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A JCPL librarian interviews published writers about their favorite writing prompts—exercises that can help inspire, focus, and improve your creative writing. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, a novelist, essayist, or poet, you’ll find ideas and advice to motivate you to keep writing. A partnership with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
Prompt to Page, Ep. 47: Fenton Johnson
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Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Fenton Johnson.
Fenton is the author of three novels and four works of creative nonfiction, most recently, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude, and the Creative Life, a New York Times Editors Pick. He has been a contributor to National Public Radio, Harper's Magazine and the New York Times magazine, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other literary awards.
He has taught in the nation's leading creative writing programs and continues to lecture and teach nationally. In 2024, he was named to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. Welcome, Fenton, and thanks so much for [00:01:00] joining us.
Fenton: Thanks for having me in Jessamine County.
Carrie: In your book, At the Center of All Beauty, you write about what it means to be a solitary, and I was just wondering if, for those listeners who maybe haven't read it, if you could define what you mean by a solitary.
Fenton: Yes. Thank you for that question. I owe the word, my use of the word, to the great writer about spirituality and mysticism, Thomas Merton, who as you probably know, spent most of his adult life at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Nelson County some 50 miles or so to the west, and I grew up near that monastery, and it features both in my nonfiction and my fiction.
Merton uses the word solitary and I like that word because typically, of course, what we would say is single. But single is a word that has no meaning outside the context of [00:02:00] marriage. Single is, you know, we sort of use it as, oh, this is a way station until you know, you find the right person or you know, it's a word that only operates in the context of marriage, whereas Merton uses the word solitary to talk about something that I hope I make clear in the book,
all of us share and can share, even people who are in a conventionally coupled relationship. And in fact, I'll take a moment to say that I think the healthiest, conventionally--psychologists tell us this all the time. The healthiest coupled relationships are the ones where the partners make time for each other to have their own solitary lives because it's in our solitude,
and I don't want to romanticize this. I mean, solitude is frequently, boring, lonely, you know, all of those words apply [00:03:00] to this condition. And yet it is also the place that we find the greatest rewards about our own interior lives. And it is part of the paradox of reading and writing, the mystery of reading and writing, that it is going into this place which is so deeply intimate to oneself that the more successfully one reaches that place,
the greater one's capacity to touch some resonant cord in someone else's life. That's what I've found, and I think a lot of writers would agree with that. And the way that we do that is in our solitude. It is of all of the, of all of the arts, I think the one that is the most solitary and the other [00:04:00] arts,
you know, can be as solitary, but when they are, it's generally because they're doing some version of writing. And I, you know, I had a great love. He died of AIDS in Paris in 1990. I wrote a book about that, a memoir, and I thought that I would be conventionally coupled. I assumed that that would happen.
The years passed and it did not happen, and I found that I was more and more being drawn to painters, writers, composers that they're, without my having designed this, they had something in common. And what they frequently had in common is that they themselves were either not conventionally coupled people, they were solitaries, like Merton or Eudora Welty, or some of the people that I profiled, people I profile in this book, or if they were engaged, if they were married, like Paul Cézanne, [00:05:00] the artist, the painter,
they were people who spent an enormous amount of time alone, spent more time alone than in fact they spent in their marriage. So I thought that's really interesting. You go to a bookstore, there are dozens if not hundreds of books about how to get a relationship, how to get a partner, how to stay in a relationship, what to do when you get divorced from a relationship.
But there's virtually nothing for people who you, you have to go looking to find something for people who enjoy solitude. And I thought that I should write toward that. So that was the impetus of the book.
Carrie: Yeah. And you also write about how important solitude is as part of the creative life.
So I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that as well, because you are profiling all artists in some way.
Fenton: Yeah. The book goes back and forth between [00:06:00] sort of critical or philosophical investigations of these people's work based partly on reading their biographies and partly on reading their work, and memoirs of my own life and encounters with solitude.
I had to, I'm so sorry to say this, but I had a residency at Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire, and I had to say no to it because I'm in the middle of moving, as you and I had discussed a little bit before beginning this conversation, but one of the reasons that I love Macdowell so much is that, you know, they give these,
this beautiful cottage off in the woods and they feed you great meals in the evening, and in the day someone brings you lunch and has made an art out of no matter how hard I tried and the two times I've been there each time for about five weeks, I never heard this person approach the house. The [00:07:00] lunch just magically, mysteriously appears on the doorstep.
And you think, oh, how fabulous. And that's true for about three days. And then you've taken every walk there is to be taken and you've done every, you know, you've looked out the window in every way that you can and you're just there with the work. And what I reach under the best of circumstances, two of my books I have finished at Macdowell, is a state that I call transcendent boredom.
Which is that--I'm not aware of this at the time. All I'm aware of at the time is the boredom, but then I go back a week or a year, or six weeks or six years later, and I say, who wrote that? I'm not smart enough to write that. I, I don't, where did that come from? And it came from this place of
being [00:08:00] willing to just sit with the, the blank page that as a French poet said, protects itself in its whiteness, you know, and really just, I don't believe in a muse. What I believe in is that you commit yourself in that way to the process. And you do it again and again and again and again.
And then if there is such thing as a muse, she knows where to find you, you know, because you're there doing the work. So I think, you know, creating that space, and I'll tell an anecdote because I know a lot of people say, well, my life doesn't lend itself to that. I heard the great writer, Kay Boyle, who was really the equal of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she was with them in Paris at that time.
She is largely overlooked in part because she was a woman. I have no question about that, I think, but I heard her late in her life on a panel and that [00:09:00] someone asked the panel, maybe this would be a nice segue to the question of prompts, someone said to, there was Al Young, who was an African American writer on the panel.
Someone asked him. How do you write? Well, you know, what's your writing process? Well, I get up in the morning, he said, and make my coffee, and then I sit down and I do kind of jazz, what I call jazz writing for an hour or so, just kind of stream of consciousness and, and then I'll feel a rhythm and I hit that for,
with luck an hour, an hour and a half before lunch, and then I break and I make lunch, and after lunch I do answer correspondence or do errands or whatever. And then the conversation went to Kay Boyle and Kay Boyle said, well, that sounds like a really great life. But I had five children and there was always somebody, you know, I had to make lunch for somebody or I had to pick somebody up from school, or I had to meet them when they were coming home, or it was two o'clock in the morning and they had to be when the baby had to be fed.
And so [00:10:00] I wrote 15 minutes here, a half an hour there, a snatch here, a snatch there. And she said part of a large part of the reason why my fiction is non-linear is because I never had the uninterrupted stretches of time, you know, three hours, four hours or more. Not to mention six weeks at Macdowell, to write a novel.
And I think that's a great story because you see her adapting her writing to the circumstances of her life, and instead of resenting, well, she probably did, but instead of resenting all of that interruption at some level or another, she said, okay, this is what I've been given. How do I write fiction in the context of the life that I have been given?
Does that make sense?
Carrie: [00:11:00] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something that other, you know, Prompt to Page guests have kind of touched on with their own lives. Especially I would say the ones who are poets like myself, you know, we tend to have full time other jobs, you know, plus what other, you know, responsibilities you might have.
So you just have to get in there and, and do it, and it's interesting to me too because so much of the literature that personally I enjoy is fragmented and I don't know, maybe that allows more room for mystery in some ways as well.
Fenton: Well, I tell you one reason. Yeah. We can get to the prompts sort of.
Carrie: Okay.
Fenton: Creative writing. I dunno if I would call it, give it the grand, so grandiose as advice. I never give anybody advice you're on your own journey. But my job as a teacher is to listen and to read [00:12:00] carefully and to, you know, the first word of the Rule of Benedict that governs monasteries is listen. And I think the first, the teacher's first job, a good teacher's first job is listen.
To what's on the page and to the writer herself or himself. But one of the pieces, one of the things I say to students, and they never pay attention to me, [Laughter] so I'm gonna say it again:
Put section breaks in your work because the section breaks the, the most important moments, the richest moments in a life, the most profound moments are its beginning and its end. The birth and death, and a section break is a way of having a little birth and a little death happening again and again and again.
There is a, here's another thing that I say. Every piece, every successful piece of writing has to, in [00:13:00] my judgment, have movement. And I would say that to my undergraduate students, and they would say, and I would say, why is that the case? Why? Why am I saying that every successful piece, I don't make vast sweeping generalizations like that, but I'm making one here.
Every successful piece of writing has to contain in some measure, some kind of movement. And they kick that idea around a lot. And, and I say, well, I'll tell you why I say that. It's because at the end of reading something that you've written, I am a half an hour closer to my death than I was when I started it.
And that always got them. [Laughter] They were young, you know, and they hadn't thought about time in that way, you know, and it really, they always sat up and kind of, it was true. And everything else has changed in the world. You know, the, the world is about asked to explain Zen Buddhism in 10 words, Suzuki Roshi being a [00:14:00] good Zen Buddhist took two words:
everything changes. Here's another prompt. You know, I think drawing is a tremendous, it's a tremendous discipline. Even if you're not any good at it, and I'm not, my sisters are, but I am not. But drawing in particularly drawing outside on a sunny day is, that was where I learned about the reality first of all, that the sun is not rising and setting it is the earth that is turning.
And secondly, that everything changes because I would look at something, I put the pencil to the page to draw it. By the time I looked up five seconds later to take another glance at it, it would look different because the light had changed in those five seconds.
From where it
was before. And writing, in [00:15:00] my judgment, the most difficult of medium, media exactly for this reason, has to somehow capture that sense of the both and another paradox, the
onward rushing energy of time, and also as the quantum physicist and mystics tell us every moment is present to this moment. So those two qualities have to be captured in the totally abstract discipline of squiggly black lines on the page. It's the most abstract of media, and that's why I think, I think of it is the most difficult because it's also the most interactive, which is something we don't think about, but,
you know, the, the writing is dead on the page until, until someone picks it up and reads it.
Carrie: Right.
Fenton: So it has to, it has to have the other person's [00:16:00] intelligence and consciousness in order to achieve meaning.
Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's funny that you mention drawing because our last guest, Leatha Kendrick, her prompt was to draw your mother's kitchen, and then she had a, well, it was.
It was a prompt based on, it was actually Rita Dove's prompt, but a prompt that she uses a lot. So yeah, you're not the first person to talk about drawing as, as a means to seeing, I think on the podcast. Yeah.
Fenton: You find a lot of, I mean, you know, Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty. Quite accomplished, photographer,
as was Thomas Merton. , A lot of people choose a visual medium, and I think it is by way of, training the eye, you know, and, and, and trying to get a, frankly, something that is not quite so abstract as squiggly black lines on the [00:17:00] page, to, to act as a touchstone and a, a place to work from.
I think.
Carrie: Right. Yeah. Do you have another favorite prompt or prompts that you wanted to talk about today?
Fenton: The word prompt, when I was in creative writing programs and then later when I started teaching them nobody used that word. It's really something that arose, I don't know, out of, ,out of the way in the way things done, I would say around the mid 1990s or thereabouts.
You started hearing it a lot. I'll give two ideas, I guess. One of which is if you find yourself stuck in front of the blank page, which is a phenomenon that we have all experienced, it's part of the process. The goddess is waiting up there to strike me dead with lightning for saying what I'm about to say, [00:18:00] but
I don't really believe in writer's block. Fighting with the white page over a week, a month, a year, sometimes 10 years. That's what we call writing. I mean, that's just part of the process. It's terribly discouraging, but I also like to think sort of liberating to acknowledge that. But a way to break through that I've found very helpful is to take a piece of, I mean, after all, plagiarism is a concept that was invented with capitalism, with the people making money off of writing.
You know, but Beethoven quotes a passage of Bach. We just say, gee, how brilliant it is that Beethoven is doing this with Bach. Whereas if I quote a passage of Eudora Welty's, then I am plagiarizing from her. And that's not about what I'm doing. It's about the publisher wanting to make money off of that. So [00:19:00] set that idea aside.
Take a piece of writing that you really, really admire, something that really deeply touched you, and allow yourself to imitate it shamelessly, to use every nuance, every shading, especially the pacing about how the movement that, you know, the, how the energy moves through the sentences, through the paragraphs, arrives at those line breaks, section breaks.
How the plot line itself, just allow yourself to imitate it just. Change the names to the names of your family or your pets or whoever you want to put in there, but just allow yourself to do that, thinking of yourself in the same way, if you go into an art museum, there's the visual metaphor again, and you see someone sitting in front of a painting and they're trying to imitate
the brush stroke of let's say Rembrandt or [00:20:00] Caravaggio or Beauford Delaney to choose somebody, you know, more contemporary to our times. And that person isn't trying to, they they're trying to learn something by imitation, which as any child can tell you is, and psychologists can tell you it's how we learn.
And if you, if you love what it is that you ultimately end up doing, and you and I've had this happen, and you stick with it over time, you'll revise it a million times and it becomes something of your own. Or, it can just, it just loosens up the, it, it allows the mind to relax in some way and not
have this burden of making something new that our, you know, capitalism tells us is, you know, every piece has to be completely new. Well, nothing's completely new. Everything is a, borrowed from, manipulated, from, inspired by, you know, there are only [00:21:00] two stories. Somebody said a long time ago, a stranger comes to town or someone sets out on a journey.
And of course those two stories are just the mirror image of each other. So that's, you know, there's a way of breaking through that challenge, if you should, or when you should face it, because we all do. And then just as a kind of very practical prompt, I've said to students especially students in the earlier creative writing classes, I will say to them, they say, oh, I don't know what I'm, I've got 750 words do next week, and I don't know what to write about.
And I say, you know, think of the first lesson in moral instruction that you can recall in your life, and then think of the best story that you have heard someone tell in the last 24 to 48 [00:22:00] hours. Write the two of those and then sit down and then see what happens. And I intended as an exercise in juxtaposition.
Apples and oranges. You know, you put an apple next to an orange and the mind thinks without having to be told to think, the mind thinks fruit. It's in our, it is in the nature of the mind to create meaning from two objects or. Sentences or whatever that are juxtaposed set next to each other because you're performing an art.
The writer is performing an artistic gesture. They're choosing these two and setting them next to each other, and the reader immediately goes to the place of thinking. Why, you know, what, what, what is the connection between, sometimes of course, the richest results arise out of a connection that is not at [00:23:00] all immediately apparent, that is in fact, mysterious or, or even absurd.
But I like that sort of moral instruction because. As one aspect of that equation, one value in that equation because it introduces a theme of some kind by kind of definition. And then just the best story that you've heard in the past 24 to 48 hours is getting people to think about listening.
And being a, a listener and a recorder of stories. So those are two anecdotes or two approaches that I have used before in, classes.
Carrie: Yeah, those sound, those sound very useful. Certainly the, the first one is one that I have used in the classroom as well and, and in my own work, taking a poem that I love but maybe don't [00:24:00] totally understand and kind of using it line by line as a scaffolding to
to build my own poem and that, and that for me, that does do kind of what you said, of letting the mind let go so that you can generate something new.
Fenton: Yes. And you know. It works is with prose and with poetry. We think perhaps less commonly of prose because of its length, but in fact, I swear I labor as just as hard over every
sentence as a poet, labors over every line. It just takes me a lot longer.
Carrie: Sure. [Laughter]
Fenton: I will say as well that I can't speak highly enough of memorization. Memorization is absolutely the best way to get to know a piece of work. [00:25:00] And I memorized a number of poems and passages. You could do safely do this in the west.
You can't really do this in the more densely populated east, but I would tape a poem that I wanted to memorize to the dashboard. And when you're out on those big open highways in the west, you can basically just, you don't, you don't have to pay very much attention to driving, there's not much traffic. Especially, you know, I would drive not infrequently from Tucson to, Palm Springs, which is six hours of pretty empty road.
And I would tape a poem to the dashboard and by the time I got to Palm Springs, I would have it memorized. And it was really deep investigation into rhythm and pacing. 'cause you really, the handle that the mind seizes on in memorizing a poem is often it's rhythm and pacing that, [00:26:00] duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, if it's
pentameter or whatever, but whatever the, the poet's, pacing of the line is, it's a place to hold onto. And then of course just the, the creation of movement through the poem. I mean, what, where does it bring you up? Or the piece of prose? Where does it bring you up short? Where does it, what is the last word?
I mean, every, every sentence, every paragraph, every section is a beginning and an end. And memorizing it really enables you to see why the writer chose to put this word at the end of the sentence as opposed to a different word at the end of the sentence.
