The stories in Adam Johnson's critically acclaimed debut
collection, Emporium, were written over several years, but fine tuned
during his participation in one of the most prestigious creative writing
programs in the United States, the Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford
University. "The experience was really great," Johnson recalled over iced tea
on an unseasonably warm April morning in New York. He is particularly
grateful for the opportunity to work with Tobias Wolff: "His regard for the
short story, the reverence he has for even the attempt to write one, is
something that will always stay with me. There's something ancient and wise
about his stories, like reading late Tolstoy, something general and fable-like
about them. He's trying to put the weight of his stories on a sense of truth, in a
tradition of realism and subtlety...he's not afraid to do summary, not afraid to
let things become ringingly clear. He can walk that line between emotion and
sentimentality, clarity and heavyhandedness, something it sill scares me to
try." But the stories in Emporium display a valiant effort; stories like "Teen Sniper" and "The Death-Dealing
Cassini Satellite" may be wacky on the surface, but it's their powerfully
resonant emotional cores that will shape your memories of the collection and
convince you to read whatever Johnson comes up with next.
RH: Before Stanford, you had studied for a Ph.D. in English literature
while you were working on your short stories.
AJ: Florida State has a nice program, a critical Ph.D. with a creative dissertation.
I took the same coursework and went through the same defense as everyone else, and then
I had time to just write what was essentially this collection of stories.
I love the critical side, and though I wasn't sure if I wanted to contribute to the dialogue on
the eightteenth-century novel, I certainly wanted to study it. I focused on the evolution of
fiction technique, how writers like Defoe and Richardson learned how to write this new
thing, the novel ... how we came to the conventions of realism we know today. There's
something about being a writer -- everybody has to start from scratch. Everybody has to
learn their tradition, and these people were making it.
RH: It sounds like going through a creative writing workshop with
these guys.
AJ: Absolutely. They were winging it, the same way I feel like I'm winging it.
Defoe wouldn't rewrite unless he was paid extra, and he rarely was, so you can see him
rush through sections, not quite knowing how to do them. Richardson's Pamela is
such an awful book, but it's such a lovely book, too -- it starts off as an epistolary novel,
but when he can't get everything he wants in the format of the letters, he changes to third
person omniscient, then he switches over to diary... he's doing anything he can, trying to
figure out how to write the story. Writing that novel taught him how to do it. It's nice to
watch that struggle exposed, because you never see it anymore.
The lessons of reading someone like Smollett are clear -- summary is boring, generalization
is pretty lame, and we've come a long way since then. But every once in a while there'd be
a magical moment where the characters would come alive and real time began to work on
the page...and it was really clear when that would turn on and off.
RH: Where do the ideas for stories like "Teen Sniper" and "The
Canadanaut" come from?
AJ: I had read a book by Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels, that really
blew me away. It takes place over three days, during the battle of Gettysburg. I'd read
historical fiction before, but it just struck me how complete the story was because of the
historical record. It seemed factual. And I liked the idea that the story and the fascinating
characters were already there, because plot is sometimes hard for me. So I thought
historical fiction would play into my strengths. I told a friend of mine that I was going to
write some historical fiction, and he said, "Why don't you write false historical fiction, like
the first Canadian man on the moon?" The second he gave it to me, I had to make a premise
like that real. So I ended up creating a whole new world, but one that still grappled with my
main issues: abandonment, estrangement, lost connections. Everything I write feels like a
different incantation of the same central issues. If I didn't have fabulous ways to play them
out... I think I am writing the same story over and over again, just in different ways.
My impulse is to write traditional, straightforward, heartfelt stories. If it isn't about the
heart, it just doesn't interest me. But it seems like it's harder and harder to do that--a good
story will just get us, but when it's used in advertising and public relations to sell things,
people will put up higher defenses towards story. It's rare that a story really gets someone
anymore. When I was young, they'd have those AT&T commercials, "reach out and touch
someone," where the girl's stranded and she's crying in the phone booth in the rain,
saying, "Mom, I just called to tell you I love you." We're smiling at it now, but my mom
would just get all teary eyed at the time.
The safe domestic story is harder for me to write than the off-kilter story, and it's somehow
not as satisfying. It's more fun to go someplace I've never conceived of before. But the
imaginative drive of your story isn't enough, whatever it is; you still have to use the same
level of artistic craft to make it work. You have to be able to write a really good straight
story, and then decide not to.
RH: And you're working on a novel now, right?
AJ: I don't see myself writing short stories again. It's that much fun. You have
the same fears and anxieties you get writing short stories, but the rewards are so much
larger. I really like settling in, becoming a more regular writer.
The novel takes places over ten days of real time, but its scope is about 10,000 years, from
the late Pleistocene era to the early twenty-first century. It's fun to play on those grand time
scales but still stay in the immediate moment. I'm just on the downward slide now. It's
probably about 340 pages. Plot's one of my problems. I can make dialgoue and detail and
action come out of the characters, but to have the plot that plays perfectly, presents a
character with all the right opportunities and levels of progression, that keeps the
motivation going...it's really hard. When it works perfectly, you can't even see a good
plot; you don't even know that it's there.
RH: You've gotten some great reviews right off the bat. How are you
dealing with the success?
AJ: I've worked on the book a long time, and maybe I could have sold it earlier.
But I wanted it to be the best possible book, so I held on to it as long as I could. I
remember when I was a student, and buying story collections, paying hardback prices for
three good stories and a bunch of filler, I'd get upset, so when I was working on my
stories, I told myself I wasn't going to do that. I wanted a book of nine stories that would
function with a totality of effect.
The writing fellowships at Florida State and Stanford helped me work on the
book maybe three years longer than I normally could have. But it also meant
that the stories sat in the dark for a long time. My agent placed three of them
very well, and I placed the rest, but every one of them had more than thirty
rejections. So I've gotten used to believing in my work despite rejection, using
rejection as an opportunity to steel myself in my belief in my work. I don't
think it's quite settled in yet that all these reviewers have said great things
about my work, and I'm not saying the reviews are deserved, but I did put a lot
of work into the stories. I resisted a lot of temptation to do other things so I
could have my dream short story collection. I don't know how many people get
a chance to do that.
