Denis Johnson

Uh, my parents are both doctors, and so I kinda thought I would, like, be pre-med in college and then pursue that path.

Um, but then, um, I had a series of really inspiring professors, and Cornell was a place where we had a lot of really wonderful visiting writers too, and so the fiction writer Denis Johnson came to give a reading at school, and I stayed after the reading to ask him a couple of questions and talk to him as I, you know, my heart was just in my throat, and I just couldn't put the words together, but he understood that I, you know, I really wanted to know what the trajectory was.

How did a person living in our contemporary world follow a path from obsession with literature, a love of reading, a long practice of writing to a life as a writer? And so he was the one who suggested that I apply to Iowa, um, to the Iowa Writers Workshop.

And I did apply there in addition to a few other programs, and, uh, I just had a marvelous experience both at Iowa and then a few years later at Stanford in the Stegner Fellowship Program.

[laughs]

The last, um, film I watched on Netflix was, just to turn the conversation back in a literary direction, the Train Dreams, which is a novella by Denis Johnson, the American writer Denis Johnson, and that was actually gorgeous.

It made a really lovely film even though generally there's y- y- it's disappointing.

And it's about this logger who, uh, this kind of railroad worker who, um, tries to build a home on the frontier.

He, he looks like he's dragging around a bloody stump on the field.

Like, uh, what's that Dennis Johnson book they turned into a movie? Train Dreams? Like that.

That's what...

That's how he's...

Shout out Dennis Johnson, the GOAT.

Uh, Dostoevsky of our time.

Um, it, dude, w- like, Roman Wilson needs more snaps.

It's hard for me to talk about her films and say something really intelligent because they're just so complicated and interesting as well.

But I really like, even like her recent films, Stars at Noon, which was an adaptation of Dennis Johnson.

It had Margaret Qualley in it.

Very interesting.

Oh, okay

... gone through a bunch of the other Denis Johnson.

I've read it three or four times since then.

Like I think this was probably my fourth time.

Yeah

... for whatever reason.

Um, but Jesus' Son was the one that really tied together all of Denis Johnson to me because it, it has that kind of like really grimy, like criminal, like bad guys [laughs] you know? Like, those are like very Denis Johnson-type characters.

But then there's just so many like really beautiful, romantic ways that he expresses something.

If they're gonna give their stamp of approval and put out my book, I want to give them a, uh, an object that's very easy to sell.

But within this book about a hit man in Paris doing one last job, I've hidden so much lyricism, so much, like, prose, like all the Dennis Johnson, Robert Stone stuff, Eugene Martin.

Like when you read it and, like, you forget that you're reading a pretty book because there's so many heads exploding and that kind of thing.

Like, I wanna make shit that looks like cotton candy, and people buy it thinking it's a bag of Fritos, but they eat it and, like, they get every vitamin and nutrient they need out of it accidentally.

Like I, I loved Saunders even though his writing is more polished.

But like Dennis Johnson is a, you know, he gets kind of touted as like the, the bad boy book of Jesus' son in MFA programs.

But it's actually just like a really sp- uh, speaking of emotions, you know?

Yes, great writer.

You know, it's, we're 25 years since 9/11, and I've been thinking about that a lot.

I, um, always to bring things back to The New Yorker, this response written by the novelist Dennis Johnson has been circulating.

Something, 'cause The New Yorker after 9/11 asked a number of writers, thinkers to reflect-

Mm-hmm