Fenton Johnson

Fenton Johnson was in sixth grade when he decided he must leave Kentucky when he grew up. He hated the racism he saw around him in New Haven. A few years later, when he realized he was gay, the community’s homophobia confirmed his decision.

At age 17, Johnson headed for Stanford University with a scholarship from the bourbon distillery where his father worked. He couldn’t wait to put the Kentucky knobs in his rear-view mirror, but he did look back. He has been looking back ever since, in award-winning novels, memoirs, non-fiction books and essays.

Johnson writes about big themes such as love, family, faith, community, responsibility and human dignity. More often than not, his ideas are explored in the context of his family and upbringing in Nelson County, or some fictionalized version of them.

“I had been handed a feast in terms of what to write about, starting with my own background,” he said in an interview. “Borders are intrinsically interesting places. You're in Nelson County and it's very Catholic, and you cross the Rolling Fork River (into Larue County) and in an instant you're in the Bible Belt. Those two worlds rubbing up against each other was what living there was about. I understood organically that was a rich vein in which to work.”

John Fenton Johnson was born Oct. 25, 1953, the youngest of nine children in a family whose ancestors had been there since the late 1700s. His parents “loved life and were deeply and cheerfully sensual people,” he said. “My mother loved nothing more than to sing and dance, and my father loved to watch her sing and dance. Each of them loved creating beauty — each was an artist, in the wonderful way that so many people are.”

Johnson grew up Roman Catholic near the Abbey of Gethsemani. His parents formed close friendships with some of the monks, who would slip away from the monastery to have dinner with the family. After much bourbon, they might end the evening by dancing on the kitchen table. He was named for two of those monks.

Johnson’s mother was born on the Protestant side of the river, but became a devout Catholic. A well-read woman who started New Haven’s public library, she was interested in theology. “My mother loved nothing more than to get the monks around the table and have these discussions,” he said. “When the Jehovah’s Witnesses would come by, she would invite them into the house and argue with them.”

His mother occasionally drove the abbey’s most famous monk, Hall of Fame writer Thomas Merton, to Elizabethtown in their beat-up Country Squire station wagon when he needed to catch a train. “They would have these theological discussions,” Johnson said. “I was just the kid in the back seat, but that was part of my growing up.”

Some version of Johnson’s family and hometown show up in his books: the novels Crossing the River (1991), Scissors, Paper, Rock (1994) and The Man Who Loved Birds (2016); his memoir Geography of the Heart (1996); his collected essays, Everywhere Home (2017); and two non-fiction books, Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey (2003) and At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (2020).

“The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are entirely artificial; it's all fiction,” he said. “I love Nelson County; I’m happy to be from there. People from Kentucky have always been very kind and supportive of me.”

Johnson has been a voracious reader since fourth grade, when a nun let him check out Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield from the school library. Growing up in the storytelling culture of rural Kentucky, it was an easy transition from reader to writer. “My mother says that I was always scribbling,” he said.

He had a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and later earned an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop. But his first job out of college was in Washington, working for U.S. Rep. Ron Mazzoli of Louisville. Washington was then a very closeted place for a young gay man, and he soon headed back to California. “In 1977, there was only one city in the world where an openly gay person could have a professional career,” he said, “and that was San Francisco.”

The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s was traumatic for Johnson, turning him into an activist with a pen. As a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, his 1991 essay about the death of his lover Larry Rose helped change the newspaper’s aversion to covering AIDS and gay life, he said. Johnson later explored that relationship and notions of family — those we are born into and those we choose — in a poignant memoir, Geography of the Heart.

Johnson said he doesn’t consider himself a gay writer. “I'm a novelist who happens to be gay,” he said. “I've written about a wide range of subjects, but I always include gay characters or a gay angle. I write about them as human beings in the larger social milieu.”

Scissors, Paper, Rock (1994) was another landmark — the first major novel about the AIDS crisis in a rural context. It is the story of a young man with AIDS who comes home to Kentucky from San Francisco to help his dying father, then must face his own death in that era before effective anti-viral drugs. The novel is an eloquent meditation on love, family and loss. Kentucky Humanities has chosen Scissors, Paper, Rock as its 2024 Kentucky Reads book.

“Like Fenton himself, his writing is always simultaneously elegant and down-home,” said novelist Silas House, Kentucky’s current poet laureate.  “All Kentucky writers, particularly LGBTQ ones, owe Fenton a great debt for paving the way for all of us.”

Johnson has taught creative writing at many colleges and universities, including the low-residency MFA program at Spalding University in Louisville. He spent most of his career teaching at the University of Arizona. After retiring from there, he left Tucson for upstate New York. He is now working on a book about the Civil War, its causes and the mythology surrounding its legacy. Not surprisingly, his own family history is part of the story.

Johnson said he tries to give readers deeper insight into America’s clash of religious and cultural differences, as well as what it means to be human.

“I want to enable the reader to find where they reside in the reaches of the heart … and find their way to something I call Truth with a capital T,” he said. “The definition of truth is something that is universal across the human condition. We can read literature and listen to music from radically different cultures and we can find ourselves in those. It's a process, not a destination. It's a process we call life.”

Major Works
Crossing the River (1991)
Scissors, Paper, Rock (1994)
Geography of the Heart: A Memoir (1996)
Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey (2003)
The Man Who Loved Birds (2016)
Everywhere Home (2017)
At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (2020)

Major Awards
Guggenheim Foundation fellowship
Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction (Stanford University)
James Michener Fellowship in Fiction (Iowa Writers Workshop)
National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction and creative nonfiction
Kentucky Literary Award (Southern Kentucky Book Festival)
Stonewall Book Award for gay/lesbian nonfiction (American Library Association)
Lambda Literary Awards (two)