Bob Johnson on Writing the Midwest

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Bob Johnson on his new short story collection, The Continental Divide.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I feel like your whole collection turns the general idea of what the Midwest is. I think a lot of people think of the Midwest as apple pie and corn and good family values and all your stories are really kind of the underbelly of that. It’s really people struggling. It’s, financial problems and drugs and just dark people. And I’m wondering if you were partially interested in that because of your career covering news, because news tends to bleed.

Bob Johnson: Well, that’s really interesting. I have to say that, no. I have to believe that all of my life’s experiences somehow or other informed my writing. So, I’m not going to say altogether, no, but when I was a little boy, one of the very first stories I wrote in the seventh grade and a teacher that sort of saw something in me is I wrote about a character who wakes up in a basement of a saloon, and he discovers that he has a knife in his back, and he stumbles his way upstairs, and he demands a beer of the bartender, and the bartender ignores him, and my character rants and raves because he can’t stand being ignored. And he glimpses himself in the mirror and sees that he’s a corpse and he’s a rotting corpse. I mean, I was 12, you know, forgive me. But anyway, for some reason or other, I’ve been pulled in that direction all my life, that that sort of dark tone. And someone asked me, Why do you write these stories? And I said, it’s what I’m it’s what I’m called upon to write. I mean, years ago, when I was first starting to write again after retirement, my friend Bob Jacobs, the Hollywood writer, said that sometimes when he read one of my stories, he’d get to a place where maybe a suggestion of coming violence is made, and he’d always go, Uh oh, here comes Bob again, doing what Bob does. And I’d like to think that my stories since then have matured, perhaps, so that coming violence, as you say, that coming grotesqueness turns out to be misdirection. So, when Bob Jacob says, Uh oh, over that paragraph, he might be wrong. So, I’d like to think that there’s some kind of maturation, or, you know, evolution, in my style. But as far as the Midwest goes, you may know, Donald Ray Pollock’s collection, Knockemstiff. Knockemstiff is about a literal town in Ohio, and that was his first big hit, that story collection, and the stories are very dark. And there’s a writer in southern Indiana named Frank Bill, and his first collection, was called Crimes in Southern Indiana. So, it’s not like the dark underbelly of the Midwest hasn’t been visited before. And in fact, I think there’s almost kind of a return, a resurgence in interest in Midwest Noir. People write about the East Coast, they write about the West Coast, they write about the South. Well, this the Midwest’s turn, and you know what I’ll say about apple pie and church goers and white picket fences? Well, it’s no surprise is it that evil and good walk hand in hand wherever people come together.

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Bob Johnson is an award-winning short story writer and graduate of the lowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published by The Common, Philadelphia Stories, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Barcelona Review, and elsewhere. His story “The Continental Divide” was named Short Story of the Year in The Hudson Review. He lives in South Bend, Indiana. His collection is called The Continental Divide.