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An Interview with Jonathan Johnson
Molly Jo Rose conducted this interview with Jonathan Johnson over email in November 2005 as a preview of Johnson's visit to GVSU and WMU.
Jonathan Johnson is the author of a memoir, Hannah and the Mountain (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and a poetry collection, Mastodon, 80% Complete (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002).
Molly Jo Rose is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University in nonfiction.
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UpInMichigan.org: Jonathan, because there are a zillion ways to ghetto-ize a writer (please excuse the clumsy use of such a serious word), I wanted to ask you some questions about how writers get categorized. In particular, I want to address the idea of nature writers, landscape writers, and the limiting way writers are often designated to one genre. What's your take on either of these writerly designations — Nature Writer and Writer of Landscape — and how do you define yourself within these terms
Jonathan Johnson: I think every writer needs something outside his or her own mind, an Other, if you will, to provide some resistance to the imagination. That Other better be something about which you're passionate, something you love. That is, it should be something toward which you feel a serious responsibility. And if we're honest with ourselves, I don't know that we really have all that much choice about what moves us enough to bring us to the page. Lake Superior and the northern Rockies push back on my imagination, give it something to work with and against, something that must be reckoned with, because I love those places. I don't find it all that different from writing about people or art or grocery stores — some of which also put the essential pressure of love on my imagination — except that Lake Superior and the Northern Rockies are Other not just to me individually, but to my whole humanity. Stand on the shore of Superior watching a storm come at you and you engage a reality that is profoundly not you, something to which your language must answer, something to live up to.
UIM: Frost said he never wrote a single poem about nature. Why do you think he was so opposed to having his poetry identified as such?
JJ: Partly, he's being his usual difficult self. Also though, I think Frost is owning up to the fact that the subject of poems like "To Earthward" or "Goodhours" — or even something pretty straightforward like "Birches" — is experience itself. And experience for Frost was woven from the threads of perception and imagination. What he saw on a walk out of town and what he thought (and how the experience reformed itself in language) conspire to make one whole. Again, it's the interplay of self and Other, that tension and resistance and allegiance that is the source of the poem. To say the poem is about nature is like saying a marriage is "about" one partner.
UIM: What does home mean to you and how is that place (real or imagined) a participant in your writing?
JJ: Home means Marquette, Michigan. I'm a bit two-hearted about this, as it also means Bonner County, Idaho, or more precisely a cabin my wife and I built there on my family's ranch. I've been migrating between the two landscapes since I was in high school. I used to take the Greyhound and sometimes the train before I had a car. Just recently, my wife and daughter and I bought a house near Eastern Washington University, where I teach, so now it's Idaho cabin on the weekends, Marquette in the summer and for a month at Christmas and sometimes a couple weeks in March. The power of something like Lake Superior (or even Jack's IGA or Vango's Lounge on Third Street in Marquette) is often too much for me when it's right there. The imagination doesn't stand a chance. So all this coming and going, this perpetual longing really, allows for a little of that distance Wordsworth refers to as recollection in tranquility. You write the best love letters to someone not right beside you at the moment.
UIM: Do you believe that writers are geographically determined? If so, what makes a Michigan writer a Michigan writer? How has your work been shaped by Idaho and its mountains?
JJ: If you are open to a place, to its weather and flora and fauna, if it's one of the things to which you have this responsibility I'm talking about, I do think it shapes your work. I'm rereading Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion right now, and you can't tell me that book isn't shaped, right down to its prose style, by Kesey's love and knowledge of the thick, wet woods of the Oregon Coast. But like any relationship, the interplay between place and writer is highly individual. Ray Carver lived a good deal of time in coastal Washington and it's hard to imagine a prose style more dramatically different from Kesey's. This goes back to Frost's statement that his poems aren't about nature. Ander Monson and Nancy Eimers and Jim Harrison and Pete Markus all have infinitely different experiences of Michigan, experiences determined as much by themselves as by the place. Again, I think about human relationships. We may know and love the same person, but how that person affects us, who we each become in relationship to that person will vary as much as coincide. For me, there's a wildness in the vast woods of Upper Michigan, in the winters and in Lake Superior, that comes right into town, like the nightfall or a storm front. Idaho is very similar, except there it's the omnipresent mountains. I find such wildness deeply companionable, and I imagine my work must reflect that.
