Though we’ve seen reviews of his book Corpus Christi: Stories we don’t remember reading Bret Anthony Johnston’s work in any of the skateboard magazines. Maybe that’s because he is a good writer.
The skateboarding novelist is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and is now the director of creative writing at Harvard University.
Johnston says: “The skills required to be a successful writer or a successful artist of any kind are the same skills that are required for being a successful skateboarder. You really see the world differently than everybody else does and you have a patience and a perseverance and maybe a penchant for masochism in ways that most other people don’t.” . . . “You have to be able to stay there, hour after hour, and hurt yourself, do splits on the banister, whack your shins and stay there bleeding and sweating until you can make the trick that you want to make. It’s the same thing for writers. You have to log the hours. You have to look at the world in a different way and be prepared to sit in a chair as long as it takes to render that world and the characters in your imagination truthfully.”
Indeed.
[Link: Radio Iowa]
