THE FIRST READERS

"I am more or less happy when being praised; not very comfortable when being abused; but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained." Arthur Balfour

Two days ago, and after about three weeks of writing and revision, I completed a 2,924 word introduction for James Weldon Johnson's classic novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) for a new edition that Library of America is doing. My wife just read it. For 41 years she's always been my first reader. I can always trust that she will give me a "general reader's" reaction, and point out any typing errors I might have made.

The next readers are my agents of 38 years, Anne and Georges Borchardt, who will either send the manuscript along to whatever editor commissioned it or find a home for it if it is a new work of fiction, and sometimes others in their office will read it, too. Between 1972 and 1982, I often passed my stories and novels by the late John Gardner for any helpful comments he might make (and knowing full well that our visions of life and literature differed in important ways). These days when I've finished a story, I often send it along to the literary scholars who have published articles and books about my work as well as the work of others. All are officers in the Charles Johnson Society at the American Literature Association, and learned on matters pertaining to literature and culture so I greatly value whatever they might have to say. I often share a spanking brand-new work with friends who I think might find its subject of interest. Sometimes I'll send a new work to editors I know, ones I have a hunch might feel it is appropriate for their publication and, if so, they can then contact my literary agents to work out a contract and payment.

I always take seriously any comments and suggestions I receive from all the aforementioned folks, and I think about them for a long time because I want every work I create to be a gift for others. But I should mention that I'm never ready to show anything I write to others until I've worked it over thoroughly and through many drafts in which I've revised each line until I can't revise it anymore, and not until I've considered every word choice dozens of times, and brought 46 years of publishing experience to it. The work is ready to show only after I convince myself that it reflects my best feelings, best thought, and best technique.

Writing screen-and-teleplays is, of course, a different matter. For the most part, this is committee work (or collaborative work, if you prefer), and a writer is professionally obligated to respond to all the notes he receives from the producers of a particular show. He (or she) is part of a team, a "hired gun," so to speak. In one of his interviews, playwright August Wilson talked about how when his first play was staged he had to get over a sense of ownership of the work since the process of moving a play from the page to the stage involves contributions from many people. (Nevertheless, his 10 plays clearly embody his own vision of black American life since August had final approval on all changes.)

But for original, literary art, it should be obvious that too many "cooks" can muddle, dilute or damage a story's coherence, clarity, and consistency, and sometimes move it too far away from a writer's intention. Seasoned, veteran artists know---and feel secure with---their own voices and visions of life and literature. What they believe and don't believe. What they want to say and how they think it is best to say it. Therefore, listening to "criticism" is not a problem, and is even quite interesting sometimes because a person's reactions to a creative work reveal as much about that person as they do about the work in question.

I believe James Baldwin addressed all these matters well in his essay "The New Lost Generation," published in the July, 1961 issue of Esquire. This quote has been in my writer's workbooks for decades, patiently waiting to be deployed, so I'm happy for the opportunity to share it now. There, in that essay, Baldwin said, "A man is not a man until he's able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others."

CHARLES JOHNSON TALKS ABOUT HIS LOVE FOR DOGS

Don't get me started on dogs. 

 

 

I love dogs. Everyone in Seattle seems to love dogs and all my neighbors have one. Or more. I read books and articles about dogs for pleasure. Although I had cats when I was growing up and also one here in Seattle, it's dogs I love writing and thinking about---Berkeley the heroic watch dog protagonist of one of my most reprinted stories "Menagerie: A Child's Fable"; and the dog character Casey (named after our late lab/shepherd mix) who swaps minds with a human in my recent sci-fi story "Guinea Pig" in Boston Review (Jan-Feb, 2011). Even my last story, "Welcome to Wedgwood" in Shambhala Sun (March, 2011) has our present furry companion Nova, a West Highland White Terrier, as a character important for the story's action.

              

As a species we adapted to the same environments and living conditions with dogs over the last 10,000 to 20,000 years. As a matter of fact, we selectively bred most of the different dog breeds that exist. Our two species complement each other perfectly. Studies have proven that caring for a dog relieves stress (At Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state dogs are used to provide stress relief for deployed soldiers.) There is a 75% overlap in the genetic codes of humans and dogs; the structure of their brains contain most of the same organs found in the human brain. Dogs have emotions and personalities. 

 

       

Our Nova's ears hear four octaves higher than I can perceive and they can be hundreds of times better than my own ears for some sounds. He can identify smells somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times better than a human can, and he has 50 times more scent receptors than I do.  He has at least the intelligence of a two-year-old child. A border collie named Chaser recently was taught the names of 1,022 items, and can categorize them by function and shape, which is something children learn around age three. 

 

 

Living with a dog, then, is like living with a younger, beloved family member. Last November our Nova tore a ligament in his right, rear leg. Repairing it required two surgeries. I spent the first month after his first and second surgeries carrying him everywhere, up and down stairs, inside and outside the house, to his twice weekly physical therapy sessions on an underwater treadmill (thank heaven a grown Westie male weighs only about 25 pounds), and making sure he took his medications. In other words, Nova is my constant companion. My buddy. Wherever I am, he is. He's across the room right now on his soft mat as I write these words. 

 

 

So, yeah, don't get me started on dogs. I plan to live the rest of my life with one (or more), and sneak them into my fiction whenever possible. And high on my reading list right now is The Greatest Dog Stories Ever Told, edited by Patricia M. Sherwood (The Lyons Press, 2001), which contains 36 dog stories by such authors as Willie Morris, Peter Mayle, John Graves, Vance Bourjailly, Farley Mowat, Jack London, Merrill Markoe, Will Rogers, Lord Dunsany, Thomas Mann, William Cowper, James Thurber, Sparse Grey Hackle, Rudyard Kipling, and one of my heroes, Ray Bradbury.

        

CHARLES JOHNSON AND THE GOOD STUFF

After dating for two years, my wife Joan and I married in June, 1970 when we both were 22-years-old. (Our birthdays are seven days apart so I’ve always joked that our fathers probably impregnated our mothers at the same moment, therefore  we were karmically fated to meet and marry.) During our first two years of marriage we were strict vegetarians because we considered that choice to be the morally and spiritually right one. I never missed meat, not once, and the reduction in our weekly grocery bill when I was in early graduate school was a blessing.

But I had a black, college friend who was raised as a vegetarian. He told me that he ate meat for the first time, in his twenties, when he visited a lady friend for dinner. “I was rolling around all night on the floor in pain,” he said. And so my wife and I had to consider what we’d do if and when we had children. Raise them as vegetarians and perhaps let them endure an agonizing night like my friend experienced as their stomachs adjusted to something foreign? Or let them eat meat while we stayed vegetarian, and have to work out two different menus for our family every day? Furthermore, back in the early ‘70s in southern Illinois, it wasn’t easy to find restaurants that offered vegetarian meals. And so after two years we drifted away from not “eating anything that has a face,” as my friend mendicant Buddhist monk Claude AnShin Thomas once put it, for he is devoted to ahima or harmlessness toward all sentient beings.  Just as a footnote: our 29-year-old daughter Elisheba, curator and owner of Faire Gallery Café, is by choice a vegan.

These early 1970s experiences and reflections no doubt played a big part in my thinking about the cultural, social and phenomenological meanings of food and eating when I wrote my second novel, Oxherding Tale, a philosophical, comic slave narrative for late 20^th century readers. 

The story’s protagonist, Andrew Hawkins, is the product of a black butler, George Hawkins, and his master’s white wife. Out of compassion, his  master secures for him a tutor, Ezekiel William Sykes-Withers, a brilliant yet tragic Transcendentalist and correspondent with Karl Marx, who makes a cameo appearance midway through the novel. Ezekiel, a vegetarian, weans Andrew off meat-eating, and convinces his black step-mother Mattie to do the same, an act that leads in Chapter Two to an explosively comic scene in the slave quarters (where Andrew is raised or exiled to) when his black, meat-eating, biofather George racializes food and equates vegetarianism with everything he (now a bitter, black cultural nationalist after losing his job as a butler because he impregnated his master’s wife) associates with the curious and effete ways of white folks. He wants what he considers to be “black” food (pig’s feet, chitterlings, collard greens, ham, fried chicken, black-eyes peas, cornbread) and not the “funnylooking roots and raw tubers, paste, rice, and wood fiber without salt or syrup or anything like I was bird or an English poet…” which is how he describes the meal that Mattie puts on his dinner plate one evening. “Naw,” says George, who sees Ezekiel as a 19^th century version of a hippie, “eatin’ vegetables and walkin’ round the woods nekkid like I seen Ezekiel do—oh yeah, I seen him---is for white people. Colored folks got enough sense to stay in their clothes…Soybeans ain’t hardly food. Beans or vegetables are okay for extras, but I need somethin’ that’ll fill up this emptiness and stick with me! Some things you got to kill for survival!”  And so he does, storming out of the house with his gun, dragging Andrew along with him as he kills, then skins a deer.  

Young Andrew is horrified by this act and thinks, “What if all Ezekiel’s talk about how poleaxing preceded porkchops was saying that violence of the shotgun blast, the instant before the final explosion of dust, stayed sealed inside like a particle, trapped in the dying tissues, and wound up on the dinner table---as if everything was mysteriously blended into everything else, and somehow all the violence slavery crime and suffering in the world had, as Ezekiel suggested, its beginning in what went into our bellies?”

         

In Oxherding Tale, I wouldn’t take Andrew’s words too seriously. After all, Hitler was a vegetarian. But while I’m not a vegetarian now, I expect to one day return to my dietary choice during the years 1970-72 before the end of my life. (Hell, I’d start again tomorrow if the mood hit me in just the right way. Remember how comedian Dick Gregory critiqued  heavy “soul food” dishes? They are not an example of healthy eating.) If one takes the appropriate dietary supplements (which my wife and I didn’t know about in the early 1970s), vegetarianism is---or so I truly believe---the most civilized and moral of eating choices, one that avoids the industries that brutally slaughter animals daily, and pump them with chemicals so they unnaturally produce more eggs and offspring at an accelerated rate---all that so far too many Americans can waddle around looking like inflated balloons ready to burst. Visit a slaughterhouse for cattle---or watch a video of one---and you’ll never again want to eat a McDonald’s hamburger. Or anything that “has a  face.”

CHARLES JOHNSON ON SCREEN WRITING

CHARLIE SMITH

Unlike the unhappy screenwriter in my story "Moving Pictures," I never abandoned literary fiction for the lure of Hollywood. (See my last post.) However, over some 20 years I wrote 20 screen-and-teleplays for PBS (among them "Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree" in 1978, which was about the oldest living American; and "Booker," which won a 1985 Writers Guild Award for best script in the category of children's television, and many other awards); screenplays for Tri-Star, Interscope, Columbia, Showtime, and in 1981 I worked as one of two writer-producers for the second season of the PBS dramatic series "Up and Coming" (a kind of forerunner to the "Cosby Show" about a black family’s trials and tribulations). Being a college professor, I never felt the need to become a full-time screen-writer, but the work I did was enough for me to become "vested," i.e., to qualify for early retirement and receive a monthly pension check from the Producer-Writers Guild with, of course, the possibility of working again as a screenwriter if something comes along that interests me.

Frankly, I began writing screenplays just to see how well I could produce entertainment for a mass audience. (And also to supplement my professor's salary.) Many of the workers I knew in the film-making business came from film school, places like CalArts , where they learned the technical side of their craft well. But film-makers frequently call upon the services of accomplished novelists and short story writers because they are strongly grounded in two things important for any story, regardless of its medium: well-developed characters, and structure (plot).

Just as film-makers benefit from a novelist's particular skills, so too the literary writer can more finely hone his (or her) craft through screen writing, where everything in a story must be dramatized, and concretely realized as a scene actors can actually perform (during a read-through they will "goof" on lines the writer composed that violate the authenticity of real speech). In a novel or a short story, one can rely on narrative summary (telling, not showing) and the poetic possibilities of language to hold a reader’s interest. Not so in a screenplay or teleplay. If one is, for example, adapting a novel for the screen (or, if you like, the stage), all those places where the novelist went on automatic pilot, failing to "show and not tell," where he (or she) fell back on narrative summary or an entertaining voice or his (or her) talent for lyricism and left an action ambiguous or only suggested---well, those are precisely the places where a screenwriter must struggle to create a vivid scene, dramatic or otherwise. Thus, some novels and stories with minimal plot (but lots of dazzling language performance) are difficult to successfully adapt as films. Imagine the challenge a screenwriter would have with Djuna Barnes’s 1937 classic Nightwood.

For me, the pay-off from writing screenplays probably came in Middle Passage, a novel that moves at a fast clip from one dramatic (or comic) scene to another (some people have told me they read the novel in one sitting) with narration  used basically as a bridge (a poetic one, I hope) between scenes (of action and dialogue) and to prepare for them. Some writers I know first compose their novels as screenplays in order to carefully lay out the dramatic structure, then in later drafts add narration (telling) with all its rich possibilities.

 For those interested in a brilliant and very accessible explanation of how great films are examples of superb storytelling, I suggest two books by Brian McDonald, Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories That Resonate and The Golden Theme: How To Make Your Writing Appeal To The Highest Common Denominator.  McDonald has taught his story structure seminars at Pixar, Disney Feature Animation, and Lucasfilm’s ILM. He is an award-winning director/writer who has written for comic books, A&E’s Hoarders and directed spots for Visa. His highly entertaining film White Face, which imagines what it would be like if circus clowns were a separate race, has run on HBO and Cinemax, and is used nation-wide by corporations as a tool for diversity training. In a word, Brian McDonald is a master teacher whose every word on screen writing you can trust.

