from a file on DJ’s computer labeled Uncollected Verses. She writes, “I don’t know the dates or circumstances under which he was writing any of the poems, but this one starts out on the Mendocino Coast and includes the dates he worked on it. Also, I arrive at the end. And I love that it takes us to the Mendocino Coast.” She also said that she “had the honor of being the first to read his work as he created it.” Their last house together was on the Sonoma Coast of California at Sea Ranch. This poem was a discovery for her.

[Untitled]
 
If I was on acid I don’t think I could take
The cymbal-crash and slow, suspenseful grace
Of white spray over the black rocks, I wouldn’t
Be able to endure the far-below
Crescendo and decay Oh Mendocino
County LSD The Grateful Dead
I am no longer able — at all, at all —
But I’m in Arizona, I’m not there,
All of it some twenty years ago,
And still your blonde pain still those headlong
Walks alongside cliffs and flung surf
And through the woods of tortured organisms
With the book in my hand shouting Whitman
— My wife has come home interrupting me.

(1991, 2004)
— Denis Johnson

 

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ALAN SOLDOFSKY

Denis Johnson Tapped Me on the Shoulder: Notes from His Last Sonoma County Outpost

It was a warm, sunny Halloween weekend. My wife Pamela and I had booked a house at Sea Ranch, the famed midcentury architectural development on the far northern Sonoma County coast near the town of Gualala, which lays just across the Gualala River in Mendocino County. We booked through an online vacation rental site that operates innocuously out of Gualala. We reserved a house with an affordable weekend rate, knowing it did come with (somewhat distant) oceanfront views.

We got there at dusk just as darkness was settling in. We found the house easily. It was near the seventh hole of the Sea Ranch golf course. The house was clad in weather-beaten wood shingles, in compliance with the Sea Ranch community’s architectural standards. The house had two bedrooms and bathrooms on each of its wings, connected on the outside by a well-used deck. On the deck there was a traditional wooden hot tub, metal patio table (slightly green with rust), and a big BBQ under a dusty plastic cover.

When we got to looking around inside the house, which was likely built in the early ’70s, the place seemed stuck in a time capsule. The house had tall timber ceilings and glass doors framing a view of the golf course. It had vintage Mexican Saltillo tile floors throughout, a natural terra-cotta color, upon which were scattered a few Persian-style rugs. The touted loft retreat was just wide enough for a single bed along with an unadorned wooden dresser, a chair, and a bedside table. Through the window, beyond the bordering trees, you could see the glint of the ocean. The kitchen was squeezed into an elongated triangle, whose apex was so tight that some of the kitchen drawers were impossible to access. The house was comfortably furnished, but in a way that suggested the owners had left all their furniture and decorations just as they were when they lived there.

The house was updated with a giant smart-screen home-theater-sized TV. And adjacent to the TV area, with its coffee table and shelving for CDs, DVDs, jigsaw puzzles, and old magazines, was the fireplace. And on the opposite wall there were some ample bookshelves that, surprisingly, held multiple copies of Denis Johnson’s novels, even some in German translation. That was immediately strange to find inside this vacation house sited near the golf course. We also discovered that there were copies of a few of Denis’s poetry collections, plus other authors that I knew Denis admired, such as W. G. Sebald and Jack Gilbert.

All that was curious enough. Then we noticed a pile of New Yorkers by the fireplace, dated from 2014–2016, with the name “The Johnsons” on the subscription label. It all started to seem a little bit too odd. Did the house belong to a Denis Johnson admirer, or even some relative who collected copies of Denis’s books? With my curiosity piqued, I went online to read some of Denis’s obits, and discovered that he had died at Sea Ranch in May 2017. Now things were really getting spooky. I could see that the house was somehow connected to Denis. But I didn’t know how. The next morning, I called the real estate office in Gualala and asked if they could tell me who owned the house we rented (named “The Lucky Seven” because it sat right next to the seventh hole). And it turns out the owner is Cindy Lee Johnson, Denis’s widow. Then it hit me — we were in fact sleeping in the master bedroom in what had been Denis and Cindy’s bed.

So, I sent Cindy an email asking about the house, letting her know that we were renting it for the weekend, and telling her that we felt the strange presence somehow of Denis. Sure enough, Cindy said that that’s the house where he died. She wrote back that “the universe was winking at you.” But she was delighted I had by accident come to visit their house, which she said she had to leave after Denis died because she couldn’t bear living there alone.

It would be an understatement to say my mind was blown. What an amazing experience to be spending Halloween weekend in this Sea Ranch house, the last house Denis had owned in his life. Yet though it all seemed quite strange, it didn’t seem surprising to me, thinking on my friendship with DJ over the decades. This Gualala house was nothing like the surreal gothic dwellings Johnson conjured up out of the coastal fog in his novel set in this region, Already Dead: A California Gothic. Though I didn’t know this last incarnation of him, when he became sick; in fact, I knew nothing about his illness until a mutual friend sent me the New York Times obituary.

I met Denis when I was 18 and he was 19. We were both in the freshman cohort in the undergraduate subsidiary program of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and our first class together was Marvin Bell’s undergraduate poetry workshop. When I first noticed Denis — dressed in old khakis, vintage Boy Scout shoes, and a wrinkled flannel shirt — I thought, “They must let anybody into this class.” But when Denis’s first poem showed up on the worksheet — I think it was “Poem About Baseballs” — no one could believe that one of our class members had written it. Although Marvin’s critiques were good-natured, they were sometimes a little rough. And I had gotten used to the class “roughing up” my poems. But no one had any suggestions to offer Denis. Most of us sat there feeling not so secretly envious, mouths agape, wondering how he could have written lines like:

four blocks away,
 
a baseball was a dot against
the sky, and he thought, my
glove is too big, i will
 
drop the ball and it will be
a home run. the snow falls
too fast from the clouds,
and night is dropped and
 
snatched back like a huge
joke. is that the ball, or is
it just a bird, and the ball is
somewhere else, and i will
miss it? and the edges are gone, my
 
hands melt into the walls, my
hands do not end where the wall
begins. should i move
forward, or back, or will the ball
 
come right to me? i know i will
miss, because i always miss when it
takes so long. the wall has no
surface, no edge, the wall
 
fades into the air and the air is
my hand, and i am the wall. my
arm is the syringe and thus i
 
become the nurse, i am you,
nurse.

It didn’t seem fair that a scruffy young hippie, who I had met earlier that summer in a city park, could produce a poem like this. Denis couldn’t explain it, either. He had been mostly a fiction writer before he came to the workshop. He told me later that he wrote the poems out as paragraphs and then cut them up into lines. It didn’t seem fair, but it was amazing that he was in our class. By the next spring term, Denis, with Marvin Bell’s help, had managed to publish his first book, The Man Among the Seals, with Kim Merker’s Stone Wall Press. It was printed in a beautiful, slender, letterpress edition (260 copies total), the type hand-set, used copies of which now sell online for at least $600. I still have mine, which Denis signed: “In love in death / in life and breath / we march forever onward / seeking health and happiness / but happiness is a long word. / Row! Row! Row!”

Back then, we alternated winning undergraduate writing contests, both having been picked in various years for the student prize given by the Academy of American Poets. We both finished our BAs in May 1971, and we were both admitted to the Graduate Workshop for our MFAs that fall. I finished in December ’72. DJ finished his MFA in ’74, with Marvin’s help — given that Denis was already getting pretty deep into his heroin addiction. The Denis I knew first was that young preternatural freak of a poet, who hung out many afternoons and evenings in a dark back booth in The Vine, the Iowa City bar immortalized in Jesus’ Son. The Vine’s motto was “if you could live on 4 hours of sleep, the Vine could take care of the other 20.”

I can’t help thinking of the various incarnations of Denis I would encounter over the years. The Denis I ran into with his sleeping bag, hanging out panhandling in front of Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where I was then working. The Denis who had just come out of his addiction and was learning to be a practicing Catholic, who I asked to housesit for me in North Oakland over a stormy Christmas holiday when my ex-wife and I took our newborn son back to Iowa by Amtrak to meet the grandparents. The Denis who wrote long-form journalism from war zones for magazines like Esquire, who was flown to dangerous locales, like Erbil during the first Iraqi war. The Denis who wrote extraordinary theologically themed plays, often about Cassandras, psychos, and serial killers, sometimes in verse, and would assist the producers at Campo Santo Theater Company in San Francisco to stage them, sometimes putting on a tool belt to help make the sets. The Denis who went on book tours, and gave readings at San Jose State and at Stanford (at the invitation of Tobias Wolff), and told stories about how he contracted malaria twice while in Africa and barely made it out. The Denis who won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction for his epic Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke. The Denis who had his noir novel serialized in Playboy. And finally, Denis the prodigal son, who took care of his mom during her last days in Scottsdale.

Denis remained a faithful friend to me for all that time. Through all of our marriages (and dramas and catastrophes), he was someone who I knew would always be there if I needed him. Perhaps the longest sustained friendship I have had in my lifetime. I can’t help but think of him now, somewhere out there, a specter pervading the shadowy, wind-blasted redwood coast of Mendocino, with fog riding over the ridges behind Gualala (the setting of Already Dead). Or intangibly occupying a barstool in the Gualala Hotel, where he was hardly ever recognized as the literary lion he was.

I wrote this poem in response to discovering that I stayed the weekend at Denis and Cindy Johnson’s house in Sea Ranch:

Lucky Seven
                for DJ
 
Is this the place where you
found yourself lost in the last
golden dimension, leavening
the mist pulling the veils
over your eyes?
 
It’s been a while since you passed here
where the road coils up the bluffs.
From where you are, you can see
dark braids of asphalt
climbing the green gradient.
 
What else is there to watch between
tracks of raindrops, caught
in your out-of-focus binoculars?
Brown pelicans shooting over the cove
in missing-man formation.
 
The one in front seeming to believe
it’s worth the effort, opposed
by headwinds over the bluffs,
miraculously hovering, blown backwards,
crashing onto the rock’s white landing zone.
 
This was your stage. It’ll keep
for eternity like the freight
of your name on a bookshelf.
The letters startling, unmistakable
in hewn blocks of language.
 
Your history preserved
between covers. You kept a bed
in the loft to absorb pieces of intelligence
or starlight that fell where you slept.
That’s more than enough.
 
The house radiates your absence
to the dark line of cypresses. A cipher
traced in air and earth. You’ve gone beyond
the skids of cloud, a fading phosphorescence
bruising the edge of the horizon.
 
The highway remains unnamed,
yet yours drifts alongside it
in the dregs of fog that hang
over the headland, a shrouded remnant —
to some what passes for heaven.

I can only hope that Denis is happy wherever he is now, in whatever ethereal realm he reached out from to tap me on the shoulder. “Row! Row! Row!”

 

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TED GELTNER

When the Streets Had No Plaques: Denis Johnson in Iowa City

If you’re looking to find the story of Denis Johnson, Iowa City is as good a place as any to start. Johnson came here in 1967 with the dream of becoming a poet. He did what he set out to do, and much more. He became a poet, a novelist, a war correspondent, a playwright, and, eventually, what someone once referred to as a living statue, one of those revered individuals whom the rest of us like to bestow awards and honors upon. He died in 2017. Tributes were written, memorials were held across the country, and a year later, dozens of famous writers came to Washington, DC, to salute him and his work at the Library of Congress.

Today, in the summer of 2022, you don’t have to look very far to find shrines to that guy, Denis Johnson the legend, in Iowa City, a town with a rich literary history. You can go on the Iowa City Literary Walk, where plaques celebrating the famous names who have created great works of American literature line the streets of downtown. On North Linn Street, you can find the plaque devoted to Johnson, in among dozens of other legends, from Flannery O’Connor to Kurt Vonnegut to one of Johnson’s own mentors, Raymond Carver.

Or you can head over to the Dey House, on North Clinton Street, current home of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which Johnson received his MFA in 1974. There, up on the wall, you’ll find framed posters promoting readings Johnson gave on the UI campus in the 1990s and 2000s, as a returning hero, a god to the next generation of aspiring writers. Or go down to the beautiful Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives, built in 2006, and walk the polished wood floors to find a collection of Johnson’s titles for your reading pleasure.

It will take you a little more digging, however, if you’re looking for the Denis Johnson who was walking these streets in 1967, the one who dreamt of becoming a poet but had yet to reach legendary status. And that, really, is who you need to find if you want to know the story of how those great works of literature came to be. There are traces of that Denis Johnson if you look hard enough.

You can walk across the Burlington Street Bridge and find Hillcrest Dormitory, the first place Johnson lived as an 18-year-old college freshman. He walked the halls, sometimes carrying selections from his music collection, looking for somebody who had a record player to share and wanted to listen to some rock ’n’ roll or blues. You can imagine that is where he first heard the song “Heroin” by Lou Reed, and the line that he would later make famous: When I’m rushing on my run, and I feel just like Jesus’ Son.

Most of Johnson’s favorite bars are gone or have reinvented themselves as more “family friendly” establishments at new locations. The latter was the fate of The Vine, the bar about which he wrote that “some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life happened [there].” The original Vine served its last whiskey a few decades ago. In the late ’60s, when it was the first bar the police checked in search of perpetrators of drug-related crimes, the patrons proudly called themselves “freaks.” It was among those freaks that Johnson found both comrades and future characters for his stories.

The Mill, where he made a deal with the bartender for his “sixty-dollar Chevrolet, the finest and best thing I ever bought,” is only a memory as well. The Mill is also where Johnson sat at the bar and, as the cigarette smoke swirled, making the air nearly unbreathable, matched drinks and talked about writing with Raymond Carver late into the night. The Mill relocated a few times and lasted all the way until 2020 before finally fading away.

Joe’s Place, on Iowa Avenue, where Johnson liked to play pinball and shoot pool, is still around. Today it’s a popular destination, sporting the town’s first rooftop bar, built in 2017. But on the first floor, you can still find a pool table and imagine it’s the one where Johnson was rescued by a friend from an impending beating at the hands of a 260-pound Iowa Hawkeye offensive lineman whom he had somehow offended. Around the corner on South Clinton Street, you can still have a drink at the Airliner, or walk a few blocks east from the campus’s famous “Pentacrest” to other taverns like Dave’s Fox Head, where Johnson was known to make an appearance. Perhaps you’ll be sharing a stool across time.

Back on campus, you can walk over to the Memorial Union, on Jefferson Street where it dead-ends at the Iowa River, and watch the students shop, dine, and scroll through their phones. If you go to the south entrance and stand on the steps, you’ll be in the exact same spot where Johnson and his fellow Vietnam War protesters lined up in the fall of 1967 to block access to the Marine recruiting office. They stayed there all day, through the rain, stayed there as the antiprotesters attacked them with rocks and fists, until the police finally broke it up, sending most of the protesters running back to their dorms, and for the most committed of them, Johnson included, to a week-long stay at the county jail.

These sites, windows into the past, offer a glimpse into the time and place that formed the Denis Johnson the world would be introduced to many years later. Though he came to town to chase a dream, he already had the soul of a poet before he set foot in Iowa City. What he found there were the experiences and characters and atmosphere that he ultimately used to create the poetry and the fiction he already believed to be part of his destiny. He also found his weakness, the alcohol and drug addictions that would almost end the dream before he got started.

Now you’re getting closer. You get into your car and head south, toward the Farmhouse, which Johnson used as the setting for some of the stories in Jesus’ Son. The real Farmhouse, where he spent his free time and where some of his pals ran a thriving marijuana business, was raided by police in 1969. The raid resulted in three arrests and the confiscation of a nice supply of marijuana and heroin. Not a bad day for the cops, until an officer was bitten on the arm by one of the Farmhouse girls, sending him to the hospital for a tetanus shot. Score one for the freaks.

The Highway 1 Johnson described in Jesus’ Son was “a long straight road through dry fields as far as a person could see,” with “blackbirds circling above their own shadows.” But now, in the summer of 2022, it’s a two-lane highway that winds over gentle hills and through endless fields of green, dotted with silos against the cloudless blue sky. Every half mile or so, you pass a gravel road. Any of them could be the one that led the three-quarters of a mile to the Farmhouse. As you drive down Highway 1, the Old Highway, it’s easy to imagine the Denis Johnson of a half-century ago, behind the wheels of that 60-dollar Chevrolet, Lou Reed’s “Heroin” coming out of the speakers — I don’t know just where I’m going, but I’m gonna try for the kingdom if I can — assured in the knowledge that his dream was out in front of him, somewhere down the road.

 

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DOUGLAS UNGER

Denis Johnson: A Teacher’s Homage

I never knew Denis Johnson personally. In 1974, right after he had graduated with his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and left town, I moved there to attend the program and heard about him. Johnson was the most talked-about writer from the previous cohort of new and emerging talents, talk that evoked the dark mystique of the heroin addict and alcoholic and how these experiences fueled his surrealist poetry.

My friend Ray Carver also told me about Denis Johnson: at Iowa, Ray was deep into his drinking, and I understood they had hung out together. Ray was impressed by Johnson’s poetry, and how he could “hold his own” at faculty poet Donald Justice’s notorious poker table. Johnson’s MFA thesis contains early drafts of poems that appear later in The Incognito Lounge, in which the lyric “I” of the poet gazes into an at-the-edge existence expressed in grotesque, surreal imagery: a worn-out woman’s face like a baseball with glasses; two people kissing likened to suspended cadavers; “night broken open like a stalk” and offering “a sticky, essential darkness.” We can find hints of the redemption Johnson reached for consistently in his later writing. This growing resonance with a Higher Power grew from his efforts to get sober, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, about which I heard from a writer friend who attended 12-step meetings with Johnson while both were at the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown in 1981–82. Johnson’s writing kept building on a spiritual and religious quest for the rest of his life.

Writer friends kept giving me Johnson’s books, or publisher’s copies appeared in my faculty mailbox: The Name of the World, Tree of Smoke. Ray Carver gave me The Incognito Lounge and Angels. My friend Dave Hickey (MacArthur Fellow in art criticism) passed me a copy of Jesus’ Son while talking up using it to teach students “the jump shift” technique — how contemporary prose, with little need anymore for transitions, could “jump” from action to action or idea and trust readers to keep up. In “Emergency,” the orderly Georgie just appears with a knife in hand, no need to explain how he got it; in “Work,” a nude, red-haired woman hangs from a huge kite pulled by a boat along a river, then after a white space, she answers a door. In Johnson’s writing, this jump shift also works in the logic of the paragraph, as in these lines from “Dirty Wedding”: “Out back they had all these Dumpsters stuffed with God knows what. We can’t imagine the shape of our fate, that’s for sure.”