Carrie: Yeah. One last question that I have for you. Many guests on the podcast advise listeners to find a writing community. And [00:27:00] most of the artists that you profile in At the Center of All Beauty, even though
they are solitaries, as you point out, they're not hermits and they do have community. In my own writing life, I find that I have a tension. There's a tension between the desire for solitude and the desire for community. So my question is, how do you find the right balance between those two things? Or do you?
Fenton: Well, it's a good, you ask a good question.
I'm glad by the way that you make the distinction between being a hermit, which is, by the way, a way of being, I've known a number of hermits and that I respect. And I have some appreciation of, but I myself am not at all a hermit. The way I've managed my writing life is that the way I manage the solitude is to, like Henry James, you know, nobody had a, a more active social calendar than Henry James.
He would write in the day and then he would go out every night to do something. Many of the most [00:28:00] satisfactory times in my life have been when I've been able to have that happen. I have to say that it is a phenomenon of getting older of that community, a lot of my community, well, a lot of the gay men died of, I mean, really I'd,
I'm reminded more and more, not less and less of how many of the people that I knew in San Francisco, which is where I lived between 78 and roughly 96, how many of those people died. And, they're not present to me now in a way that they would otherwise have been. But this happens, I mean. It happened to me and the survivors of my generation in a particularly brutal way, but.
And maybe something like that will happen for the generation that lost a lot of people to COVID. I, I don't know. But, but it happens to every person as you age. My writing community had largely [00:29:00] been sustained through, in, conversations, occasional visits, and, you know, what I call epistolary love.
I, I, I loved writing letters. And I had several correspondents who I, with whom I would correspond at great length. And, I mean, literally six and seven page single spaced letters that we would exchange every, you know, six weeks or so. That is something that I really, really miss, and I think is a great loss to letters across the board is, I mean, I, I, I still do send letters, but my best correspondents have died, and so it becomes a challenge.
You're right. One needs that, I guess one does. I mean, you, you do have people like Cézanne who you know, who really retreated into solitude , later in his life, if retreat [00:30:00] is the right word. And then you have people like, you know, Erik Satie, who were, who were really, [Laughs] you know, Erik Satie living in that one room apartment with two pianos, one upside down on the other.
And, the entire apartment filled with scores of his that he had written and nothing in a, a, a narrow little space to a cot. And that was his living space when he died. Um, I don't want to go there. [Laughter]
Carrie: Right.
Fenton: But, but it's, you know, we speak of, there's a lot of, verbiage given to this phenomenon called the loneliness of old age. Loneliness is not as, loneliness is different from solitude, and loneliness is not necessarily a bad thing at all. But there does come a place where you need to have some, I need, and I, most people need, kind of [00:31:00] social interaction and being a writer, such a peculiar calling that you need to have an interaction with other people who love this thing and who, who love both doing it,
however tortured it may be sometimes, but who also love reading it, so. And I guess I can finish up by giving a blurb to, you know, my favorite institution and the most brilliant institution that this country has really promoted, even more so than the national parks, which is to say the library and your the, the ready availability of the community library. And through interlibrary loan,
the fact that these days it makes available to the writer just about if you're willing to have a little patience. Any book that's ever been published that can be found on the shelves [00:32:00] of just about any big library is just a tremendous resource. And then librarians themselves are, you know, I want a librarian to be president.
You know, I want us to have librarians as presidents, you know, whatever, you know, I won't go there, but, but, we'll, I'll end on this positive note. Thanking libraries, and just being. I couldn't do what I do without libraries. I don't, and I, and I think, I don't care what kind of writing you do, I think, that is true of, of everybody.
So, accumulate as many libraries as you can and give donations to your local library, support your local library, particularly at this challenging and difficult time. And keep writing.
Carrie: Well, thank you so much. That was a great way to end, and we certainly appreciate your love for libraries here at the Jessamine County [00:33:00] Public Library.
Fenton: Thank you.
Carrie: Thank you for listening to Prompt to page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit jesspublib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and learning at carnegiecenterlex.org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all instrumental, musical collaboration between three Lexington based university professors.
Find out more about Archipelago: Songs from Quarantine Volumes One and Two at the links on our podcast website.