Bob Johnson is the author of the new story collection The Continental Divide. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Common and The Hudson Review. He lives in South Bend, Indiana.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in your new collection?
A: I hold an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but took a long break from writing to teach school and work in commercial TV in South Bend, Indiana. I began writing again after my retirement in 2012 and wrote the 14 stories for the collection from 2014 to approximately 2022.
Q: The writer Charles Baxter said of the book, “Forget anything you thought you knew about the Midwest--these stories will set you straight.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: Well, I like the assessment very much, though other writers have also written hard-bitten story collections about the Midwest. I’m thinking in particular of Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff and Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana.
My guess is that Baxter was suggesting that my stories (along with the other works just mentioned), trash the notion that the Midwest is an idyllic land of church spires and dairy farms and white picket fences. But of course, everyone knows that. Good and evil exist hand-in-hand wherever one goes.
Q: How was the book’s title--also the title of the first story--chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I often drive on U.S.20 west of South Bend, Indiana. When I do so, I pass a sign announcing that I’m crossing the North-South Continental Divide—also known as the St. Lawrence Divide.
Readers may be more acquainted with the East-West Divide in the Rocky Mountains, but the St. Lawrence Divide works the same way: Rain falling on its northern slope finds its way to Lake Michigan. Rain falling to its south flows eventually to the Gulf of Mexico.
Anyway, on a particular drive one day, I was smarting over a critic’s observation that my stories were too autobiographical, and I envisioned an old lady I’d never met, living in a house I’d never seen, smack dab on the St. Lawrence Divide.
She shared the house with her ex-convict adult son, and though I wasn’t thinking metaphorically in the moment, the various divides I ended up writing about were those between good and evil, blood loyalty and government law, sacrifice and survival.
My stories are about the subjects above, though isn’t that the case for all fiction?
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the stories would appear in the collection?
A: I struggled with this, though in the end I threw up my hands and made the order mostly chronological. I imagine my first story happening in the late 1960s, and a piece near the end, “Tell Me About Bobby Kennedy,” happens on the night Obama was first elected president.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Though I have ideas now and then for a novel, story writing appears to be the hand I was dealt. I’m pulled again and again into a character’s reckoning with a single, life-changing gesture.
In Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” for example, the IRA protagonist Bonaparte is forced to execute a British hostage he’s become friends with.
Read Bonaparte’s (and the story’s) final thoughts after he commits the dreadful act, and you’ll see what I mean: “…I was somehow very small and very lonely. And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again.”
My stories don’t always end with such explicit epiphanies, but I hope they deliver the same power.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: People sometimes ask me to describe the best writing instruction I’ve received. You might think it was at the Iowa Workshop, and, in many respects, that’s so. It’s hard NOT to be changed by sharing and critiqueing work with such brilliant people.
But since I’ve retired I’ve have attended the Kenyon Review summer writing program several times, where our assignments were built around a daily “prompt.” Write a 500-word story about a man named “Brock,” for example. Write a one-page piece beginning with the sentence “So that was that.” Come back tomorrow and share what you’ve written with the group.
I’m not sure any exercise has been more valuable to me than that. The Continental Divide sign on U.S. 20 was such a prompt—though in its case, an accidental one—and it changed my writing forever.
The world was my canvas. I didn’t have to have met the old lady I was writing about or seen the ramshackle house she lived in. I didn’t have to have faced myself the Sophie’s Choice she was confronted with at the end.
My task was to sit quietly at my keyboard and let her speak through me.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment