“I never felt the pull that everyone else had,” Johnston said by phone from New York City, his latest stop on a whirlwind national tour for “Remember Me Like This,” a deeply human novel that follows a broken, battered family dealing with the return of a son four years after his kidnapping in a fictional Corpus Christi suburb.
The beach may get short shrift, but the Sparkling City by the Sea glistens in Johnston's taut prose.
“The longer I'm away from South Texas in general and Corpus Christi specifically, the more clearly I see potential for stories that can only happen there,” said Johnston, who was born and raised in the city but now directs the creative writing program at Harvard University.
Stand on Ocean Drive and look at the water and tourists, he said. Pivot to the south and you've got soldiers and sailors. Pivot again and see farmers. One last turn and you see a downtown trying desperately to reinvent itself.
But most of all it's the weather. The distinct, overpowering heat that pulls you down. The threat of a distant storm that ever looms.
“I wanted the weather to in some way mirror what the family was going through,” Johnston said. “They can't escape everything that has happened to the family in the same way people in Corpus Christi can't escape the heat.”
The novel drills into the fractures the kidnapping has created in the family and how they have learned to cope. The mother volunteers at night to keep watch on an injured dolphin. The father turns to a lover for distraction. The younger son masters the skateboard that his brother left behind (and that Johnston in a previous incarnation rode in a brief professional skateboarding career). When the missing boy returns, they must cobble together a changed life in the aftermath of their personal storm.
“You never know when one of these storms is going to hit you,” Johnston said of the novel's greater metaphor. “When it does, you can tell a lot about a person by how they handle the storm. Do they put up plywood on the windows or do they hit the road?”
Johnston was attending Del Mar College 20 years ago when English teacher Mike Anzaldua dropped on his student's desk a ticket to see author Robert Stone read in the Corpus Christi Literary Reading Series.
“That changed my life,” Johnston said. “I left knowing this is what I want to do — I want to tell stories. That's what I'm still trying to do.”
He grew up in a household where reading books was the norm, but had no notion that he could write them. In May, Johnston returned to Corpus Christi to read in that same author series.
After degrees from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Miami University, Johnston found himself at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop where he completed stories that would make it into his 2004 debut collection “Corpus Christi.”
“Remember Me Like This” can trace its seeds to Johnston's volunteer work decades ago in Corpus Christi with an injured dolphin, which left him with a mystery. He was told the night shift with the dolphin was the hardest to fill, yet the shift was always taken. Then someone brought in a beach ball for the dolphin. Over the years he pondered who would so strongly desire to work the night shift. Then it came to him: A mother who had lost her child. The ball belonged to that child.
“The beach ball was full of her son's breath,” Johnston said. “She brought it in to save the dolphin since she hadn't saved her son.”
Six years of writing, frustration, breaks to pen short stories, more writing and rewriting later he had a novel.
“Many people say the book is about being lost; I think it's about being found,” Johnston said. “We all want to believe the lost will find their way home.”
While Johnston revels in the creation process, he sees writing as a vocation.
“I find writing incredibly difficult. What makes me come back is the pleasure of the sentence,” he said. “I don't romanticize being a writer at all. I think of writing as labor. I don't believe in muse or inspiration. I believe in going to work. It's the same as if I worked at the Naval Air Station. I clock in and clock out when the work is done.”
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