Reading Denis Johnson teaches developing writers economy of language in the sentence, how it’s possible to evoke a world with little need for exposition, and that at any point in a story, anything can happen. Readers sense and share this absolute freedom. It’s useful to teach his first novel Angels, followed by his National Book Award–winning Tree of Smoke (published 24 years later). In Angels, the small-scale, pathetic ironies of fringe characters expressed in a language sourced in drug use and madness that straddles both realism and surrealism expands in Tree of Smoke into an architectonic metaphor for the cruel failures of the Vietnam War and its generation. In both books, the dark character of Bill Houston knows his choices are wrong, yet he makes them anyway. Still, like Houston, Johnson’s doomed characters never lose their sense of wonder at just being alive, which is part of the magic of why readers care for them. Tree of Smoke invents a roster of flawed people caught up in a spider’s web of deceptions and betrayals (and murder) managed by CIA agent William “Skip” Sands, representative of ugly American ambitions (including clandestine funding of literary journals). This compare-contrast between the two novels teaches that a story doesn’t have to end but can be continued with variations. As well, we can consider the close POVs of Vietnamese characters such as Nguyen Hao, Trung, and others, and discuss how, these days, such a treatment could raise such blowback around issues of cultural appropriation that many publishers might not take the risk. In its theme of an American society already broken down, Johnson fiercely confronts the ideologies of his times, which still feel like our times.

My favorite Johnson novel to teach undergraduates is The Name of the World. The life-numbed first-person narrator — a former political speechwriter on a fellowship — observes the existential bankruptcy of contemporary higher education, the idyllic college campus rendered as an intellectual wasteland that has lost any former purpose:

The Humanities Department was long ago dissolved to form more departments, bigger departments; the old building houses budgetary mavericks, grant-sponsored programs and the like, experiments that live out their funding periods and fade away. Somehow this became the home of History.

Johnson uses satirical techniques of assertion-negation, as in: “The dinner that night honored a distinguished visitor to our campus […] As it happened, he’d taken a fever, and didn’t attend.” This satire expands into a deconstruction of the campus into an absurd environment of contradictory mandates, half-truths, and bureaucratic malaise. Faculty, in their political and social maneuvering, are more concerned with their institutional standing and illicit affairs than the content of their classes. As in so many of Johnson’s stories, despair is tempered by humor, not so much a direct laughter into the abyss as a satirical tap dance at its edge.

As with his novel of the academy, Denis Johnson often explored set genres and turned them inside out — the crime story, the war story, the gothic, the pastoral romance. In book after book, he renewed established forms. He never compromised his dark yet mysteriously uplifting vision. I’ve worked with two generations of writers who learned from him. Teaching his work is the most enduring homage.

 

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JAMES L. MAGNUSON 

The Passion of Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson was always up for things. This radical openness took him to extraordinary places: a cab ride across half of Asia; a trek into the wilderness to pan for gold for wedding rings; a search in Liberia for the murderous president, Charles Taylor; weekly meetings with the homeless under a bridge in Austin.

My friendship with Denis and Cindy began 25 years ago when he came to Texas to give a reading at the Michener Center for Writers. I brought him back a number of times to teach. He always got a wicked pleasure out of referring to me as The Boss. Having him back again and again was the smartest decision I ever made. The students idolized him, and even though he never wrote a comment on a student story, these young writers were set aflame by the experience of being in a room with him and quoted him endlessly.

He was bold and impulsive, and the smartest decision he ever made was marrying Cindy, who reined him in. I remember the night he told me that Cindy was out of town, and he’d just found out that he could buy a half-dozen used police cars for a good price, but he was afraid that Cindy would be mad at him.

It wasn’t long, however, before he bought a red Cadillac convertible that he loved. His only regret was that he never could find a good set of longhorns to mount on the grill. He cut quite a figure, tooling around town in that car, slumped down so low that his baseball cap barely showed above the dashboard. I remember a trip we all took out to an elderly woman’s ranch where his son Daniel, just 14, kept hopping out to gather up fossils and stuff them in his pockets.

When he fell in love with something, he fell hard. There were the years when he was obsessed with theater and would painstakingly construct tiny homemade stage sets out of cardboard and glue. But when something he’d fallen in love with didn’t live up to his hopes, he could be crushed. I remember his excitement when he learned that a prestigious theater troupe had announced they were going to produce his play. But when he arrived for the dress rehearsal, he was stunned to discover that a theremin was being used to weave a thread of eerie background music into the production. Denis hated it. He spoke to the director and the producer, but they wouldn’t budge. So that night, after everyone had left, Denis snuck back into the theater, stuck the theremin under his jacket, then went out and pitched it into the Chicago River.

He was a passionate man but also an endlessly generous one. When he walked into the Center one day and heard the novelist Tony Giardina singing a Jim Reeves song — I believe it was “Make the World Go Away” — he listened for a while and then showed up the next day to present Tony with a freshly burned CD of Jim Reeves’s greatest hits. When he was in Austin, he would go down to the AA meetings on 7th Street where most of the attendees were homeless. I remember how moved he was by how open and welcoming they were with him. He kept in touch with them for years afterwards.

Denis’s last visit to Austin was in the spring of 2017 when I was retiring from the Michener Center and he had agreed to say a few words. But the first night he wasn’t well enough to come to dinner. He and Cindy thought it was the flu. The next day, when he was still feeling bad, they went to the first set of doctors who diagnosed it as vertigo. He couldn’t make it to dinner that night either and Cindy spoke in his place. Now everyone was worried. When I spoke to him the next morning, he told me that the latest test results had confirmed that he had liver cancer.

He and Cindy handled the situation with astounding calm and grace. I had promised that he could come back to Austin in the fall for a three-week residency and he wanted to be sure I didn’t give that spot away, because he was sure he could make it.

We exchanged messages over the last couple of months. I’d like to share snippets from a few of them: “I’m having a great day. Thinking fondly of you two and a zillion other zany friends as well. I’m set up to see some specialists and make new friends in lab coats. Every breath tastes very sweet.” And another, from two weeks later: “We’re rocking the coast and loving every minute of it, even the stormy ones, maybe even especially the stormy ones … Just read Pudd’nhead Wilson — full of unacceptable language, but Clemens had a human heart. What a romp. Dickens and Shakespeare in one!” And then again, from two weeks later: “Thanks for the boost. I’m weak as a wet sock, but in no discomfort. I’ll check out the Rebecca West.”

So now, what more to say, except that, Denis, you really didn’t need to worry because I promise you, we’re never going to give your spot away.

 

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LEE MONTGOMERY

Our Commodore

In 1992, at the Santa Monica Writers’ Conference, Denis was introduced as the next Melville. He read from Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. It was the first I’d heard of him or it. Denis later told me that he had forgotten most of Moby-Dick but knew that he had read it because he had memorized most of the chapter called “The Lee Shore” and considered it to be the Owner’s Manual for Denis Johnson. “Not because it reflects what I’m like,” he wrote, “but because it exhorts me to change.”

When I sat down to read Resuscitation, my first Denis Johnson book, it blew me away. There was a quality to the writing, the voice, urgent, crystalline, and heartbreaking:

He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn’t have come here at this moment, and also every second arc lamp along the peninsular highway was switched off.

I was just beginning to write fiction and didn’t know my place in this world — any world actually, or if there was one — but Denis Johnson opened up possibilities for me, as he did for many writers who came in contact with him either through his prose or his person. He blew them open, I should say.

He opened my eyes in terms of what I thought I could write about, and in life.

I want to say that I was friendly with Denis and his wife Cindy. I adored him, and continue to adore Cindy Lee. Over the years, we did many projects together, but I don’t know that I was a good friend, though I felt like one. I say this to somehow try to explain this man’s wild and big-hearted generosity. He had an uncanny sense of making everyone feel like his best friend. Whenever we corresponded throughout the years, it was, “Oh Lee, what joy to get news of you!”

And he had such an openness and authenticity; it made me more open, too. He was my older brother’s age, so when I read his work, I felt like I knew him. And when I talked or corresponded with him, he held nothing back. Unabashed honesty. And when I was lucky enough to visit him and Cindy at their Idaho ranch, I heard about all the crazy games he played on his nieces — making them sleep in the woods by themselves and then in the middle of the night setting out to scare them to see who could last the night — and I laughed along as he taught my 13-year-old daughter how to light her farts on the trampoline or drive a standard jeep up a steep lumber road.

That fall in 1992, a few months after I first met Denis, I began the program in fiction at Iowa. Denis was there that semester teaching poetry. Let me just say I found Iowa terrifying. I had been working with a woman in groovy Topanga Canyon whose students sang their novels. At Iowa, I was suddenly side by side with those who’d graduated at the top of their class from Yale or wherever and had been reading Dickens since the age of three. Again, I was adrift trying to find a voice in my work. Trying to find my courage.

One night, I went to a place called The Mill after workshop and happened to meet up with Denis and Frank Conroy at the bar. Frank, who had early success with his memoir Stop-Time, tended to look at writing/publishing careers as black and white: You’re it, you’re shit. He talked a lot about having the best table at Elaine’s in New York back in the day. That night Frank was going on about a student, about how talented he was, how gifted.

“He has it, boy,” Frank said. “He has it. He’s got it.”

And Denis leaned back in his chair with that big easy smile.

“Ya,” he said. “Maybe he has it, he has it! But he’s probably going to lose it. He may get it again, but he’ll lose it again. It goes like that.”

Denis was always throwing out stuff like this. I considered them lifelines. Go easy. Be reasonable. Be kind. I was told he kept a note on his computer that reminded him to do something kind for a writer every day. He couldn’t help it. When, years later, one of my students did an interview with Denis, she shared his answer to “what questions he asks himself about what he’s writing.” This, again, is classic Denis:

The questions I consider: When this is done, won’t the fuckers wish they’d treated me different. Will this ever get done? How can I get it to get done without my having to be the one who gets it done? Is it any good anyway? Who can I find to tell me it’s good before it exists, so I can write it with absolute confidence? What will I say at the National Book Awards? What if I mispronounce “Pulitzer” at the Pulitzer Prize ceremony? Should I actually accept these awards? — I mean, don’t they actually mean nothing to me? etc. — the minute I take my fingers from the keyboard. Put my fingers back down, the questions go away. 

Fast forward I don’t know how many years, I’m at Tin House and in charge of launching a summer writing workshop at Reed College. I wrote Denis a note telling him I knew him before he was a cult figure and asked if he would come and be our headliner. He agreed. He and Cindy Lee came, and he was so much more than that. He read from his books, did readings of his plays, sang songs on panels, and led Bob Dylan hootenannies after dinner. And his advice was always down to earth, generous, and kind. After his reading, when he sat for the interview portion, he’s the one who started it off by asking the audience questions. What’s the difference between nautical and actual miles?

Most summers Denis and Cindy hosted what they called Camp Chaos, what started as a week of camp for their nieces. Somehow, it began to include others, student poets mostly. “Dear Friends of Chaos,” the invitation read. “Come to Chaos. All who arrive will get access to free-range kitchen, one communal meal a day, and shelter from any rain. […] Musicians will receive special treatment, poets will be treated like slaves. […] Midwife available.”

A few things happened there. I saw that Denis and Cindy wore Pendletons and I met the Colonel, their dog.

First the Pendletons. My father was a Pendleton man, and after he died, I brought all 10 of them home with me to Oregon, bereft, thinking I might wear them. What I ended up doing was sending most of them to Denis and Cindy. I’ve since lost the email from Denis thanking me, but I remember he said they were so excited about wearing their Pendletons that they went into town twice that day to show them off.

During the Camp, the Colonel, a big old bull mastiff, was often found sprawled out across the living room floor. I remember studying his massive, expressive face, so full of dog wisdom. Oh the stories I could tell. We bonded during that time, a bond that was strengthened when I was editing an anthology about dogs for Penguin called Woof! and Denis sent me an essay penned by The Colonel (by “S. B. Dogg, Colonel Hotter-Than-Air Balloon Forces of North Idaho”) called “My Commodore” (who was Denis), chronicling their days in imaginary Balloon Forces. “We suffer incursions,” the Colonel wrote. “I insist it is a fact. […] I find myself unable to condone his attitude toward the lurking dangers. […] He is, at best, cavalier. When I hear the enemy’s camouflaged steps I leap up and race forward. ‘This is an outrage! I shall violate the cease-fire!’”

In our correspondence, I often inquired about the Colonel.

“Poor old Colonel died last summer, just dropped dead in the living room in Idaho,” Denis wrote. “He was a great one. When we buried him a huge double rainbow appeared in the sky. The body went in the hole and the Colonel went up the rainbow.”

A few months before Denis died, he wrote that he had been sick and taking the treatment, the cure he called it, but he was doing fine. Something told me he wasn’t. I stared at my last and final Pendleton — a real beauty, a deep blue and green Scottish plaid with patch pockets and leather buttons, which I’d been saving. After hearing from Denis, there was no question where it was going. I sent it to him saying I hoped it brought warmth and healing.

“This is the best Pendleton I’ve ever seen,” he wrote. “I’m knocked out. I’ll treasure it.”

But the treasuring didn’t last long because, soon after, up the rainbow Denis went, too.

 

¤ 

JOHN FREEMAN

Angels: A Tragedy of American Atonement and Salvation

A society without forgiveness is a factory for vengeance. If you cannot atone for a crime, if you cannot be saved through its contemplation, the question becomes: How to pay? Is it with time? With pain? With your life? If the answer is all of the above, where does society put such payees? In late-20th-century America, in prisons, and the death penalty became its solution to these questions. Beginning with Nixon’s “war on drugs,” increasing numbers of Americans, many of them black and brown, were thrown in prison for long stretches for minor drug use. Or for no crime at all. While capital punishment was suspended in 1972, by 1976 it was reinstated, with Gary Gilmore’s death by firing squad in Utah the first execution in years. By the mid- to late 1980s, one or two inmates were killed a month. More than 40 percent of them have been African American.

It was in the beginning of this lethal crystallization of American criminology that Denis Johnson published his 1983 debut novel, Angels. A text of hallucinatory beauty and intimate, swerving compassion, Angels drops into American life like a narrative antidote, coating the inside of arteries hardened by law-and-order culture, by an increasingly unforgiving Christianity. The book’s protagonists begin like familiar noir fantasies, hardboiled cousins to Jim Thompson’s characters. No-luck drifters, seeking release, Bill and Jamie run into one another on a cross-country Greyhound. Bill sports “a kindly grin and a tattoo of a seahorse,” while Jamie has her two children and a determination to never again see her abusive husband. Bill has had three previous marriages, she just the one, the end of which “[s]he’d seen […] coming like a red caboose at the end of a train.”

Angels borrows its name from the spectral figures — the righteous defenders — of the Old Testament. The angels in Denis’s book are messengers, and their signaling is all scrambled. They have not floated down from above but exist in an electrified society that makes no sense, always talking to itself, full of noise. Jamie’s husband, we learn in a brief flashback, “angrily sold stereophonic components for a living.” As the Greyhound grinds toward Indiana, Jamie observes “power lines as they dipped and swooped and ran by over the phone poles.” One of the nuns on the bus falls asleep when she is supposed to be praying. “Cleveland went by like a collection of billboards.” 

As they drive, Jamie gives in to the need to talk, to parlay, to be heard. Bill fishes out beers and then whiskey, and a drunken state emerges unlike any since The Great Gatsby. “[D]idn’t she have a right to cry with the kids driving her crazy,” Jamie thinks as the borders between past and present swirl, “all I need is wings Lord I’d go with my pride and no one ever have a thing to say about it, specially nuns.” They arrive in Pittsburgh, and within 10 days Bill has spent virtually all the money he has, and Jamie, sensing her dependence, knows that what comes next is nothing she wants a part of. Only by standing up and nearly leaving a bar does she avoid being prostituted by Bill.

Up until this point, Johnson had published only poetry: three volumes in 15 years, each with an increasingly narrative cast, especially The Incognito Lounge, wherein a luminescent sense of empathy blooms, saturating the poems with a longing for some kind of collective forgiveness. For peace. “Maybe you permit yourself to find / it beautiful on this bus,” Johnson writes in the title poem of Incognito Lounge, “as it wafts / like a dirigible toward suburbia.” Angels emerges from this desire with a terrible darkness pressing it along. It is a book about a bardo of souls seeking transcendence and forgiveness, but it is also a book in which the fallen pay for their vulnerability terribly with their bodies, and at different rates. 

For instance, Bill winds up in Chicago, waking from a blackout in a bar with a wisecracking server. He is broke, dirty, and yet somehow unharmed. Desperate for cash, he commits a robbery and immediately goes on another bender, coming to this time inside a hotel. He feels himself changing: “[T]he darkness seemed to rush up suddenly against his face and stop there, palpitating rapidly like the wings of a moth.” Somewhere inside him lies a warning light, a beacon to better decisions, yet he can’t receive its message. “A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he’d never be able to guess what it was.”

A far worse outcome awaits Jamie in Chicago, where she journeys after Pittsburgh to say a thing or two to Bill. She never quite gets her chance because she encounters a different man with a kindly (she thinks) aura, wearing a bright red suit in the bus station. A campy Lucifer. He offers to help her look for Bill by vaguely describing a man who drinks and has a tattoo. Hungry, tired, Jamie agrees to accept his assistance and follows the man to a diner, where he plies her with coffee and pills he calls “[w]hite crosses. They’re very mild. They’re equal to about two cups of coffee each.” Thus begins her swift descent into hell, and a sexual assault described in terrifying detail. “She begged and begged and begged” to survive so her kids could live. “She traded away her soul.”

Miraculously, Bill manages to get sober and searches for Jamie, finding her at the Child Welfare League attempting to get onto public assistance. Reunited, horrified by their recent fates alone, they recombine, and in another book, this would be the moment their lives improved. Furious, unequivocal, Jamie wants Bill to find the people who raped her. “We could find them,” she cries. “I know we could find them. They deserve it!” Bill refuses. “One, I just don’t want to cross that line,” he says. “I don’t know what’s on the other side of it.” And also, he adds: “I knew guys in the joint who did away with people. They never said nothing, but you could get the idea — hey, there was this one, I know it didn’t make him feel any better. He just wished he could do it again.”

The tragedy of Angels is that Bill later crosses that line, for reasons he only very late in the game comes to understand are wrong. That he had had a choice. Meanwhile, the effects of what Jamie has been through pile up and compress and turn her life into a living hell. All this unraveling takes place in Arizona, under the blinding white unblinking desert sun, where they’ve gone to be nearer to Bill’s family, who are barely getting by themselves. Burris, one brother, is a heroin addict; James, the other, has grown accustomed to the power of a gun. Their mother, separated from the boys’ stepfather by prison, is lonely, paranoid, and convinced all her kids will wind up in prison too. She also “had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless.”

Here is another tragedy of Johnson’s great book: virtually all of the characters in Angels have received messages of care and of love too late. Their lives could have been — could have gone — other ways. For some reason a distortion sets in and no amount of seeing can undo it. When the family gets together for a picnic, what could be a chance for Mrs. Houston to realize that something had been salvaged from her awful marriage turns into a miniature crime-planning session, prompted by a man named Dwight who turns up wearing a baseball cap lined in tin foil. Bill is apoplectic that their fate is in this man’s hands. “This is our leader,” Bill says to his brother James. “A young dude with tin foil on his head.” To which his brother replies, “What can I say? […] Your complaint is noted.”

The tin foil is one of many clues that people in this book need professional help. Here is one other way Johnson was prophetic. As the US criminal justice system ramped up in the 1970s, the country had begun to see the effects of widespread deinstitutionalization in its mental health facilities. Ronald Reagan was the godfather of these changes. It was under his watch in 1976 that California put the final axe to many rules that kept people in states of acute distress inside institutions. Then, shortly after his election as president, Reagan worked to repeal most of Jimmy Carter’s 1980 Mental Health Systems Act, among the goals of which was to fund and nurture community mental health centers.

The result of these twinned decisions is still felt all over the country today in the large homeless populations. Angels, in a loose but very real way, is a tour of the dangerous and unloved spaces many of the unhoused occupy. The bus stations and shelters, the state bureaucracies, the streets just before and after dark. Spaces of poverty and abjection and shame. Before she heads west to find Bill in Chicago, Jamie goes to donate her blood plasma. She winds up on a bed between two people clearly in states of psychosis. When one of them says something repulsive to her, “[s]he decided to stab him with her nail file later on, on the way out.”

The inversion implied within Angels — the plurality of its title — is a powerful moral challenge. What if the fallen actually are the angels, it asks readers, what messages do they send? And if they were mixed up among the disturbed, the desperate, which ones can be heard? How would this message from above change our sense of salvation? Especially when all the iconography of salvation has wound up emblazoned on weapons of destruction, as it does throughout this terrifying and deeply sad book. 

The robbery goes just as bad as one would imagine, and the rest of Angels unfolds its consequences. The angels, already fallen, are caught within institutions made to punish, not cure: the prison, where Bill awaits his execution; the psychiatric institution, where Jamie suffers a horrific breakdown; and the courts, where Arizona enacts its sense of justice for a guard Bill murdered in the robbery (who turns out to be a retired cop), without much participation of the accused. Heading out to the prison one day, a cab driver sees the future we live in clearly. “Probably someday, this whole desert is going to be a jail,” he says.

Tenderly, heartbreakingly, Angels shows how the characters who earn this title contact one another, right up until the end. Bill writes a letter to Jamie, saying separation will be hard and asking her to tell his brother, who left the scene of the robbery, that he will always be his brother. It is on this errand that Jamie, newly sober herself, heads out to the prison in the cab. It took months for Bill’s apology letter to get to her. Meanwhile, during his last days, Bill passes messages back and forth with another prisoner, also fast-tracked onto death row. In their own awful way, they are there to acknowledge each other’s remaining humanity. Outside the prison gates, crowds gather on the day of the execution, awaiting deliverance from evil. As if it can be turned into smoke and sent up a pipe and out into the air. 

 

¤

SEAN SAN JOSÉ 

Soul on the Stage: Denis Johnson’s Theater World

When I first read Denis Johnson’s debut novel Angels, my life changed. The first thing that pierced me was the way it starts: at the Greyhound Station in Oakland — a place I knew in all of its realness. When I finished it, with its sad and stark ending, my soul was blown open. And forever after, I feel like I have known Denis Johnson.

And then a modern-day miracle happened for me: I really met Denis Johnson. And my soul found a real spirit. And we all got to watch a master, a true vessel, a genius, create in a whole new form, as Denis wrote for the live theater. 

When Denis Johnson was called back, and had his homegoing, in private, I sat in private reading him, his words. And I could hear him speak. Not just the powerfully prescient tale of his dying in “Triumph Over the Grave” (in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden) but a piece called “The Starlight on Idaho” that he had written for the stage, which we titled Haze. That work consists of a long monologue by one Mark Cassandra, “Cass.” Cass speaks in a rehab facility, writing maybe, rapping on, begging, praying, pleading to God, to Jesus, and yelling at Satan too …

And that is what it feels like to live without Denis Johnson. To talk with God, to wonder, to yell at Satan, and at God, too. But then … He did leave us the words: “And where are you God? Where is you now?” As only a true believer can cry. 

That is one of the lines that the character, Mark Cassandra, shouts out — to the walls, to the heavens, to hell. I always felt like I could hear him actually talking with those three elements: the walls of real life, the heavens of our spirituality, the hell at the base of our world.

I read Denis’s writing all the time. I can still hear his voice, his actual speaking voice — gentle and grounded. I can hear his voice loud, too, because I can recall each and every one of the 10 performance pieces our group Campo Santo was privileged to do with Denis at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco from about 1999 to 2014: 15 years of him as Playwright in Residence, 10 premieres, two volumes of his plays published. But it was the souls he changed in being with us all.

At one event we held honoring him, I introduced Denis, with full sincerity, as the writer who has most changed my life and who in my actual life I consider my spiritual advisor. Denis accepted, came to the mic, and said: “Thank you, Baby bro, I’m your spiritual advisor? Man, you are fucked.”

I feel fucked without him. Have to remember the words, the writings, and the moments I was gifted with — DJ and my brother, Luis Saguar, standing in Westlake Joe’s parking lot, under a streetlamp, after getting Denis a burger (sometimes I think that is the only thing he ate in San Francisco), and DJ and Luis trading war stories of sorts for about two hours on the corner. Survivors, true soul survivors … I close my eyes and visualize that night a lot. That parking lot, outside of the action — kind of like the one for the Greyhound Station in Oakland, the one in Angels.

Again, when I first read that opening page in Angels, I was immediately there, because I knew the real-life location. That is what Denis Johnson can do — take you there. Across everything: worlds, religions, race, class — speaking to the soul. Those invisible lines lose power with his honesty — that is how Denis wrote so accurately about a bus station that is in a Black city, with a station filled almost entirely with Black and Brown denizens. I read that first page rapt, and had to flip to the back and peep the author photo. I was like: this writer is a whyte guy. How in the hell …?

All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

I am one of the “weirdos” and I for sure never imagined either, jamás … And then he revealed the bottom and beauty of the world to us. Beyond the brilliance and the heart that he leaves us with at the end of Jesus’ Son … He did it in his life.

