Bret Anthony Johnston at the MegaRamp, Camp Woodward
Jesper Andreasson for The Aviary: What are you working on at the moment?
I always work on more than one project at a time. Right now, it’s a novel and a documentary film. The novel is called THE UNACCOMPANIED and it’ll be finished by the end of the year. The documentary is called WAITING FOR LIGHTNING and will premiere at SXSW this March. It explores the life of Danny Way, the skateboarder who dreamed of jumping the Great Wall of China. It’s directed by Jacob Rosenberg, and I’m embarrassingly proud of the film.
The men in your fiction often have a hard time expressing themselves, especially when it comes to revealing tenderness. It’s the women that have the emotional clarity and directness. Does this come from your own experience?
I think it has more to do with my characters coming from Texas. The majority of my experience has been that men in Texas, for better or worse, hold everything in. If you’re a boy in Texas, you come to understand this very early on. It’s a code, an ethos. You don’t saddle other people with your emotions, you don’t burden them with anything that can be swallowed or worked out alone, in silence, and so when a man from Texas tries to express himself, there’s often a very deep conflict. I’m not in any way saying this is a good or healthy way to live, but it’s a way of being in the world that I understand and I’m fascinated by the effects, positive and negative, of such habits. I’m profoundly interested in the pressure of such silence—how the men think they’re doing the right thing by shielding their loved ones, how their loved ones so desperately want them to spill their guts. I guess my hope, in a silly way, is that stories start to fill in some of that silence.
Your story, “Encounters with Unexpected Animals,” which will appear in Esquire this spring, is about a dad giving his son’s troubled girlfriend a ride home. It is only a few pages in length, but feels very expansive. Was this a longer piece you edited down?
Thank you. No, I always knew the story would be short. Every so often when this novel I’m writing starts to frustrate me, I will take what Flannery O’Connor called a “vacation” and write a story. I wrote "Encounters" on my most recent of seven vacations.
There’s a section where the dad stops the car in the middle of nowhere, and you think he’s either going to hurt the girl or hit on her (he’s shown some subtle interest), but instead he tells her to stay away from his son. It’s a protective and moving moment. Did the father’s reaction surprise you?
His reaction didn’t surprise me because I’d always known that’s why he drove her home. However, I had no sense that she would react the way she did. I’m always writing toward surprise; if there’s nothing for me to discover, no sense of moving into the unknown, then I grow very bored, very quickly. Until she reacted in the way she did, I thought the father’s plan would work—just as he thought it would. I was thrilled and elated and relieved when everything fell apart.
Do you try and write the first draft straight through to the end without editing? Or do you write a few pages one day, edit those the next?
It depends on what I’m writing. With nonfiction, I tend to edit as I write. With fiction, I tend to follow the characters through the whole narrative without looking back.
Your skateboarding career ended with a broken foot. What did you learn about yourself in this “in-between” time, the days between having been a skater and of becoming a writer?
You’re awfully kind to call it a career. Do you want some money?
If I learned anything—and I’m not sure I did—it’s that I truly love skateboarding. There were a couple of years after the injury when I didn’t skate, when I tried to focus on other things. I went to college, spent a lot of time getting beat up in jiu jitsu classes, applied to graduate writing programs. Then, on the night before I left for grad school, I went to a pawn shop and bought a board. I hadn’t really skated since breaking my foot, but I remember doing boardslides on these metal rails in the pawnshop parking lot and feeling like I’d found something I’d lost. The notion of having been and becoming don’t really apply here, not for me. They feel knotted together. The more I skate, the better I write.
You still skate quite a bit. What does it give you that writing doesn’t? Is the payoff similar? I mean, is stepping off a ramp after a good run akin to finishing a solid writing session?
There is a similar rush, absolutely, and that rush—which certainly has to do with creating something that wasn’t there before, but also has to do with a kind of surrender that accompanies the act of creation—is addictive. The addiction, for me, is the result of escaping myself. A lot of skaters, including some of my close friends and some of the greatest skateboarders in history, view skating as a mode of self-expression. The same goes for a lot of writers and writing. I don’t see it that way. I’m not trying to express myself with my skating or my writing; I’m trying to disappear. That’s the challenge, the allure, the hope. To forget yourself and let this other thing consume you with a kind of relentless purity. I don’t want to express myself. I want to lose myself.
I know that sounds goofy and highfalutin’, but I think that’s where the payoff or rush is rooted: returning to yourself after a good run or a good sentence, and understanding that the world is now, necessarily, a little different.
Hemingway spoke of his favorite stories being the ones that wrote themselves, like he’d overheard them somewhere and he’d simply written them down. Therefore he always felt slightly embarrassed over them. Do any of your own stories fit into this category?
Yes, I’m usually embarrassed by my stories.
What young author excites you at the moment?
I hate all young writers. I see them as threats, as greedy little animals that are clawing for my food. Each one of these spineless marauders is trying to take me out, so I do everything in my power to sabotage their careers.
Except you. I like your writing a lot, Jesper.
What novel do you wish you wrote?
The one I’m writing. I wish it was done and behind me.
Is there a certain verb that makes you cringe each time you see it on the page?
So long as they’re not used as dialogue tags, I’m cool with most verbs. There are a good many nouns that put me in a stew though, and don’t even get me started on modifiers. Every time someone uses the word “delicious” to describe anything other than food, I die a little.
If you were strapped to a meteor, plunging toward earth at a catastrophic rate, heading toward some remote Siberian tundra where no one would be hurt on impact (except for yourself, of course), what would be your last words? Remember, no one would be within earshot.
“This again?”
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. Named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, Corpus Christi: Stories received The Southern Review's Annual Short Fiction Award, the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, and the James Michener Fellowship. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories, The Puschart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, The Best American Sports Writing, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR's All Things Considered. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under 35. A skateboarder for almost twenty years, he is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard.
Jesper Andreasson was born in Stockholm, Sweden. Nominated in 2009 for the James Kirkwood Literary Prize, he is currently getting his MFA in Literature and Fiction Writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Los Angeles.
Jesper Andreasson for The Aviary: What are you working on at the moment?
I always work on more than one project at a time. Right now, it’s a novel and a documentary film. The novel is called THE UNACCOMPANIED and it’ll be finished by the end of the year. The documentary is called WAITING FOR LIGHTNING and will premiere at SXSW this March. It explores the life of Danny Way, the skateboarder who dreamed of jumping the Great Wall of China. It’s directed by Jacob Rosenberg, and I’m embarrassingly proud of the film.
The men in your fiction often have a hard time expressing themselves, especially when it comes to revealing tenderness. It’s the women that have the emotional clarity and directness. Does this come from your own experience?
I think it has more to do with my characters coming from Texas. The majority of my experience has been that men in Texas, for better or worse, hold everything in. If you’re a boy in Texas, you come to understand this very early on. It’s a code, an ethos. You don’t saddle other people with your emotions, you don’t burden them with anything that can be swallowed or worked out alone, in silence, and so when a man from Texas tries to express himself, there’s often a very deep conflict. I’m not in any way saying this is a good or healthy way to live, but it’s a way of being in the world that I understand and I’m fascinated by the effects, positive and negative, of such habits. I’m profoundly interested in the pressure of such silence—how the men think they’re doing the right thing by shielding their loved ones, how their loved ones so desperately want them to spill their guts. I guess my hope, in a silly way, is that stories start to fill in some of that silence.
Your story, “Encounters with Unexpected Animals,” which will appear in Esquire this spring, is about a dad giving his son’s troubled girlfriend a ride home. It is only a few pages in length, but feels very expansive. Was this a longer piece you edited down?
Thank you. No, I always knew the story would be short. Every so often when this novel I’m writing starts to frustrate me, I will take what Flannery O’Connor called a “vacation” and write a story. I wrote "Encounters" on my most recent of seven vacations.
There’s a section where the dad stops the car in the middle of nowhere, and you think he’s either going to hurt the girl or hit on her (he’s shown some subtle interest), but instead he tells her to stay away from his son. It’s a protective and moving moment. Did the father’s reaction surprise you?
His reaction didn’t surprise me because I’d always known that’s why he drove her home. However, I had no sense that she would react the way she did. I’m always writing toward surprise; if there’s nothing for me to discover, no sense of moving into the unknown, then I grow very bored, very quickly. Until she reacted in the way she did, I thought the father’s plan would work—just as he thought it would. I was thrilled and elated and relieved when everything fell apart.
Do you try and write the first draft straight through to the end without editing? Or do you write a few pages one day, edit those the next?
It depends on what I’m writing. With nonfiction, I tend to edit as I write. With fiction, I tend to follow the characters through the whole narrative without looking back.
Your skateboarding career ended with a broken foot. What did you learn about yourself in this “in-between” time, the days between having been a skater and of becoming a writer?
You’re awfully kind to call it a career. Do you want some money?
If I learned anything—and I’m not sure I did—it’s that I truly love skateboarding. There were a couple of years after the injury when I didn’t skate, when I tried to focus on other things. I went to college, spent a lot of time getting beat up in jiu jitsu classes, applied to graduate writing programs. Then, on the night before I left for grad school, I went to a pawn shop and bought a board. I hadn’t really skated since breaking my foot, but I remember doing boardslides on these metal rails in the pawnshop parking lot and feeling like I’d found something I’d lost. The notion of having been and becoming don’t really apply here, not for me. They feel knotted together. The more I skate, the better I write.
You still skate quite a bit. What does it give you that writing doesn’t? Is the payoff similar? I mean, is stepping off a ramp after a good run akin to finishing a solid writing session?
There is a similar rush, absolutely, and that rush—which certainly has to do with creating something that wasn’t there before, but also has to do with a kind of surrender that accompanies the act of creation—is addictive. The addiction, for me, is the result of escaping myself. A lot of skaters, including some of my close friends and some of the greatest skateboarders in history, view skating as a mode of self-expression. The same goes for a lot of writers and writing. I don’t see it that way. I’m not trying to express myself with my skating or my writing; I’m trying to disappear. That’s the challenge, the allure, the hope. To forget yourself and let this other thing consume you with a kind of relentless purity. I don’t want to express myself. I want to lose myself.
I know that sounds goofy and highfalutin’, but I think that’s where the payoff or rush is rooted: returning to yourself after a good run or a good sentence, and understanding that the world is now, necessarily, a little different.
Hemingway spoke of his favorite stories being the ones that wrote themselves, like he’d overheard them somewhere and he’d simply written them down. Therefore he always felt slightly embarrassed over them. Do any of your own stories fit into this category?
Yes, I’m usually embarrassed by my stories.
What young author excites you at the moment?
I hate all young writers. I see them as threats, as greedy little animals that are clawing for my food. Each one of these spineless marauders is trying to take me out, so I do everything in my power to sabotage their careers.
Except you. I like your writing a lot, Jesper.
What novel do you wish you wrote?
The one I’m writing. I wish it was done and behind me.
Is there a certain verb that makes you cringe each time you see it on the page?
So long as they’re not used as dialogue tags, I’m cool with most verbs. There are a good many nouns that put me in a stew though, and don’t even get me started on modifiers. Every time someone uses the word “delicious” to describe anything other than food, I die a little.
If you were strapped to a meteor, plunging toward earth at a catastrophic rate, heading toward some remote Siberian tundra where no one would be hurt on impact (except for yourself, of course), what would be your last words? Remember, no one would be within earshot.
“This again?”
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. Named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, Corpus Christi: Stories received The Southern Review's Annual Short Fiction Award, the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, and the James Michener Fellowship. His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories, The Puschart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, The Best American Sports Writing, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR's All Things Considered. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under 35. A skateboarder for almost twenty years, he is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard.
Jesper Andreasson was born in Stockholm, Sweden. Nominated in 2009 for the James Kirkwood Literary Prize, he is currently getting his MFA in Literature and Fiction Writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Los Angeles.