UIM: What do you look for when you read work from a Michigan writer? (I am thinking particularly here of the easy comparison of your poem "Drownings Have Occurred" and the running theme of drowning under the ice in Ander Monson's book, Other Electricities.) What are primary concerns for writers from the Upper Peninsula?
JJ: Writing out of the same place is a little like having the same religion, I suppose. You think of it as all your own, and you get to have company in that feeling. I remember reading Jack Driscoll's stories that were eventually collected in Wanting Only to Be Heard when they were first appearing around the country in literary magazines and feeling profoundly understood. The same with Sharon Dilworth, And Ander, too. It's their northern Michigan in those stories, not mine. But what I love and attend to they love and attend to, so I come away from their words feeling at least a little known. I hope people will go back and read the stories of John VandeZande also. And the work of his son Jeff. Two wonderful writers of the U.P. Mildred Walker's novel, Fireweed, published in 1934, is set in Big Bay and is essential reading as well.
UIM: Certainly Jim Daniels, a native of Detroit, is writing from an altogether different place than you are. In what ways is a U.P. writer different from those writing in the lower part of the state? Do you feel an obligation to speak from that place and to represent it?
JJ: In the U.P. we know there's a place down there somewhere receiving all the ore we ship out, that the freighters that slip over our horizon are heading somewhere closer to the rest of the human world. And we know the trucks with snowmobile trailers that come up in great migratory columns hail from a place where the press of hard labor and human proximity are enough to make people desperate. (Like people in many economically and geographically marginal places we can be a little smug.) We also know that downstate is where the economic and educational and cultural opportunities are—though this is certainly less so than it used to be—and when we need those things it's most often downstate we go to find them. So there's this exchange that goes on. People like Jim Daniel's character Digger, and downstate writers like the poets David Dodd Lee and John Rybicki know the U.P. is up there, a reservoir of wildness when they need it. And people like me when I was twenty-four know that there are big universities and cities and communities of writers and artists below the bridge that (maybe) will have us.
UIM: Which writers in particular are you reading from Michigan that interest you?
JJ: Marquette has its first major novel in Harrison's True North. I read it sitting at an outdoor table at the Third Street Bagel Shop last summer. I felt as at home in that book as I did at that table. I go back to the late poet and my undergrad teacher (and almost father-in-law at one time—another story) Philip Legler perennially. Both are writers of a sincerity as large and blessedly immoderate as the place.
UIM: Beyond Michigan, who do you find necessary reading these days and what venues do you feel are giving writers the most freedom to get really great work done and out there for people to read?
JJ: I've been reading a lot of Twentieth Century European poets lately. There's a wonderful new-ish translation of the Italian Cesare Pavese's poems by Geoffrey Brock. And I find a familiar northern sensibility in Tomas Tranströmer and Rolf Jacobsen. Among U.S. writers of my generation I'm very engaged by the poems of Campbell McGrath and of young Swedish-American poet Malena Mörling. They are two very different writers, but there's an intimacy I'm drawn to in both, an authenticity. They both seem keenly aware of mortality and of the transience of their experience and aren't going to waste any time goofing around being coy or intellectually evasive. They understand how much is at stake in this life. That's a rare quality. One I find also in Mark Halliday (playful as he can be) and in Jack Gilbert.
UIM: In Hannah and the Mountain, you refer to your dedicated habit of writing in terms of you being "a greedy man." Can you discuss why the work of writing might feel secondary to everything else in life? How do you juggle your academic duties with your writing and how has your commitment to getting your writing done altered since you started a family?
JJ: Well, writing for me is a self-serving way of using my time and space on the planet. Maybe someone reads what I write and it's useful or good company for them. I hope so. But it's not why I write. I write for my own use and company, to be closer to my life, more fully aware and in this world. I absolutely don't think of my writing as secondary to everything else, which is why I describe myself as greedy. As it happens though, I do find I am a better father, husband, and friend when I'm writing every day. No question. A little weirder maybe, but kinder and more grateful. Thank God that's the case. I'm afraid I'd do it even if it weren't.
As far as finding the time and heart to write, the school breaks are essential. I get a good head of steam up which keeps me going deep into the term. I usually get mired down about two thirds of the way through, but by then there's only a month or so left before the next break.
And I'm absurdly fortunate to teach at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at EWU. It's 67 miles from our Idaho cabin, we haven't had one single meeting before noon in the seven years I've been there, the teaching load is very reasonable, and the students are inspiring to me. Also, we teach all the graduate literature courses to our MFA students in the creative writing program, so I get to read Milton and Homer and Pavese and Marilynne Robinson in addition to the new writing by our students. I'm a little under it just now as I'm serving my sentence as Program Director, but we rotate, so I'll be out in two and a half years. I lack the brain chemical that's supposed to give you a kick when you move something from the In box to the Out box.
UIM: What accountability do you feel the writer has toward the people they write about? In what ways do you think Amy's telling of the story about your first few years at the cabin would have been different from your telling of it?
JJ: The story would have been tougher had she written it. But it would have been a different story. On a practical level, I showed the manuscript of Hannah and the Mountain to the doctors and nurses whose professional lives are depicted, both to fact check things and to see what they'd say about my using their names — (I wasn't going to consider other changes). All agreed to let me use their names. As far as family goes, I write about them out of love, and they know that. What greater accountability is there really? Still, having the details of one's life out there, for both the writer and those around him, naturally leads to a little self-consciousness. So in prose I'm working on a novel now.
UIM: How do you feel your writing has changed since you became a father?
JJ: Both my capacity for empathy and my inability to reconcile myself to the suffering people impose on one another have increased. Parenting is the true wilderness, the furthest outside ourselves we go in this life. You have kids and you know something about the Not Me. These days my daughter, who is five, is fascinated by scat. We go out into the woods and she wants to poke every poop we find with a stick and check for bones and fur or berry skins or grass. She wants to know the story. We've watched wolves in the wild through spotting scopes together. Sometime we howl through the house to find each other. To say she's renewed my sense of wonder is the most under of understatements.
Also, having someone to whom you so completely commit your time, energy and attention can have the effect of making you get serious about the time, energy and attention you've taken away from that person to write. No more diddling around. Or quite a bit less of it anyway.
UIM: Some writers say they begin a poem with a phrase or an image that rattles them until they can get it down on paper. What begins a poem for you?
JJ: It's much as you describe it for me as well. It's the language that almost always begins the thing. The language is both wiser and more loyal to the experience than I am. I like Dick Hugo's instruction that you should never want to mean something more than you want to sound good. Too much intentionality is a sure way to go off track for me. I suppose it's why I still occasionally write in form, which pushes me around with no regard for my sorry little meaning.
UIM: Because you have published in all three genres, the following questions will discuss the matter of genre designation. How do you know when to treat a piece prosaically or poetically? What motivations or decisions are involved in that and have you ever had the experience of writing a piece in several genres before what needed to be said was finally said?
JJ: I tend to write in a single genre for months at a stretch. Last summer I let the novel I'm working on cool off and wrote nothing but poems. This fall I'm back at the novel with fresh eyes. I do find myself treating the same subjects in prose and poetry. In loose terms I'd say that the more unstable and interior an experience is, the more it lends itself to poetry, the more I'm inclined to let language drive. I can't remember something I've written about in prose first.
UIM: How aware are you of the distinction between your voice as a poet and your voice as a prose writer?
