When I was offered the chance to introduce Fenton Johnson
tonight, I was quite flattered.
But I soon found myself with a problem.
An introduction is a story of a kind,
and the more I thought about this and weighed the evidence,
the clearer it was to me that it's actually
Fenton himself who is the 100% consummate storyteller
around here.
Fenton is made of stories.
He tells stories, and craves stories,
and finds stories as surely as we sit here today
under a waning April moon.
His own history is such a tale, the facts
beguiling but his capacity to weave them together
even more so.
Top this for evocative literary beginnings.
I was born John Fenton Johnson in Kentucky Hill Country,
ninth of nine children of a Catholic father
and a Protestant mother who, searching for romance,
converted to Catholicism.
I grew up a cruise mile from the Abbey of Gethsemani,
some of whose monks crept from the monastery enclosure
to drink beer and smoke cigarettes
and eat my mother's cooking and dance with her
by the light of the moon.
I am named after two of those monks, the best
cook and the best dancer.
For as far back as anyone cares to remember,
my father's family made whiskey and told stories.
Not too shabby for a writer's origin story.
Can you top it?
Not me.
I can and will tell you that this son of the South and son
of storytellers has, in the decades
since this provocative start, forged his reputation
by writing works of profound and lasting value,
plunging headlong into the metaphorical depths hinted
at in these early experiences, including
the gravitational pull of family and community
and in beautiful and disparate ways,
the interconnection between the spirit and body.
We meet tonight on an auspicious occasion, a triumphant turn
in any writer's career.
Fenton's excellent new novel, The Man Who Loved Birds,
has just been published by the University of Kentucky Press.
Underscoring the significance of this work
as well as the achievements of a lifetime,
The Man Who Loved Birds was released simultaneously
with reissues of Fenton's two previous novels, Crossing
The River, his first, published in 1989
and out of print for many years called
"as rich and southern as fried chicken gravy"
by the Chicago Tribune.
And Scissors, Paper, Rock.
First published in 1993, a classic of Southern and LGBT
literature, winner of the Lambda Literary Award
and the Bay Area Book Review's award for best fiction.
Both of these books include forewords
by leading American writers, homages to the works
and acknowledgment of their enduring value.
Fenton is also the author of Geography
of the Heart, a memoir which received the American Library
Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best gay nonfiction.
And Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey
Among Christian and Buddhist Monks, this one an inquiry
into what it means to be a skeptic and to keep faith.
Keeping Faith also received a Lambda Literary Award, as well
as a Kentucky Literary Award for creative nonfiction
and outstanding literary achievement.
A collection of new and selected non-fiction,
Everywhere Home, an autobiography in essays,
was selected by Sarabande Books in its prestigious Linda
Bruckheimer Kentucky Literature Series
and will come out next year.
Finally, in this banner season, Norton
will publish Going it Alone, the dignity and challenge
of solitude, a book-length meditation on solitaries
and solitude, in 2018.
This project emerged from a cover essay
Fenton wrote on the same subject for Harper's that
came out last year.
Fenton's essays and literary journalism
on issues involving social justice, faith
and spirituality, environmentalism,
and human rights have appeared in a wide range of newspapers
and magazines, including, besides Harper's, the New York
Times and the Los Angeles Times.
He's received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others,
and he's also had an active career writing narration
for independent media, including radio, documentaries,
and personal films.
Phew.
But finally, Fenton is my beloved colleague
here at the University of Arizona.
We've taught alongside each other now for over 15 years.
It is therefore my pleasure and honor to introduce him today
and to share with you my admiration for a writer who
thinks, feels, and imagines powerful stories
into this world.
[APPLAUSE]