In a Kentucky family whose traditions
included telling their own stories
and making their own whiskey.
He's the author of two novels, Crossing the River
and Scissors, Paper, Rock, which I see him carrying around
so maybe he'll read from.
In 1996, he published Geography of the Heart, a memoir,
which is his journal of the plague of HIV.
The book is a compassionate and gorgeous account
of the death of Fenton's lover Larry Rose,
a high school English teacher and the son
of Holocaust survivors himself.
The Library Journal called the book,
a testament to how humans could and should treat each other.
And it's particularly fitting that Fenton
should be reading tonight in the middle of the Pride Alliance's
Awareness Week--
a commemoration made all the more urgent by recent events
as you know.
There is, in fact, a protest march
that I'm to announce on Sunday at 2:00 PM,
beginning at the park at 4th Avenue,
between first and second.
For more information, you can call 795-3305,
and I urge you to go.
That said-- oh, here's a little bit more.
Fenton has received various high honors for his work--
a Stegner fellowship from Stanford University,
a Michener fellowship in fiction from the Iowa Writers'
Workshop.
His work appears regularly in Harper's Magazine
and occasionally, in The New York Times magazine,
also once in a while, on National Public Radio.
At the moment, he's working on a non-fiction book examining
the nature and role of faith in secular culture,
based on his time among monks, both Christian and Buddhist.
The book is called Faith Beyond Belief, A Skeptic's Journey
and his fourth coming from Houghton Mifflin.
Fenton Johnson is, as most of you
know, brand new on the creative writing faculty here
at the university.
That said, I think I should explain to you how completely
strange it is for me to be here introducing
Fenton Johnson to you tonight.
It's the oddest of circumstances really.
I first heard Fenton read in the mid-'80s at Stanford,
where the two of us were Stegners.
His work, at the time, completely knocked me out
with his amazing eye for detail and his sort
of gorgeous and gracious Southern narrative style.
I learned tonight that Fenton, in high school,
won the state championship at boys extemporaneous speaking,
and I said, why am I not surprised, Fenton?
In the years that followed that, we became good friends
in San Francisco, writing books together
at almost exactly the same pace.
And the thing that no one tells you about the writer's life
is that you are alone for a lot of it,
and in that deep isolation, it was a great thing
to have a colleague, especially colleague like Fenton,
though keeping up with him was a challenge sometimes.
We worked in studios a mile apart,
across the Valley that's called the Mission District--
Fenton up on the slope of Bernal Heights
and I on that first step of Twin Peaks,
if you know San Francisco.
And from my studio, which was on the roof there, I
could look across to Fenton's studio,
and I could feel him working over there often--
his energy and industry just emanating
from the other side of the Valley,
and many days, I cursed him and worked harder for it.
Later, we decided to convene our friends for a weekly gathering
in a cafe called Babbar, and these sometimes rowdy sessions
continued for three or four years, amazingly enough--
and this is in the mid-'90s.
Turning to our amazement into, what was considered,
a scene mentioned in newspapers, and people would thank us
in their dedication to their books-- people we never
heard of, and then, because it was a scene, had to end,
of course-- dissolved instantly as soon as it was recognized.
And we drifted our ways--
Fenton went off to New York to teach at Columbia and Sarah
Lawrence, and I stayed in San Francisco.
And our communication grew a little less frequent,
but then-- without our ever mentioning it to each other
really--
the University of Arizona summoned us both.
And we converged again here in Tucson.
We arrived here on exactly the same day, just last month,
and it was Thursday, the 6th of January and probably,
about the same time of the day, which is late at night--
Fenton driving westward into town from Kentucky,
and me driving eastward into Tucson from San Francisco.
So it's more than a touch dreamlike
to stand up here introducing Fenton to you,
considering that last month, he was the sole person I knew
in this town, besides the people-- the wonderful people
I'd met in the process of my interviews.
The two of us, the same, but these other--
outer circumstances completely transformed.
So I say to you, Fenton, hey, look.
It's us in our new lives in Arizona.
So it feels like fate to have Fenton here
and feels like proof that life will hold up,
will hold its shape just when you think it had none.
And so it's quite a sweet thing for me
to be able to say to you, please welcome
a wonderful writer and a good friend, Fenton Johnson.
[APPLAUSE]