FEATURED WRITER OF THE MONTH

Editorially, one of the things that excites us most at The OA—perhaps second only to getting an issue back from the printer—is discovering a fresh new talent to share with our readers. Lightning struck this summer in the form of Barb Johnson, a native Louisianan and longtime New Orleanian who worked for decades as a carpenter before pursuing a full-time writing career. As an MFA student at the University of New Orleans, Barb won several awards and made her national magazine debut in Glimmer Train in 2007. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled More of This World or Maybe Another, is forthcoming from HarperPerennial in October. We’ve only read two of the stories so far (you can find “The Invitation” in our current Southern Lit issue), but we can’t wait to get our hands on the rest of the collection. Barb will also be joining us on The OA’s Writers on Writing panel at the Louisiana Festival of the Book in Baton Rouge on October 17. Although we have yet to meet her in person, we enjoyed getting to know Barb through this interview. Read on to learn more about this rising star.


THE OXFORD AMERICAN: Describe the experience of transitioning from carpentry to writing.

BARB JOHNSON: The single most distinctive element of that transition has been that my knees no longer hurt when I’m sitting perfectly still. As for the mental transition, I’m not sure there has been one. I think about writing in very much the same way I think about building something, with the exception of making a plan. If I had to design a library and build it, you better believe there was a measured drawing with every detail settled before I began. But I am, in my natural state, a tangential thinker. When I start a story, it’s not with any specific plot in mind. I just follow the tangents until some sort of story makes itself clear to me.

THE OA: You were in your forties when you entered the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. How long had you been writing at that point?

BJ: I always liked to write and, like many, I produced some pretty awful poetry in my twenties. Then I quit writing for about ten years while I tried to find gainful employment and settled into adulthood. I picked it up again in my middle thirties and joined a very casual writers’ group, but one in which I was finally free to confess my love of writing, an admission I was reluctant to make. In my mind, telling people that I liked to write felt like telling them I liked to play paper dolls in my spare time. And writing didn’t often come up as a topic for conversation on jobsites.

Typical jobsite conversation:
Drywall guy: My brother and I went hunting this weekend. You?
Me, the carpenter: I played paper dolls on my living room floor.
Plumber: I got a pool tournament this weekend. What you doing?
Me, the carpenter: Oh, you know. Stuff.

So, yeah. I was very in the closet with it for a long, long time.

THE OA: Some folks disdain MFA writing programs (saying writing can’t be taught). What’s your opinion?

BJ: First, I will say that MFA programs aren’t for everyone. And I don’t think they claim to be able to “teach” writing. What they are good for is gathering a dozen people around a table, all of whom are trying to do what you’re trying to do. All of whom have chosen to make this endeavor the focus of their lives for two or three (or if there’s a big-ass hurricane, four) years. The trip around the learning curve goes a lot faster with that sort of company. You have the great opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes, to have a group of people with whom you can have an ongoing writing conversation. But not everyone is a group kind of person, and an MFA program can be very frustrating for that sort of person. I am, a year following graduation, still in an ad hoc writing workshop with some people I went to school with. I know their strengths and weaknesses as writers, and they know mine. Their input is invaluable to me. It would’ve taken me another ten years to learn the sorts of things I have learned by working so closely with other writers. And in the meantime, the isolation might have discouraged me from putting in the necessary time.

THE OA: You seem to be a “natural” writer—is writing fiction easy for you?

BJ: That’s a wonderful compliment, but I think it contains one of the illusions we have as writers reading. Because readers don’t see the five drafts and don’t receive the dark-night-of-the-soul-this-shit-is-too-hard phone call, it’s tempting to believe that some writers just pop out stories. For instance, Alice Munro’s stories are fairly unadorned and they just seem all of a piece to me. I can’t imagine her so much as pausing while she writes those things. Experience tells me that she must. Of course she must.

As for whether it’s easy, I would say that rather than easy, it’s fun for me. Do I think in some way it’s easier for me than for other people? Not that I’ve noticed. I do enjoy the ride of it, though.

THE OA: How do you explain your seemingly quick success?

BJ: I am stymied. I have no explanation. For about the last year, my mouth has been hanging open: Whaaaaa? My slightly shameful private endeavor has somehow become a public “profession.”

