Meet Barb Johnson

Q&A with Barb Johnson:

AROHO: Your personal history—more than twenty years as a carpenter before entering a creative writing program at age forty-seven—is not the "usual" path of aspiring writers. How do you feel your very different path has informed, helped, or held back your writing?

Barb : I feel that both my advanced age (cough-cough!) and my increasing lack of tolerance for lifting heavy objects combined to make me not only willing to sit for long hours in front of a computer, but actually eager for the chance. When I put down my saw to enter a writing program, I was really, really ready. I was starving for what they were serving. And the whole time I was in that program, every single day, I was just crackling with excitement about it, trying to learn as much as I could as fast as I could. I don’t think that would’ve been true had the experience not been such a contrast to my previous work life. Coming into this late in the game, I’m tempted to wonder what all I could’ve produced had I started earlier, but I was busy doing other things when I was younger. Everybody gets where they’re going when they do. I know that it took all that time, all those experiences, to get me to this place, to make me ready.

AROHO: How did you prepare to apply for the Gift of Freedom?

Barb:Long distance running. Okay, no, not really, but it wouldn’t have hurt. The GOF application is an intense experience, to say the least. It requires a writer to do a complete accounting of her writing life. I worked on my application for well over a hundred hours. There’s no preparing for that. It’s the kind of experience that ultimately fortifies you because it requires you to provide not only superficial information about yourself and your writing, but it also asks enough questions to force you to clarify your deepest intent in life. I’ve never done anything like it, and there is no way to prepare for such a thing. It’s a complete act of faith. You stand at the edge of the high dive, you close your eyes, and you jump.

AROHO: Every Gift of Freedom recipient works on a specific creative project. What is your project?

Barb:I’m very excited to have the time to complete my first novel. My short story collection, More of This World or Maybe Another, is coming out in the fall of 2009. That collection is a group of closely-linked stories about four main characters who live along the Gulf Coast and eventually converge in a neighborhood called Mid-City in New Orleans. My novel will pick up where those stories leave off.

AROHO: You lost your carpentry business to Hurricane Katrina and lived on your apartment’s balcony for a while after the storm. What effect has your experience with the hurricane had on your writing, and are your stories set in post-Katrina New Orleans?

Barb:I don’t write fiction about the hurricane. It put a hitch in my giddyup, for sure, but I don’t let it near my imagination if I can help it. I do write about New Orleans, though, and about the Gulf Coast, because it’s my place, the place I know best. Everyone has a Hurricane Katrina, something unexpected, often dire, which interrupts the flow of their lives, which changes them deep down. After such an event, a person has to find a way back. I’m writing my way back. And my way back is to imagine the city on a sunny day, with people sitting on their stoops talking across the street to one another, a neighborhood with problems functioning the way such a neighborhood does, defining and being defined by its inhabitants. I write to reveal the larger problems of modern life—addictions, violence, alienation—along with the many salves for those wounds—community and the love of the ad hoc family, the family of choice that is ever-present but not often written about in contemporary life. Putting a hurricane in the mix, particularly that hurricane, would obscure the meaning I’m going for.

AROHO: Over the last roughly eighteen months, you have been honored as Best New Voice by Glimmer Train Stories, won first place in Washington Square’s fiction competition, had your short stories acquired by one of the largest American book publishers, HarperCollins. What does it mean to you, then, to be awarded the Gift of Freedom?

Barb:For an emerging writer, it’s an unbelievable boost to have, not only the money to write full time, but also the great communal support of an organization like A Room of Her Own, whose mission is not profit, but rather the whole-hearted support of women in the writing marketplace. That is to say, AROHO is not supporting my work in the hopes of gaining profit from it. Their commitment in presenting the award, and my commitment in accepting it, is not a commitment to an individual, but to the larger community of women writers. So to receive the GOF is both an enormous honor and an extraordinary opportunity to carry AROHO’s mission into my own community.

Has there been a specific moment in all this when you allowed yourself to think, "I am a real writer?"

Barb:I don’t know how long that will take, that shift in my head from being a carpenter to being a writer. Recently, I was asked to be on a panel at a literary festival, and it struck me that I might be asked to talk about writing. As though I knew something about it. I’m very used to people asking me whether it’s better to cope inside corner molding or to miter it (always cope, y’all), or how to repair the sash cord on a double-hung window. But writing? Shouldn’t you ask a writer about that? In the end, though, writers write. I don’t guess it matters what you think you are in the privacy of your own head, so long as you sit down and type it all out.

Barb @ HarperCollins: www.harpercollins.com/barbjohnson