I sat on my bed and started reading, turning immediately to “Work,” perhaps my favorite of Johnson’s stories, and when I read my favorite sentence in it, the one I’ve known by heart for almost twenty years - “Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was but today we had the feeling of men who had worked” - it was all I could do to hold back tears.ĭenis Johnson is gone at 67, and a few days later I still feel in shock at the news. As soon as lunch was over, I excused myself from the group and went back to my hotel room to download Jesus’ Son to my phone, the fastest way I could think of to get to Johnson’s fiction. I kept the news to myself, because I didn’t want to interrupt the good cheer my students were sharing, even if I could no longer quite join in. I stood up from the table in the middle of lunch with four of my graduate students, all of us on a global fellowship program during which we’d arranged for them to meet and study with local writers in Hong Kong and Singapore, and when I came back I brought with me the awful news that Johnson had passed. Last week, while traveling in Hong Kong, I was taken by surprise to hear that Denis Johnson had passed away, a surreal bit of news made stranger by the way that so little at home ever feels fully real while I’m abroad. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |