Fenton Johnson to Release Three Books

By: Mar. 17, 2016
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On September 9, 1971, two weeks before Fenton Johnson left his home in Nelson County, Kentucky, for college, the state police kidnapped and murdered a local renegade and pot grower from neighboring Marion County whom they had been unable to convict. No autopsy was performed. About the same time, his small hometown acquired its first doctor in years-a Muslim woman from Pakistan. Though Johnson was only seventeen, both events left an indelible impression. The murder of the marijuana grower fed questions about conflict between the free spirit and the constraints of the law-whether imposed by state or church-and the hiring of the doctor led him to wonder what it would mean to be a Muslim woman practicing medicine in the insular Roman Catholic Knobs of Central Kentucky.

Now, forty-five years later, Johnson combines these two incidents with his fascination with monastic life as the inspiration for his new novel, The Man Who Loved Birds. In it, Brother Flavian, a Trappist monk curious to explore the world of experience-including his own sexuality-beyond the monastery's walls; Dr. Meena Chatterjee, a Bengali-born physician who immigrates from India to establish a rural practice near the monastery; and Johnny Faye, a charismatic, pot-growing Vietnam veteran living just outside of the law, form an unconventional love triangle. Johnny, who lives to tell a good story, teaches Flavian and Meena how to love, radically transforming all they thought they believed about desire and duty, action and contemplation, reason and faith.

Johnny makes a game of taunting the police until he comes up against an ambitious district attorney. Their struggle leads to an end both inevitable and poignant, as Flavian and Meena each must make a life-or-death choice. Their choices force the reader to confront the relationship between fate and destiny-what chooses us and what we choose. As an American man, Brother Flavian believes in our capacity to direct and control our lives; as a Bengali woman, Meena understands choice as an illusion. From their evolving relationships to their ultimate fate, Johnson use this trio of unforgettable characters to explore the redemptive power of love in a society whose indifference and ignorance permit a moral inversion in which what should be good is evil and what should be evil is redemptively good.

Johnson spent two decades researching his latest novel. In 1989, he wrote his first New York Times Magazine feature on the marijuana growers of central Kentucky, and the interviews he conducted and the characters he encountered fed his imagination. He also traveled to Calcutta, India, visiting the Calcutta Medical College, where Meena would have pursued studies. For the character of Brother Flavian, Johnson drew inspiration from the Abbey of Gethsemani near his hometown, as well the time he spent living in contemplative communities while writing Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks.

The Man Who Loved Birds engages social issues, from immigration policy and draconian drug laws to police violence and social mobility, even as it expands on eternal themes that have been present in Johnson's fiction from the first: What is the nature of family? What is the relationship between the families we are given by fate and those we choose? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to have and to keep faith? Funny and sexy, poignant and agonizing, The Man Who Loves Birds weaves together a tapestry of characters with different backgrounds and socio-political views to create a quintessentially American story.

Two Novels Reissued to Coincide with Author's Newest

Lexington, KY-In 1993, Kentucky writer Fenton Johnson published his second novel, Scissors, Paper, Rock, to broad acclaim. It followed his 1989 debut novel, Crossing the River. In the years since these two books were published he turned his attention to non-fiction, publishing Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks andGeography of the Heart: A Memoir. Now, after more than twenty years, Johnson has returned to his fiction roots with a new novel, The Man Who Loved Birds, and to coincide with the release of his new novel, Johnson's previous ones have been reissued in paperback.

In Johnson's debut novel, Crossing the River, Martha Bragg Pickett carries her Confederate heritage like a flag. She is as stubborn as her red hair and hungry for life. She crosses the river to go on a date, leaving the safe, abstaining, Baptist, southern side and venturing over to the dangerous, rowdy, Catholic northern side. And when that proves less than thrilling, she marches her young self into the (men only) Miracle Inn, which gets a rise out of the owner Bernie Miracle. But even Martha is shocked to find herself living on the wrong side of the river twenty years later, with a grown son, a tired marriage to Bernie, a handsome Yankee contractor newly arrived in town, and a well-remembered itch for a life that hadn't been scratched since she made her first big, brave mistake.

Through the intricately interwoven stories of Raphael Hardin and his parents and siblings, Scissors, Paper, Rock contrasts the families we inherit-our blood ties-with the families we choose, our partners in love and our friends. For the first time since he left his birthplace in Kentucky for San Francisco, Hardin has returned home alone. Before, he had always brought men with him on his visits, lovers with whom his mother had been "civil, even flirtatious," while his father retreated into his sacred woodshop. Now his mother has died and, at age thirty-six, Raphael has come back to see his dying father, who knows and disapproves of Raphael's boyfriends, but is unaware that his youngest child may be ill as well. Raphael's halting, often painful, attempt to reconcile with his father forms the centerpiece of the novel. At times funny, at times heartbreakingly poignant, Scissors, Paper, Rockexplores with wisdom and humor the many kinds of family, the infinite varieties of love.

Taken together, these three novels show the development of Fenton Johnson as a novelist over the course of course of nearly three decades. According to Johnson, The Man Who Loved Birds merges the themes present in both his previous novels. "The contemporary concerns of Scissors, Paper, Rock (drug and immigration policy, police violence)," he states, "integrate with the more timeless concerns of Crossing the River (the eternal conflict of love and the law)." With the rerelease of these two paperbacks, Johnson's oeuvre can now be enjoyed in its entirety.

Fenton Johnson, the author of award-winning fiction and literary nonfiction, is associate professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and teaches in the MFA program atSpalding University in Louisville.



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