JJ: Allowing myself the lucidity of prose has liberated me from that concern somewhat in poetry, I'd say. Though I read and write far more poetry than prose, I have the feeling of knowing what I'm doing at any given moment more in prose. Most days you've got some sense of what's ahead of you when you're working on a book of prose. It's reassuring in its way, but when I return to poetry I'm happy to be free of that.
UIM: As an essayist, I think writing begins with a question that the writer wants answered. Would you agree with this, and how do you choose which genre (poetry, fiction, nonfiction) will best respond to the question?
JJ: That's a smart way to put it, yes. Thinking of the essay-building process as one of following (as in a question or animal tracks in the snow or even a narrative), rather than leading gets at the sense of discovery so essential to the form for me. Again, I tend to work on something in poetry first, when the subject and language surrounding that subject is least stable. Hannah and the Mountain was something of an exception and actually began as a journal, but there again, I was working on the subject in poetry early on too. Both "The Last Great Flood" and Be Young. Have Fun." in Mastodon, 80% Complete, were written during this period and come specifically out of some of the same experiences, as do parts of other poems in that collection. When a series of events or (as you say) a question — rather than a moment or moments or images or the movement of thought or music of language — begins to drive the piece it tends to shift into prose. But of course, I don't want to paint this too broadly. Sound and image and moments and thought's movement are all essential to good prose. It's a question of what's central, where a piece of writing's center of gravity is. In the novel I'm working on now, the center of gravity is the characters and how they change over an extended period of time, but I've been writing poems about their landscape too.
UIM: What do you make of the growing trend to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction, and which of these two genres do you think has a closer relationship to poetry?
JJ: I love this question because it undermines the assumption that fiction and nonfiction are closest. Here I'm talking about form and process, not content or the issue of truth-telling. For me the way in which one tracks thought in nonfiction is very similar to the movement in extended meditative poems.
And on the issue of truth-telling, I'm not sure I understand the impulse behind blurring the lines between nonfiction and fiction. For me the facts in nonfiction are very much like the formal demands of a sonnet. The facts are what your imagination must answer to and what brings your imagination to important and surprising places. Things like collapsing characters and shifting events around and still calling the work nonfiction have always seemed like laziness or evasiveness to me. Fiction is a broad and welcoming genre, much like free verse. If you want to step outside the constraints of the facts, wonderful. You're writing fiction, man. There's nothing wrong with the tradition of autobiographical fiction. May it come out of hibernation.
UIM: What is your relationship to your older work, and which poems do you feel best represent what you want to accomplish as a writer?
JJ: Old poems are like old friends, aren't they? What they know about you, who you were and have become since, is often as important as how you feel about them. Judging them — harshly or kindly — is no way to spend one's time. The best you can do is try to be brave and cordial when one you've forgotten about for a while shows up with arms wide. I've certainly in closer touch with some than others, but I'm reluctant to say which. Partly because I don't suppose I'm any better judge than anyone else, and partly because sometime one of those old, neglected poems will look me up and I'll remember who I was then and find a little of that writer in me still.
UIM: What are you most looking forward to about your upcoming readings in Michigan?
JJ: Along with other work, I plan to read some newer poems from my forthcoming collection, In the Land We Imagined Ourselves, and that gives me a useful edginess as I look forward to the visit. I'm also looking forward to checking in with some places that sustained and even inspired me when I was in graduate school at WMU and living in Kalamazoo and Paw Paw and finally Allegan, feeling far from home. One little lake, a particular patch of tangled woods along the river, certain trees near campus. I want to at least drive by the Paw Paw cottage Amy and I rented for a year. And the duplex on Greenwood where we first lived together and where I'd stay up late, lights out, watching the snow fall out the window and missing Marquette with a conviction I had no idea would be so artistically important to me.
And I'm looking forward to checking in with some of my favorite people and writers on the planet. I owe much of who I am and continue to become as a writer (and human being) to certain friends and mentors there, and I'm honored they've asked me to come read.
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