An artist in full

From fiction to cartooning, Charles Johnson excels in a range of creative endeavors

By John Ziebell

It would be hard to name a single contemporary author who embodies the full spectrum of American letters better than Charles Johnson. Currently the Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington, Johnson has garnered praise as a literary critic, philosopher and lecturer. A former professional artist, he has published more than 1,000 cartoons and illustrations. He is the also author of more than 20 screenplays and has won both the Prix Jeunesse and Writer's Guild awards.

Johnson's prose has been published to critical acclaim in all genres-- short stories, essays, novels, reviews and editorials--and translated into eight languages. His novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award in 1990; in 1998 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Additionally, Johnson was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, received a Washington Governor's Award, won an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002, and was most recently elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Charles Richard Johnson was born in Evanston, Ill., and in the early years of a wide-ranging career, aspired only to be a commercial illustrator.

"I just had a burning desire to draw," Johnson says. "I began working as an illustrator, a cartoonist, when I was 17. The first illustrations I sold were to a magic company. I wasn't paid much, but I still have one of the dollars I earned from that job."

Johnson credits much of his early success to the help and interest of Lawrence Larier, who was then the cartoon editor for Parade magazine and the author of more than 100 books. Johnson put in seven years as a working artist and published more than 1,000 drawings and two collections of his cartoons. He also created, produced and directed the how-to-draw show "Charlie's Pad" for a then-fledgling Public Broadcasting Network.

"I still draw, and still take assignments," Johnson says. "Just last year, the Seattle paper ran a series of my drawings and an essay on Martin Luther King."

For Johnson, a shift to writing fiction provided a different sort of access than he'd gained through publishing cartoons. Johnson was a graduate student in philosophy at Southern Illinois University when he met the novelist and critic John Gardner, also a cartoonist, who had a significant impact on his development as a writer.

"Writing came to me pretty easily," Johnson says. "Reading, of course, always fueled my imagination, no matter what I was doing. I kept a journal since I was 12, and even when I was working as an artist I used to write for fun--I'd do things like co-write a play over the weekend."

It was around that time that Johnson discovered the first subject that he felt "needed to be written as a novel." His dedication to craft was so complete that he wrote six unpublished "apprentice" novels in the early 1970s. Influenced by Gardner's theories of moral fiction and his own explorations of Buddhism, Johnson published his first work, Faith and the Good Thing, in 1974 while completing a Ph.D. in phenomenology and aesthetics at SUNY Stonybrook.

Johnson began writing short stories and essays in addition to novels, and his editorial work started to appear in a host of publications. He also continued to write and collaborate on screenplays. While Johnson doesn't find any writing path inherently more fulfilling than others, he does admit that they offer different challenges.

"Screenplays really are a group effort, and when everything clicks--the writer, the director, the actors, all of it--the work can be greater than the sum of its parts. And when you see people bring real emotion to your work, it's profoundly rewarding. For the fiction writer, on the other hand, there's no division of labor. You have to assume all those roles--the writer has to be everyone. And you have to give each character a piece of your own emotional life if you want them to really come alive on the page.

"As far as writing goes," Johnson adds, "the only thing I haven't really tried is poetry. I wrote some bad poems when I was an undergraduate, but prose and poetry demand completely different styles. A fiction writer feels the structure of a narrative, but a poet cognitively thinks a different way. Sometime I'd like to give poetry a serious try."

Issues of race are central to most of Johnson's writing, and critics hail him as a significant contemporary writer whose unique views on race and oppression combine insights gleaned from his many areas of interest. Johnson defines his theory of black literature as "a fiction of increasing artistic and intellectual growth, one that enables us as a people--as a culture--to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration."

"You know, we can figure out exactly when people started talking about race as being categorical, when we started trying to apply scientific methods to categorize people," Johnson says. "But there is no biological basis for it. The idea reveals nothing scientifically. As a matter of fact, geneticists find more differences between individuals within a race than between the so-called races. Race is a social construct that needs to be deconstructed."

Another thing that critics find unique in Johnson's creative work is an ability to blend his study of Eastern traditions with academic training in Western philosophical thought. "I became interested in Buddhism because my mother was in a number of book clubs, and one time she got a book on yoga. I read it, and tried the chapter on meditation. I didn't know what I was doing, but that may have been the most profound half-hour of my life. It just made sense to me, and I've been following the Dharma since I was about 19."

Though a strong advocate of Buddhism, Johnson doesn't believe that processes of thought and belief, or even specific inspiration, need to be compartmentalized.

"Westerners have some apprehensions, but if you really understand the principles of Buddhism, you see spiritual brothers in traditional Western writers like Schopenhauer and Emerson. The Dharma isn't about East or West. It's about living life fully, every moment."