MOVING PICTURES: A CLOSER LOOK

To ask if a story is "experimental" can be misleading. As one wag put it, every original story is an experiment when one is working on it.

 

So I can't exactly say which of my stories is most "experimental." However, I can say that my short story "Moving Pictures" has sometimes proven to be challenging for some teachers and students who aren't familiar with Western philosophy and Buddhism. Its plot is simple, even deliberately minimalist, but the story dramatizes how we create and are responsible for every aspect of our lives---right down to the level of perceptual experience.

 

On the surface, that story, told in second-person viewpoint, is about an unhappy novelist-turned-screenwriter, who is sitting in a Seattle theater in the mid-1970s, watching a film (a corny western) he wrote. His life is an almost cliched digest of the usual post-modern complaints---divorce from a trophy wife, job dissatisfaction, selling out his literary dreams to make a buck in Hollywood, and cynicism. At the story's end, he leaves the theater, sees his car has been broken into, important papers in his glove compartment stolen, and after a moment of rage he collapses under the weight of his grief. 

 

 

But, earlier, as he watched the movie he scripted, he recalls (in the pre-digital era forty years ago) seeing reels of film for the movie "hanging like stockings" in the editing room: scraps or rags of footage. There, as the film's editor assembles its scenes together in post-production, he, the curious hack writer, looks at the film through a viewer, seeing each frame individually. 

 

 

With that editing room scene we enter deeper, philosophical waters. The story eases into an exploration of our perceptual experience, of how moment by moment our minds create Samsara (the world of illusion) when we project our desires and memories onto objects and others. The magic of the mind in conjuring our experiential "world" is analogous to the magic involved in experiencing a film that causes us to laugh, cry, feel suspense, catharsis, etc. At first, the screenwriter perceives through the viewer each frame "as a single frozen image, like an individual thought, complete in itself, with no connection to the others, as if time stood still; but then the frames came faster as the viewer sped up, chasing each other, surging forward and creating a linear, continuous motion that outstripped your perception, and presto: a sensuously rich world erupted and took....nerve-knocking reality." 

 

 

No one---absolutely no one---who wrote about this story saw how the experience of watching a film is used in "Moving Pictures" as a metaphor for the way perception operates, driven by desire and intentionality and the ego. That is, until Dr. Gary Storhoff, one of this nation's finest literary scholars and a follower of Dharma, made the story's meaning perfectly clear. In his superb critical study, Understanding Charles Johnson (University of South Carolina Press, 2004), Dr. Storhoff brilliantly says this:

 

 

"The protagonist's question about the perceived unity of his sensuous experience is answered in his full viewing of the feature film, first in the cutting room and then in the theater. The two film versions are Johnson's allegory of human apperception, employing both Western and Buddhist theories. First, Johnson creates a subtle dramatization of Immanuel Kant's theory of epistemology in Critique of Pure Reason. As viewed frame by frame in the cutting room, the protagonist's senses do not apprehend the world as a unified totality; instead, he perceives an apparently pointless procession of discrete phenomena, one unique object after another. The filmic world through the viewer appears discrete and intractable, where objects exist independently of other objects and move disparately and in randomness. When the projector is activated and the protagonist sees the film as it appears on the screen, the filmic experience is suddenly organized spatially, temporally, and causally---an actual stream of experience that does mysteriously hang together. These 'scraps of footage' do finally 'cohere'.

 

 "Yet it is clear for Johnson as a Buddhist, the perceiver's mind does much more than process reality in this Kantian sense...in viewing the film filtered through his personal biases and emotional requirements, he is not aware that he is producing illusions stimulated by the film's sensory data and mistaking these experiences for an emotional reality...In other words, the protagonist's epistemology is marked by his emotional cravings (that is, his wants, wishes, felt needs, regrets, and so forth)...The theater's screen is in fact "empty" in a Buddhist sense; as a blank screen, it denies the reality the protagonist projects onto it...For this unenlightened protagonist, knowing the movie, like knowing the world itself, is filtered through his own personal desire...His spirit-shattering sorrow results directly from his flawed epistemology. Of course, the protagonist may yet revise his theory of reality since he is in charge of his life---'producer, star, director in the longest, most fabulous show of all'." 

 

Needless to say, I feel eternally indebted to Dr. Storhoff for recognizing all I intended to express in "Moving Pictures," and for so eloquently walking a reader through that in his outstanding scholarship.

THE EDITOR CHARLES JOHNSON

During the years 1978-1998, I served as the first fiction editor for The Seattle Review. Over the course of two decades I had the pleasure of seeing that literary journal publish many writers, ranging from those who at the time were established and even famous (Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Nicholas Delbanco), "emerging" (Daniel Orozco), and new (David Guterson). As one might guess, the real joy in selecting fiction for the Review came from discovering memorable stories from new writers whose work, given the always stiff competition for publication in commercial or mass market magazines, might not have found a home. (Early in my own life, many of my stories now frequently reprinted and anthologized, appeared originally in literary journals like Indiana Review, Antaeus, Mss., Callaloo, North American Review, Mother Jones, and Choice.) Historically, it is there, in the thousands of literary magazines in America, that many destined to become our finest writers first see their work in print.

It has always seemed to me that a "well-rounded" life as a writer involves not simply producing one's own creative work but also serving whenever possible what we call the larger literary culture in this country. In other words, helping others who do work we admire to find an audience. I count myself as fortunate in having had many opportunities to serve talented writers of every race, gender and cultural background at each stage of the creative process---first, by offering rigorous literary art instruction in my beginning, intermediate, advanced and graduate classes at the University of Washington (and elsewhere) for 33 years; then providing many people with their first publication in The Seattle Review for twenty years (some of those stories later received awards); and writing endorsements (blurbs) for their earlier and later books (these fill two and a half bookshelves in my library); and, finally, by serving as a fiction judge given the privilege of honoring their work with national literary prizes, grants, and fellowships.

The spiritual principle here is that whatever we want for ourselves we should also want for others. Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," the sermon he felt captured his vision best, the second dimension for completion and fulfillment in life is learning “that there is nothing greater than to do something for others.”


Or put it this way: If you want to be happy, first try to make someone else happy.

Publishing other writers is one small way of achieving that goal.

EYES ON THE PRIZE?

Common sense tells us that writers and artists shouldn’t worry about receiving literary awards. Nevertheless, they do worry about these things, despite the self-inflicted damage this may cause to their egos in the absence of such prizes. In a recent article, “Is Mine Bigger Than Yours?,” in Buddhadharma (Winter 2010), I touch upon this subject in terms of scholar Richard Hayes’s discussion of the Sanskrit word maana, usually translated as “pride,” which in Buddhist literature is one of the impediments to our experiencing peace, awakening, and liberation. The word is derived from a verbal root that means “to measure.” So maana is the act of measuring ourselves against others, something we do 24/7 (even when we pretend that we don’t). We have been conditioned to constantly do this all our lives, from our earlier years of receiving grades that measure our academic progress to the promotions we seek on our jobs. Nothing could be more human since we are social animals and learn by imitation. If we did not do this measuring of ourselves against others (or against ourselves at different times), we would be unable to improve our performances or correct our mistakes. Literary awards, or an “A” grade are---or so we’ve been taught---public validation that we’re OK and doing good.  I certainly believe that outstanding work should always be acknowledged, but the absence of an award attached to one’s work is obviously no indication that we aren’t doing good.

In addition to serving as a judge for several literary awards (the National Book Award for fiction, Pulitzer Prize for fiction, PEN/Faulkner, and many more) I’ve greatly enjoyed creating awards for others. The Marie Claire Davis Award at Evanston Township High School (named after one of my writing teachers in 1965), is given to a senior for a portfolio of creative writing that demonstrates excellence in English, and the winner receives $500. The Charles Johnson Student Fiction Award at Southern Illinois University is a nation-wide competition for college students; the winners receive publication in Crab Orchard Review and $1,000. And I even once created (at the urging of one of his disciples) a special literary award for my friend, the late spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy for his voluminous spiritual writings---it was presented to him by my UW colleague Shawn Wong since I had to be out of town, but I bought the plaque at a trophy shop, and wrote the laudatory citation.

Something I discovered during the creating of these awards for others is that giving is just as rewarding as getting. The happiness the recipient experiences becomes my happiness, too. Furthermore, the creation of an award intended for others serves to de-mystify the allure, glamour and enchantment of awards and prizes in general for a writer.

I would advise young writers (or old ones) to enjoy literary prizes when they receive them, and not to feel bad when they don’t. Resist naama. Don't worry about external validation. Try not to compare yourself to others, because each of us is unique---a life that is unlike any that has ever been before or will be in the future. (As the Buddha supposedly once said, "You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.") Read the splendid historical overview of the major literary awards written by Salon’s Laura Miller on November 16, 2000. She points out that the Nobel Prize in Literature was not awarded to Leo Tolstoy, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka. (Their work is certainly not diminished because they were passed over for a Nobel Prize.) If one enjoys the creative process for its own sake, that really should be reward enough. An award is “after the fact,” so to speak, when the special joy one experiences in doing the work is long over.