Johnson, Rob

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JOHNSON, Rob

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: University of Texas—Austin, B.A.; University of Houston, M.A.; University of Southern California, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of Texas-Pan American, Department of English, 220 COAS, 1201 West University Dr., Edinburg, TX 78539-3705. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, editor, and educator. University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX, currently associate professor of English.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Short Lines: A Collection of Classic American Railroad Stories, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) Fantasmas: Supernatural Stories by Mexican-American Writers, introduction by Kathleen J. Alcalá, Bilingual Press (Tempe, AZ), 2001.

Contributor to books, including From Texas to the World and Back: Essays on the Journeys of Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Mark Busby and Dick Heaberlin, Texas Christian University Press (Fort Worth, TX), 2001. Also contributor to periodicals, including Flannery O'Connor Bulletin and Southwestern American Literature.

SIDELIGHTS:

An associate professor of English, Rob Johnson is interested in Mexican-American writers, the Beat Generation, and Southern authors. In addition to essays on writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and William S. Burroughs, he also frequently writes about border culture and South Texas writers.

Short Lines: A Collection of Classic American Railroad Stories, which Johnson edited, is an anthology of short stories about trains and railroading, a genre widely popular throughout the United States from the 1890s into the 1930s. Rail stories appeared in popular periodicals and in pulp magazines devoted entirely to railroad fiction. Well-known writers such as O. Henry, Jack London, and Rudyard Kipling wrote railroad stories, and other writers, such as Harry Bed-well and Frank H. Spearman, became known primarily for their rail fiction, explained Robert S. McGonigal in Trains magazine. Short Lines also includes tales by Thomas Wolfe and Frank Norris, among others. "Though aimed at a general audience, this anthology is rich in rail detail," observed McGonigal. "It's sure to please anyone with an affinity for old-time railroading." Booklist critic Gilbert Taylor noted that "both students of short-story technique and nontechnocratic fans of tall tales of the rails will find enjoyable variety" in Johnson's anthology. A Publishers Weekly critic commented that "these tales collectively elicit nostalgia for a time when, helped by the railroads, America was just beginning to introduce itself to itself."

Johnson also edited Fantasmas: Supernatural Stories by Mexican-American Writers, an anthology of supernatural tales by nineteen new and established Mexican-American writers. The contributors are writers of the cuento de fantasmas, which translates literally as "ghost stories," but which in practice involves a much more intricate blend of folklore, superstition, religion, pulp fiction, and the supernatural. The cuento de fantasmas style first attracted Johnson's attention after he read student submissions from a creative writing class at the University of Texas-Pan American, noted Tamara Kaye Sellman on the Margin Web site. "His students responded to an assignment on retelling folktales by submitting short stories which contemporized numerous local myths," such as la llorona (a weeping female spirit); la lechusa (a shape-shifting witch); and el diablo, (the Devil himself), Sellman reported. "What emerged was a fascinating tapestry of borderland stories showing direct and unequivocal interaction between real-life characters and an active and culturally vital spirit world." Johnson realized that the stories belonged to a specific type—not magical realism but "what might be described as an 'imaginative' realism peculiar to writers in the four-county borderland in South Texas adjacent to the lush Rio Grande Valley and Mexico, better known as the Valley," Sellman remarked.

Stories in the cuentos de fantasmas mode include not only ghost stories and supernatural tales, but stories about "superstitions, curses, and miracles; contemporized myths and folklore; spirit possessions and deals with the devil; and horror stories and tall tales which, naturally, incorporate supernatural elements," Sellman noted. The works in Fantasmas include viscerally frightening stories in which terrifying dolls come to life or college professors become mass murderers, as well as gentler stories of unexplained assistance from benevolent forces and the kindling of romance through the "serendipitous coexistence of the human and spirit world," wrote Michele Leber in Booklist. The book has "something to haunt everyone," Leber commented. "Fascinating but disturbing, these tales may reflect the authors' need to purge themselves of personal or cultural fears," remarked Nedra C. Evers in Library Journal.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 15, 1996, Gilbert Taylor, review of Short Lines: A Collection of Classic American Railroad Stories, p. 1235; October 15, 2001, Michele Leber, review of Fantasmas: Supernatural Stories by Mexican American Writers, p. 381.

Library Journal, December, 2001, Nedra C. Evers, review of Fantasmas, p. 137.

Publishers Weekly, February 5, 1996, review of Short Lines, p. 78.

Trains, July, 1996, Robert S. McGonigal, review of Short Lines, p. 76.