Denis Johnson died on Wednesday, at the age of sixty-seven. A few weeks ago, not knowing that he was fighting cancer, I asked him if he’d be willing to contribute to a series of short pieces about jobs for this year’s Fiction Issue. “Wonderful to hear from you,” he wrote back. “But come now, don’t you know that in certain circles we don’t even utter ‘the J-word’? My second wife came home one day and said, ‘When are you gonna get a job?’ and it came over me like a revelation, and I said NEVER. And she left. But she came back. (Later left again.)—That’s my whole contribution to the J subject.”
It was true and not true: writing was a job, was, for him, a way of making a living. (He told me, in a conversation at The New Yorker Festival in 2014, that he had signed on to write his last novel, “The Laughing Monsters,” more or less so that he could buy a piece of land that was adjacent to his own in Idaho.) But, when I asked if it felt like work to him, he said, “No, no! If it was work, I wouldn’t do it. I’m really just lazy. If I wasn’t getting paid for it, I’d still do it, and, you know, I’d be really broke.” At the same time, he did the work, whether it was delving into his own colorful and sometimes troubled past for stories or travelling the world in search of setting, narrative, and inspiration. He was also very good at knowing when to stop moving and allow the work to gestate. Denis was a master of the retreat. One newspaper article referred to him as a “gregarious recluse”—a title he found apt. While I was working on a story of his a few years ago, whenever I tried to call him in Idaho, I’d be told, “He’s out on the lake.” That lake—where, at one point, he had a shed where he went to write—provided a metaphor for how he thought about his sentences, which he polished, sometimes for years, until he felt he had got them right. “There’s a surface tension to the words,” he told me. “It is an illusion, and you can poke at it once, and then after that you’re just poking the ripples.” Here’s hoping that his words will go on rippling in his absence.
Assembled here are the stories and poems and nonfiction that he published in The New Yorker, as well as three episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast in which his work was read and discussed by other writers.
“The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” a short story from the March 3, 2014, issue.
“1966,” an excerpt from “Tree of Smoke” published in the June 11, 2007, issue.
“Homeless and High,” a personal essay from the April 22, 2002, issue.
“Emergency,” a short story from the September 16, 1991, issue.
“Dirty Wedding,” a short story from the November 5, 1990, issue.
“Work,” a short story from the November 14, 1988, issue.
“Two Men,” a short story from the September 19, 1988, issue.
“The Skewbald Horse,” a poem from the January 23, 1984, issue.
“The Monk's Insomnia,” a poem from the October 18, 1982, issue.
Donald Antrim reads “Work,” on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast.
Salvatore Scibona reads “Two Men,” on the Fiction Podcast.
Tobias Wolff reads “Emergency,” on the Fiction Podcast.
A Q. & A. with Johnson, from 2014.
