The Threads that Connect Us: An Interview with Charles Johnson

In the spring of 2009, Charles R. Johnson, holder of the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professorship for Excellence in English and former director of Creative Writing at the University of Washington, taught his last course as a full professor of English. His retirement is the appropriate moment for a retrospective look at the life and career of one of the most prominent black writers of our time. Johnson's prolific and influential publication history includes four novels, Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage (1990), and Dreamer (1998); three collections of stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986), Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001), and Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories (2005); and works of philosophy and criticism such as Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988) and Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2003). As a cartoonist and journalist in the early 1970s, Johnson published over 1,000 drawings in national publications. A husband and a father, Johnson is also a screenwriter, an avid essayist, and an international lecturer.

In 1984, Johnson guest edited an edition of Callaloo focused on the illumination of new black writing. Since that time, his work has received numerous awards for contributing to that effort. He has received an international Prix Jeunesse Award and a Writers Guild Award for his PBS¹ drama "Booker" (Wonderworks, 1985), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986), two Washington State Governor's Awards for Literature, the 1990 National Book Award (fiction) for Middle Passage (Johnson was the second African American male to win this award after Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man in 1953), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1998), and the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2002), as well as several other awards and degrees.

More recent works by Johnson maintain his early commitment to developing an American understanding of inter-connectedness. With the election of the United States' first black president, Johnson's article "The Meaning of Barack Obama" (Shambhala Sun, 2008) provides a timely examination of the significance and implications of Obama's cosmopolite identity and potential as a leader. In another piece, titled "The Cultural Challenge of Barack Obama" (Life, 2008), Johnson explores Obama's ability to transcend "the racially provincial and parochial" and declares that this moment in American history "is not so much revolutionary as it is evolutionary" (175). In his article "The King We Need: Teachings for a Nation in Search of Itself" (Shambhala Sun, 2005), Johnson reminds us how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "understood that our lives are already tissued, ontologically, with the presence of others in a we-relation" (49). This fundamental recognition of solidarity, coupled with King's advocacy for the practice of agape—a love that recognizes everything as process—creates an integration and interdependence that Johnson sees as necessary for positive social change. The provocative "The End of the Black American Narrative" (The American Scholar, 2008) further interrogates and unsettles racialized notions of American literature and identity that are based on what Johnson sees as dated narratives, arguing instead for new, individual narratives that are humbly self-aware of identity's tentative nature. In a piece titled "Northwest Passage" (Smithsonian, 2008), Johnson locates Seattle as an exemplary cosmopolitan site of cultural exchange, "peopled with every sort of American [imaginable.]" Johnson's work continually pushes against the limits and boundaries of our understanding of identity, asking us to rethink logics we have come to take as given.

Davis:

I guess my first question will be the most obvious one: how did it feel to make the decision to retire from the University of Washington?

Johnson:

This is my thirty-third year of teaching at the University of Washington. I started here as a twenty-eight-year old assistant professor in 1976, and I feel these last three decades at UW have been rewarding. But I've also been thinking about retirement and becoming a professor emeritus for several years now, devoting all my time to creative work and study.

Davis:

It's interesting to hear...