THE OA: Your short-story collection consists of “linked” stories about people who live in New Orleans. Can you tell us about the inspiration for these characters? Did you plan their interwoven stories from the beginning, or did one story inspire another?

BJ: This collection was my thesis and, initially, it never occurred to me that the stories were or could be “linked,” or that anyone in the world would be interested in reading this stuff. In terms of how the collection came together, I would say that one character just sort of led to another. This is one of the great benefits of being in an MFA program. We were required to submit a new story roughly every three weeks, which resulted in a level of productivity I can promise you I would never have achieved on my own. It was soon clear that what I enjoyed most was creating characters. Creating a brand new character every three weeks resulted in some fairly superficial characters. When I began reusing characters, I was able to add depth to them, because I’d spent more time thinking about them and putting them in a variety of situations.

Some characters in earlier stories were combined to make a third, more deeply drawn character. I started moving people around. What does this slightly deviant but very resourceful and funny kid look like next to this wrecked-up drunk guy? What if the drunk guy turned out to be his dad? What if the kid doesn’t know who his dad is and thinks the drunk guy is a big loser? What if the drunk guy won’t cop to being a dad? What if this kid follows around this musician guy, who is responsible for the accidental death of his own child and is a little phobic about being around children? What if the musician’s sister really wants to take care of that funny, slightly deviant kid but can’t figure out how to do that? What if this same woman is drawn to this other woman, despite the fact that her fiancé is a real catch? How do all these characters fit together? How will they act if I stick them in close proximity?  I was going in and tinkering with the plots of existing stories. That’s how they became linked. First one, then another, then another.

THE OA: What is the best writing advice you've received?

BJ: Write the things you feel the most resistance to writing about. I certainly did that in the stories that make up More of This World or Maybe Another. And as much as I resisted writing those stories, they ultimately pushed me to a deeper level of writing.

THE OA: Who is your ideal reader?

BJ: I don’t know that I believe in ideal readers. If someone asked me, “Would you like to read a book set in a women’s prison in the early 1800s?” I’d say no thank you. But I loved Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. How about a book set in some unnamed South American country under siege, in which the main characters are political people and an opera singer? Nuh-uh. No. But Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto is one of my all-time favorite books. The reason those books go beyond their plots and settings is that the characters are so compelling. Their fears are my fears. Their worries are my worries. Their surprise is my surprise.

People who are curious about other people, I guess, are ideal readers for any writer.

THE OA: Who are some of your favorite writers?

BJ: Carol Shields. Sherman Alexie. Alice Munro. Ann Patchett. Junot Diaz. Deborah Eisenberg. And about a million others I will think of later today when this interview is over.

THE OA: Why did you choose to stay in New Orleans after the storm? Did you ever question your decision or consider moving elsewhere?

BJ: I feel lucky to know where home is and to have such a strong feeling of being home when I’m in New Orleans. It’s where my people are. New Orleans has problems, has always had problems—but New Orleanians have a deep allegiance to it anyway, because it’s a wonderful balance of seemingly contradictory things. It’s beautiful and wild and complex and laid-back and steady and loyal and ultimately all-embracing. I never doubted I’d come back.

THE OA: What local treasures (food, music, sights) would you share with a visitor to New Orleans?

BJ: Parkway Bakery for a po-boy. The patio of the Napoleon House for a long afternoon of conversation and Pimm’s Cups. Rock-n-Bowl for an evening of bowling and music and dancing—simultaneously all at the same time, y’all.

THE OA: You recently won a grant from the A Room of Her Own foundation, which will support you with $50,000 over two years as you write your first novel. What plans or strategies do you have for making the leap from short fiction to a novel? 

BJ: Okay, anything I say here is going to be some form of blowing smoke because I’ve never written a novel before. There are two major camps among writers. Those who outline and write from plot and those who create character and let the plot emerge from those characters. I live in fear of being asked to outline something. I just don’t think that way. So, hopefully, a novel will emerge from whatever my POV characters get up to.

My “plan” is to just go on in the back door. The novel will be set in New Orleans. More specifically, in a neighborhood known as Mid-City. The story will pick up where the stories in the collection leave off. There will be more than one POV character. I’ll write their stories much the way I write short stories: a tale of something that happens one day with the fallout that ensues, only with a lot of small arcs playing out under the umbrella of a larger story arc. From that, a final plot will emerge, I hope. And then I’ll stitch it together in a pleasing way. Or, you know, something like that.

The OA Ten: Questions we ask of every interviewee. Weeeeee!

1. What superstitions do you have?

Superstition is the greediest of the irrational beliefs. Once you let it in, it will not leave you alone. I try my best to keep it out of my yard altogether.

2. What would you like to change about yourself?

I wish I had just the tiniest sense of direction. I spend a lot of time getting lost. Although, while I’m lost, I spend a lot of time asking for directions and meeting new people in the process. And I like that pretty well.

3. What are you still trying to accomplish in your professional career?

I struggle with “what is allowed” versus what occurs to me naturally, and that thwarts the kind of experimentation that might lead to something really wonderful. I also feel the press of time on me, and that, too, keeps me from experimenting as much as I would like. I expect by next year I’ll have the time to give a few new things a try.

4. What is your hidden talent?

I can fix a machine without knowing the names of its parts or how, exactly, the thing works or what about it is broken. This is true of most of the people in my family. My friends call me MacGyver.

5. What subject causes you to rant?

The criminal justice system, education, health care. FEMA. Corps of Engineers. I dare not say more as it will lead to a giant rant, which, even though this material is being displayed digitally, will fill this galaxy and bleed over into the next.

6. What is the biggest mistake you ever made in your professional life?

I haven’t had time to make many mistakes in my writing career. Every time I open my mouth or do an interview, I feel like I’m right on the verge of said mistake.

In my career as a carpenter, I have to say it took me a while to understand that it requires just as much time to build a bookcase out of crappy material as it does to build one with nice wood. The extra outlay of cash, if you have it, when measured against the number of years you have to look at the crappy piece, is minimal. This goes for installing plumbing and electrical fixtures, too. Cheap stuff breaks pretty quickly, and then you have to buy new stuff. And pay the labor to install it. Free advice for people renovating houses. Or for writers, because there has to be some cross-application there.

7. What is one thing that you used to dislike but that you now like?

 Revision. Early on, I had no idea how to find the problems in my own stories. What is wrong with this dadgum thing? Others could find them and point them out to me, but I didn’t know how to fix them. It turns out that, for me, fixing stories is a lot like fixing those machines whose workings I don’t necessarily understand. I guess we each function in a fairly specific way, and I’m most comfortable using my intuition. I quit trying to find out what the government-sanctioned right way was to do things and started aiming my intuition at broken stories. Now I can’t wait to start the second draft. Or the fifth. Which is another thing. It takes me about five drafts to get where I’m going, and I’ve finally accepted that.

8. What profoundly underrated book, album, or movie would you like to champion for us?

I just love the movie Big Bad Love. It’s based on Larry Brown’s collection of short stories by the same name. The movie consolidates those stories into a wonderful tale about a guy who’s trying really hard to keep himself down. After he loses just about everything in his life that has any meaning, he starts the long climb back up. It’s set in northern Mississippi. I generally hate movies set in the South because the actors mangle the accents. The accents are terrific in this movie, and the soundtrack is outstanding. Exceptional, even. The bluesman R.L. Burnside has a cameo appearance playing in a bar. You won’t see the best acting or directing ever, but it has enough unique elements to make it interesting and even enriching. Also, no one in the film is excessively good-looking and, for me, that always adds an element of truth to a story.

9. What is your favorite line from a song?

I’m a huge fan of singer/songwriters—John Prine, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Joni Mitchell, Stephin Merritt— and songs that are narrative in nature, so picking a single line from a single song is just torture. I love existential dread, and John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery” is full of it.

 “There’s flies in the kitchen/ I can hear ’em, they’re buzzin’/And I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today./How the hell can a person go to work in the morning/come home in the evening/and have nothing to say?” 

10. What was your favorite childhood toy?

The thicket of bamboo that ran across our backyard. It was a place I could crawl into and hide in. It was a great source of raw materials for making a flute, or a pole for pole-vaulting, or poles for high jumping. Bamboo makes for a pretty good bat, and it’s an excellent building material for impromptu camps, for weaving mats or making tinikling poles. Why were we doing a dance (tinikling) from the Philippines in southwest Louisiana? My neighborhood housed people in the military when I was young, so I suppose it came into our culture that way. And kids dream up games that go with what’s at hand. That bamboo was a one-stop shop for amusement.