Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally best-selling novel Remember Me Like This, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the winner of the 2015 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize.

He is also the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent (London) and the Irish Times, and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories, and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.”

In 2017, Johnston won The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, “the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story.” Other awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, the Stephen Turner Award, the Cohen Prize, a James Michener Fellowship, the Kay Cattarulla Prize for short fiction, and many more. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and The Best American Sports Writing, and on NPR’s All Things Considered.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Johnston is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation. He wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning.

After directing the creative writing program at Harvard University for eleven years, he is now the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.

8.13.2017  Johnston returns to his Texas roots as director of the Michener Center for Writers at UT–Austin

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally best-selling novel Remember Me Like This, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and winner of the 2015 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize. He is also the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories. After directing the creative writing program at Harvard University for eleven years, he is now director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He spoke with LSLL via email about his books, skateboarding, the Michener Center, and the best fish tacos in Corpus Christi.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Congratulations on being named the director of the Michener Writing Center and welcome back home to Texas, Bret. Many of the people who know your best-selling fiction may not realize that you actually grew up on the Texas coast. What was it like growing up in Corpus?

Thank you! I’m thrilled to be coming back, and more than a little shocked.

In many ways, growing up in Texas was ideal. It’s a unique part of the country, with its own codes and culture, its own temperament and landscape, and in ways that have nothing to do with politics, I still view the world through the lens of where I was raised. What it lacked, though, was any kind of real interest in the arts, certainly the literary arts. My parents were always reading, so I was always surrounded by books, but when I stepped outside our house, no one really cared about reading or writing. That was disorienting, confusing. I had a few invaluable teachers along the way, though, and they gave me reason to hope, reason to believe that there might be some kind of life with books.

You were accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop; when did you decide to be a writer? Was there a pivotal moment or experience?

One of the aforementioned teachers, Mike Anzaldua at Del Mar College, gave me a ticket to a Robert Stone reading hosted by the Corpus Christi Literary Reading Series. I would’ve walked into traffic for Mike Anzaldua, so even though I didn’t know who Robert Stone was—which, by the way, is blasphemous and illustrates my previous point—I went to the event simple because Mike told me to go. I’d been writing stories and poems for years and not showing them to anyone, but before the Robert Stone reading, I’d never laid eyes on an actual writer. It was like seeing a unicorn. I didn’t know they still existed. So, I went into the event knowing that I loved to read and write stories, but an hour later, I came out knowing that I wanted to spend my life trying to be a writer. Suddenly, it seemed possible. It seemed like a worthwhile way to spend my time.

Week in, week out, at Lone Star Lit we shine a spotlight on the best in Texas writing, and we try to depict the range of the state’s literature via the geography of settings and the cultural diversity of its authors. Corpus Christi: Stories is such a book. Will you tell our readers about it?

Again, thank you for the kind words. It’s a collection of ten short stories, all of which are set in or around Corpus. I’m as shocked as anyone that the book has never gone out of print since its publication in 2004 and that it’s won such acclaim. The truth is, I didn’t know I was writing the book until I’d written half the stories. It was only after I wrote the title story that I started to recognize how the region itself was becoming a kind of character, a character so rich and dynamic and nuanced that it would be impossible to fully explore the place in anything less than a book. My goal then, and my goal now, is to write stories that can take place nowhere else. I hope that readers will have a sense of that in those stories—all of which were, for better or worse, written in Ohio, Iowa, and Michigan.

I understand that you’re a skateboarder — and that one university in California recruited you to teach there by sending photos of nearby skateparks, I’ve also read of your documentary film about skateboarding, Waiting for Lightning, which premiered at South by Southwest. How did that opportunity come about?

Skateboarding has given me so much, and the opportunity to be part of the team behind Waiting for Lightning epitomizes that. I was writing a long piece of journalism on the professional skateboarder Danny Way and in the course of doing research for the story, I met the director Jacob Rosenberg, who was starting to work on a documentary about Danny’s life and his attempt to jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard. Soon after, Jacob invited me to join the project. It was an absolute gift.

For the past eleven years you have headed up the creative writing program at Harvard. How would you describe that experience?

Invaluable. My students and colleagues made me a better reader, teacher, and writer. I came away from every workshop and countless conversations with a list of books to read and a renewed faith in the value of literature. At Harvard, I felt less alone in this endeavor. There was a profound sense of shared enterprise, and it only made me want to work harder. It still does.

Your first novel, Remember Me Like This, was named one of the best books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Would you tell our readers about your book?

It’s a novel set on the Gulf Coast of Texas, and it takes places over a summer when a young man who’s been missing for four years, returns home. That the book has struck such a chord with readers around the world is shocking and humbling. When people talk about the book, they often discuss it in terms of kidnapping. I’ve never seen it that way. I’ve never thought of it as a book about being missing or lost. I’ve always and only thought of it as a book about being found.

Last month you were named director of the Michener Center, which receives close to 1,000 applications annually for twelve seats in their program. Their current acceptance rate is less than one-half of 1% in fiction, and between 2% and 3% for the other genres. A couple of questions; first, what are those other genres besides fiction?; and second, a nutshell, what do those 12 people who get accepted show, that the other 988 do not?

The Michener Fellows can study fiction, poetry, playwriting, and screenwriting. Each writer works in two genres for three years.

There are plenty of things that a sophisticated reader can recognize in a successful application, but many, if not all, of them come down to a writer’s unique facility with language. How the writers use twenty-six letters and their infinite combinations is what distinguishes them. All of the technical conventions matter—dynamic characters, the syntax of a poem, the construction of scenes, etc.—but there are plenty of writers who can create technically sound work; however, there are very few who can transcend the techniques, very few who can animate characters or evoke an image in the reader’s mind. So it’s very often the ineffable qualities in an applicant’s work that puts them over the top. You recognize it right away, a sense that the writer is engaging the larger world, taking part in the profound act of witness.

I will ask you the question that I ask every author who teaches writing. Can writing be taught?

Craft can be taught. Commitment can be taught. Patience and discipline and resilience can be taught. All of which are necessary for a writing life. Writing, though, must be learned.

Which Texas authors do you enjoy reading? Are there recent Michener fellows who are debut authors that our readers should discover?

There are so many — Goyen, McMurtry, Katherine Anne Porter. As for Michener Center writers, the list is almost endless and it’s always expending. Many readers will already be familiar with the powerful work of Philipp Meyer, Kevin Powers, and Alix Ohlin, but they should also seek out Brian Hart, Fiona McFarland, and Mary Miller. The poet Sam Sax has a tremendous first collection being published any minute, and Karan Majahan’s novel was a National Book Award finalist. George Brant is an amazing playwright, and Kieran Fitzgerald is a screenwriter who recently wrote Snowden. Check back with me in a month and I’ll have more names. The caliber of writing that comes through the Dobie House is incomparable.

As perhaps Corpus Christi's most noted chronicler, what is a “must visit” destination in your hometown?

El Potro, at Rodd Field Road and SPID, is the best Tex-Mex you’ll ever have. Anything will be great, but I would wholeheartedly suggest the fish tacos. Tell the staff Bret sent you. Tell them I’ll be down as soon as possible.

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