Many people think of retirement as an end. A job well done. A time to rest. But 74-year-old Bob Johnson is just getting started.
Johnson loved his career in local TV news, retiring as operations manager at WSBT. Over his years at the station, Johnson and his wife, retired news anchor Cindy Ward, had a New Year’s Eve tradition.
They’d share a drink at TGI Friday’s on Grape Road and ask each other their plans for the coming year.
While he enjoyed his work at the station, especially when it allowed for creativity, Johnson says he would always vow each year to pursue more of his first love, writing short fiction. But he says he was terrible at multi-tasking.
"I got promoted and the next thing you know I'm managing 30 people and a huge budget and building new sets and the like, and once again I was just was unable to multi-task," he recalls. "I couldn't do all that and then come home at night and write, and I couldn't get up at 5 in the morning and write as some people do. I just had to devote myself to the one thing."
So the writing waited. When he retired in 2012, the words started coming much more easily.
"And I just picked up where I'd left off 30-odd years before."
It quickly became clear that Johnson wasn’t a TV news guy who wanted to try writing someday when he retired. It seemed he had been a writer who’d worked in TV.
Of course those closest to him always knew this. Right out of college he’d earned a master of fine arts from the prestigious University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Coming back to his native Middlebury in 1975 after that, he taught English at Northridge High School, then also at Goshen College, before taking a job in marketing at WSBT.
In 2014, less than two years after he retired, Johnson sold his first short story, called “Pay the Fish Lady,” to a now defunct online literary magazine. More established publications, like The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review, rejected his submissions but they gave him positive feedback. Then he started selling stories to respected literary journals like The Hudson Review, The Barcelona Review, and The Common.
Many awards later, the literary world now seems to know who Johnson is. On Feb. 11, Cornerstone Press will release on paperback his literary debut, The Continental Divide: Stories. Johnson will host a book reading and signing February 18 at 7 p.m. at Fables Books in Goshen.
The 14 stories are set in the fictional town of Mount Moriah, which sits along the St. Lawrence continental divide. Johnson says the town and its characters bear some resemblance to Middlebury, which is, in fact, situated on the St. Lawrence divide.
Themes of grace and redemption, but also darkness and violence, run through the stories. A country woman makes a Sophie’s Choice regarding her family’s survival. A small-town
marshal hunts his own son for murder. A former football hero must face his role in a brutal locker room ritual.
Johnson says he sometimes uses violence to explore deeper themes.
"I'd like to think that readers would take my stories as seriously — I mean, I hate to sound pompous, but as serious literature — not as just gratuitously violent, or violence or horror for horror's sake," he says. "I would hope that readers would see my stories for all their darkness, and sometimes the violence and the darkness is necessary for what I'm getting at."
Johnson says he would include his writing in the new literary genre called Midwest Noir.
"I like to say that fiction, it's about the moral ambiguity of surviving in a dark world," he says. "The best noir films, they're flashy and fun with all their weird lighting and that sort of thing, and the mobsters and perhaps the prostitute with the golden heart, but they explore serious themes. The best noir movies are serious movies, and they end on difficult and earned places."
Helping Johnson to host the book signing will be his longtime friend, Leonard Beechy. They taught English together for just one year at Northridge but they’ve remained close since. Beechy is also a writer but as a Biblical scholar he covers very different themes.
But Beechy says he often sees arcs of redemption and grace in some of the Midwestern darkness that Johnson captures.
"He's turning that into such a rich tapestry, a cafeteria of characters," Beechy says. "All of them are rooted in a kind of place and all of them have, in some ways, a sort of similar tone to them."
Beechy says it’s been a joy to watch his friend be so prolific.
"Just amazed and impressed and kind of inspired by how a person's creativity blossoms this late in life, how you find your voice that way."
