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  • An Interview with Charles Johnson
  • Charles Johnson (bio) and Charles H. Rowell

This interview was conducted by telephone on February 16, 1997, between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Seattle, Washington.

ROWELL

In formal education, you began as a visual artist and a journalist, and then you later studied philosophy. What set you on the road to fiction writing? Do you recall how and when this major shift occurred? In an essay, you wrote, “What I discovered early on is that one art form will inevitably lead to another.” And later you wrote in that same essay, “It became very important for me to write when I realized the limitations of other mediums.”

JOHNSON

When I was young, and I do mean very young, under the age of ten, my great passion was for drawing. That was what I got all the praise for from my teachers when I was in elementary school. And I was very committed to it. I drew all the time as a child. It was a great source of joy and pleasure for me, and I decided to become a cartoonist somewhere in the early 1960s and did a correspondence course with a New York artist named Lawrence Lariar—a two year course. My dad paid for it after we had a long discussion first, because he didn’t know any black people who could make any money in the arts, and I had to convince him that this wasn’t so. But that was really what I was most passionately directed toward, drawing. So I began publishing in 1965—I still have the first dollar that I made hanging on my wall here in my study. I sold six drawings, illustrations to a magic company in Chicago that I heard about from a friend of mine who was also a cartoonist at Evanston Township High School. But by coincidence that same year my first three stories were published in my high school literary supplement. That came about because I took a creative writing course. A friend of mine wanted to take it, and he dragged me along. And we would sit there and talk. It was taught by a woman named Marie Claire Davis. She was an English professor at ETHS, and her claim to fame at the time was she’d published in the Saturday Evening Post. Well, Marie liked my stories, and so without telling me she published them. Those stories have been reprinted in First Words, Earliest Writings from Favorite Contemporary Authors, an anthology edited by Paul Mandelbaum. There are a lot of people in there. They have my first three stories and a comic strip that I did in high school (which I won an award for in 1966 from a newspaper organization that held a national competition for high school cartoonists; they also gave me an award for a second-panel cartoon I did for the ETHS paper); they have work by Joyce Carol Oates, Gloria Naylor, and Rita Dove. Mandelbaum also released a video cassette on [End Page 531] which actors read our material from the book. By the way, a few years ago I returned to my high school, asked them to establish an award in my old writing teacher’s name (which I’d sponsor), and they set up “The Marie Claire Davis Award for Creative Writing” 30 years after she left the school. Marie has traveled to the award ceremony two years in a row from Florida, where she is retired and lives with her husband; after each ceremony, she calls me, gives me wonderful descriptions of the event, and how the winner and runner-up looked and reacted. I tell you, it’s a great joy to be in touch this way with Marie Claire so many decades after I took her course in 1965 (She had us read, I remember, Joyce Cary’s lovely essays on art).

So that was my beginning: I was passionately devoted to working as a commercial artist. And I was also writing, but mainly for fun and because it was easy for me. I was planning to go to art school. I showed my material to a recruiter, and I was...

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