What’s amazing — of the many awe-inspiring aspects of DJ — is what he achieved of the truth on the page, he was also able to actualize on the stage. I was lucky to witness this world of Denis Johnson: the human heart and the singular genius come alive in the theater.

When Denis Johnson wrote his plays, he gifted us — Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts and audiences— with developing them all and doing them first. We got to see the maestro at work, but more beautifully, we got to be touched by his soul. 

We all started at a point when Denis was already not only the revered “writers’ writer” (never have I heard an author more praised and respected by fellow writers) but also had already published a collection of his genre-bending, award-winning journalism, which helped further cement his reputation. We had all long been stunned by his voice, knowing him for his work as a poet. He had even entered the fray of Hollyweird and wrote screenplays. But now, as he applied his gifts of language to the theater, he was as open to it as we were awed by him. 

I asked him once: what is his approach, the difference between writing for the theater as opposed to his other writing? He said: “I love these plays, because I can just listen, hear people talk, I sit down and let the voices talk. And that’s what I write.”

No one I’ve worked with is more “tapped in” to hearing souls speak than that. And it all is true: the writing, the worlds, the relationship, the reflection, the real of it all. It is also, like all things D of J, so much deeper. Read his three-act blank-verse masterpiece Soul of a Whore and you’ll get a taste of the depth of his unlimited ability for creating characters through hearing their voices.

For 10 special projects, the poet from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop wrote for a group filled with Brown and Black folx inside a funky little space, and it was surely special — a journey of the spirit, carved out of the streets of the old Mission District and little motels of the Tenderloin of San Francisco’s soul. And his soul sacrifice was shared alive with the world.

It all flows forever … DJ did it right, his stuff was so real. For me and for all of his admirers, he speaks to the soul.

Here are the plays Denis Johnson as Playwright in Residence premiered for Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco from 1999 to 2014: 

1. 
   
   
   
   1. Stories from Jesus’ Son (stories Dundun + Emergency performed and created theatrically with Word for Word Performing Arts Company)
   
   
   2. Hellhound on My Trail (original play, part one of Cassandra Trilogy)
   
   
   3. Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames (original play, part two of Cassandra Trilogy)
   
   
   4. Soul of a Whore (original blank-verse play, part 3 of Cassandra Trilogy)
   
   
   5. Psychos Never Dream (original play)
   
   
   6. Haze (created from his piece “Starlight on Idaho,” along with writings from Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers, and Vendela Vida)
   
   
   7. Purvis (original blank-verse play)
   
   
   8. Everything Has Been Arranged (created from his journalism collection Seek, specifically “The Small Boys’ Unit”)
   
   
   9. Des Moines (original play performed immersively and site-specifically)
   
   
   10. Nobody Move (created from his novel Nobody Move)
   
   
   
   

 

¤

TOBIAS WOLFF

Remembrance of Denis Johnson

(This piece was written for Denis Johnson’s memorial service in Iowa City and is part of Tobias Wolff’s tribute to DJ in the The New Yorker.)

Denis and I became friends in the late ’70s, when we were both living in Phoenix, a city neither of us loved. Taking refuge from the heat and the faux-cowboy, arms-bearing culture, we got together to talk about books and writing and the prisoners we sometimes worked with at the state penitentiary in Florence. Both of us in need of some spiritual footing, we now and then accompanied each other to church. Denis was coming out of a troubled chapter in his life — an imaginative version of which he was to create, indelibly, in Jesus’ Son, and more obliquely in other works — and supporting himself, he told me, by renting out his uncanny typing skills at a high premium to local agencies and businesses who needed rush jobs on contracts and applications. Common friends who had known him at Iowa told me that he had enjoyed a certain renown there for his speed on the keys, and that other young writers, approaching deadline, often hired him to type up their stories for workshop, and even entire theses.

Denis was resolutely sober, abstemious, but not at all grave. He had a boyish, even impish quality that had not deserted him when I saw him last at Stanford in 2010. His humor was mordant, with a refined sense of the absurd, but never cruel. He had already come too close to disaster in this “parched world,” as he describes in it his poem “Nude,” to take pleasure in the struggles of others. But he had a sharp eye for the illusions and evasions and self-deceptions that lead us into absurdity, and this informed the essential generosity of his work.

From Phoenix we went our separate ways, and met only occasionally in the years that followed, but I have always felt close to Denis through reading his work. I need hardly say that his is one of the most distinctive voices in our literature, and that he has written work that will abide — Angels, Fiskadoro, The Incognito Lounge, Jesus’ Son, and more. That voice, though — the inventiveness and exactitude and dark underlying wit, sometimes flowering into startling bloom, as when the mad, drug-addled orderly Georgie in “Emergency,” asked what he does, replies, “I save lives.”

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Alan Soldofsky’s most recent poetry collection is In the Buddha Factory. He is also co-editor with David Koehn of Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts About Prosody by Donald Justice. He directs the MFA program at San Jose State University where he is a professor of English.

Ted Geltner is in the midst of writing a Denis Johnson biography. His previous books include Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews. He is an associate professor at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia, where he teaches reporting, literary journalism, magazine journalism, and photojournalism. 

Doug Unger is the author of four novels, including Leaving the Land, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and a short-fiction collection, Looking for War and Other Stories. He serves on the executive boards of Words Without Borders and other arts organizations, and is co-founder of the Creative Writing International program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches.

James L. Magnuson has published nine well-received novels, including Famous Writers I Have Known. He has won awards while writing for the movies and for television, and so many of his plays have been produced that he has lost count. He has recently retired as director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Lee Montgomery is the author ofThe Things Between Us, Whose World Is This?, and Searching for Emily: Illustrated. The Things Between Us received the 2007 Oregon Book Award and was a four-star critic’s choice for People magazine. Whose World Is This? received the 2007 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Ken Kesey Award in Fiction.  Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications including most recently TheNew York Times Magazine, Oprah, Story, Glimmer Train, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, and Tin House, among others.

John Freeman is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, which includes Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.”

Sean San José is a San Francisco Bay Area theater maker, performer, and director. Over the years, he has directed new works by Luis Alfaro, Jessica Hagedorn, Octavio Solis, and many more. He is a co-founder and the current program director of the new performances group Campo Santo, for whom he produced and directed 10 of Denis Johnson’s plays. He was recently appointed the new artistic director of San Francisco’s Magic Theater.

Tobias Wolff is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, and the short-story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question. He included Denis Johnson’s story “Emergency” in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories.

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Featured author image provided by Cindy Johnson.