Walking Down the Drive

| Melinda Johnson

Once upon a time, when I was little, I went outdoors on a summer afternoon. I walked down the long driveway, from the backdoor of our yellow house, past the garden and the swingset, toward the garage. As I walked, I heard my own voice inside my head, telling the story of what I was doing. I knew the story stretched back to my beginning, and that I was just noticing it, not beginning it. I knew the story was happening still, and that it would keep on happening, as long as I kept on telling it. Continue reading →

Fiction Is Like Carrot Soup

Carrots
| Melinda Johnson

“So, is this autobiographical?”

“I think this character is my aunt.”

“Was it that boy you dated senior year?”

Each time I write a book, its publication brings on a flurry of questions. The questions happen because the books are fictional, and I’m beginning to think there’s something about fiction that doesn’t make sense to us as human beings.
Continue reading →

Losing My Voice

Tangle of computer cords
| Melinda Johnson

Facebook locked me out of my account this week. And let me in. And locked me out. I built a second account, and Facebook locked that too. It said it was an impersonation. No, it was me. Well, then I must be impersonating myself. Is that even a thing?

This went on for several days, some times hour by hour. Before long, Facebook and I had thoroughly confused each other. Fortunately, it ended well. Nobody was impersonating anyone. The malware at the root of this evil is gone. The account is unlocked.

And then, I caught a cold and lost my voice. Continue reading →

Fair Winds and Following Seas

Blue ocean water showing a small wave
Aside | | Melinda Johnson

Three years ago, we said goodbye to the Navy. If someone were to ask, “What’s it like, being a military family?”, I’d say, “The most lasting of my memories is the way that good things and hard things were so completely welded to each other. Being proud, being lonely, laughing hysterically, crying inconsolably, loving a place and wanting to leave it, missing a time you wouldn’t want to live through again. It changed everything, sometimes at high cost. But I would do it again, in a heartbeat.”

-Photo by Gaetano Cessati on Unsplash

Memorial Day

Anchor recovered from the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor
| Melinda Johnson

Anchor recovered from the USS Arizona at Pearl HarborIt’s about to be Memorial Day again. Remembering time. Truth is, what we have to remember is more than we can handle. People die, in a war, and that’s already too much to grasp. But there are other casualties. Hundreds of them, for every soldier, on both sides. These casualties seem small, and they sometimes fly past so quickly that there’s no time to name them. But the empty places left by these small deaths remain, and there will be years and years to feel the loss, after it’s too late to prevent it. Continue reading →

Illustrating the Story

Several colors of paint and a paint brush in a dish on a paint splattered drop cloth
| Melinda Johnson

My next book, Shepherding Sam, is coming out in October of this year. Hooray! The words are finished and out of editing. Conversations with the illustrator have begun. I love this part, but it also prompts a brain dance with me, and the brain dance goes like this.

When I wrote the story, I saw it all in my mind’s eye. I didn’t see it as pictures drawn by an artist. I saw it the same way I see the deck, the Japanese maple, and the telephone wires outside my window. I saw it as real. More real than a photograph, which only has two dimensions. I wrote the story that I saw, but of course, I didn’t describe every person, place, puppy, and tree leaf in exact detail. I didn’t describe much at all. I just told the story. So every reader will have to fill in the faces, the leaves, and the puppy, and the illustrator will help them.

But wait!

The illustrator hasn’t SEEN what I saw. Nobody has. Only me! Continue reading →

Aunt Nadia’s House and “Sea Fever”

| Melinda Johnson

Memory works two ways for me. Sometimes, it’s linear. I remember a specific event and its context, and I’m sure both are plain facts. Sometimes, it’s associative. I remember things connectedly, and the power of association may overcome aspects of the original history.

This poem, “Sea Fever” by John Masefield, is strongly connected in my memory with my great Aunt Nadia’s house in Rockport, MA. The house was 300+ years old in parts, and a “witch” lived in the oldest room when it was a raw wooden cabin in the woods. I wonder about her. Continue reading →

God Writing

Aside | | Melinda Johnson

Writing makes me think about God. Imagine writing a chapter. What’s in it – characters, plot twists, setting, subtext? Planning goes into that. Word choice. Looking at the other chapters. Thinking how you’re moving the action, developing the characters. But then, look at one day of your real life. One. What’s in it? SO many characters playing roles you know little to nothing about, and every one of them has an entire lifetime full of meanings and memories you know nothing about, and you and these other characters are interacting with each other, with yourselves, with your multi-faceted setting, with time, space, memory, love. And the collective intelligence and imagination of the human race to date has not come up with a way to predict what will happen in the next chapter.

Immensity.

-Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

Question by the River

Aside | | Melinda Johnson

I have lived in several worlds in my life, and I don’t suffer homesickness in the ordinary way. But sometimes, in the middle of a song, in a cloud of flower scent, at a moment of child-like peace, a wave of grief will rise over me because I can no longer go back to any good thing I remember. When I reach the river that flows by the throne, that might be my question – why couldn’t I bring together all the fragments of pure beauty I have seen and felt? I hope that’s what awaits me on the other side of the river. All those lost moments, the bouquet that was too much for human hands to grasp.

-Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash