Johnston, Bret Anthony 1971-

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JOHNSTON, Bret Anthony 1971-

PERSONAL:

Born 1971, in TX. Education: Graduated from Texas A & M University, Miami University, and the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, California State University, San Bernardino, 5500 University Parkway, San Bernardino, CA 92407-2397. Agent—Collins McCormick Literary Agency, 10 Leonard St., New York, NY 10013. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

California State University, San Bernardino, CA, instructor in creative writing. Speaker at literary festivals, including the Twenty-fifth annual International Festival of Authors, 2004.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Three awards from Atlantic Monthly; Jeanne Goodheart Prize for best story of the year, from Shenandoah; two honors for short fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters; James Michener fellowship, Michener-Copernicus Society of America.

WRITINGS:

Corpus Christi (short stories), Random House (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to numerous anthologies, including New Stories from the South, 2003, 2004, and 2005; O. Henry Prize Stories, 2002; and 2004 Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore. Contributor to periodicals, including Paris Review and Open City.

SIDELIGHTS:

Bret Anthony Johnston's short story collection Corpus Christi explores loss, grief, and memory in a set of ten "compelling and haunting" tales, according to Library Journal contributor Cheryl L. Conway. The stories, all set in and around Corpus Christi, Texas, depict the lives of ordinary people caught up in dramatic change. In one narrative, a young teacher cares for his terminally ill mother; in another, a couple is driven to divorce by the death of their child; another tells of an accidental death. The title story introduces readers to several inmates in a Texas psychiatric hospital. Conway noted that the author's depictions of "events, feelings, and Corpus Christi itself connect readers to his characters and their dilemmas and reactions to tragedy." Booklist's Marta Segal Block found that despite the stories' depressing subject matter, each story offers "an honest and nonpatronizing view of the mainly lower-middle-class characters." A Kirkus Reviews writer named "Bird of Paradise" as the most successful story in the collection. It relates a teenager's memory of seeing jealousy and revenge acted out in the home of a friend. The reviewer felt that this story and the others in the collection suffer from "emotional flatness," but also noted: "The world that Johnston brings us into is at once familiar and oddly surreal, for the author writes with great attention to detail and nuance." A stronger endorsement came from a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who described Corpus Christi as "a series of nuanced portraits of middle-aged, middle-American loneliness in all its permutations.…Without lapsing into sentimentality, [Johnston] evokes a peculiarly American brand of abject loneliness and tentative optimism."

Bret Anthony Johnston told CA: "Robert Stone is perhaps the biggest influence on my writing, but not in an entirely conventional sense. He was the first 'real' author I ever saw read in person. I'd never heard of Stone, but I went to his reading because my sophomore literature professor gave me a free ticket. By the reading's end, I knew writing was what I wanted to do. It was a watershed moment for me. Writing stories seemed like a dignified way to spend a life. Beyond that, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and many others all had an influence on my work.

"As for the writing process, I don't believe in inspiration nearly as much as I believe in the labor of writing, the rhythm of the work. I try to work every morning, and on a great day I can go for three or four hours, but not always. Even if I'm not working, or not working well, I still do my best to finish out the session. It's hard for me to miss days of work because I know it's going to take longer to get back into it, that it will be more taxing to find that level of intense concentration. Frank Conroy taught me that. I write every first draft in longhand, and then I type it into the computer and revise a little as I go. Beyond the daily typing, I never read anything I'm working on until I've reached the end of the first draft. The few times I've allowed myself to reread earlier, I get stuck. I start doubting the work because I do not trust the process, do not trust the labor. I didn't read the first draft of my novel, which was about six hundred pages, until it was completely done.

"I honestly believe that we live by stories, and regardless of how tragic, how unsettling, there is some comfort to be derived from the very telling of the stories, the reading and experiencing of them. This is linked to memory, of course, and one of the things that I've tried to explore in the collection might well be called the mythology of memory. I find the subject endlessly fascinating, so I was intrigued by those characters whose memories were revised or lost. If our memories play a large part in defining us, what happens if those memories are wrong or no longer accessible? How would a father who's lost his son react upon learning some of what he recalls most vividly is incorrect? How would a woman who's been clinging to the past, who's really relied on her memories to sustain her, cope with dementia? I literally couldn't conceive of those answers, so I wrote the Corpus Christi stories. As for their effect, I certainly hope they're felt and that they're remembered, but above all else, my deepest and most sincere hope is that they're enjoyed."