Scientists discover a secret city on Europa. A poet falls in love with opera at La Scala. A teen pleads to have her father taken off death row. So begins three books recently published by UO faculty members Mat Johnson, Garrett Hongo and Kim Johnson. Here, they wax poetic on their books and their inspirations.
“Invisible Things” by Mat Johnson
The crew of the SS Delany, on the first manned mission to Jupiter, is shocked to find a glass bubble on the moon Europa. Inside is an entire city, not of alien structures but human ones, even an American football field.
“Invisible Things,” published June 2022, is his fifth novel by Mat Johnson, UO professor of creative writing and Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities.
“Invisible Things” began with a desire to talk about contemporary dynamics indirectly. He wanted to approach the issue of mass denialism in a way that was distant enough that people could move beyond their preconceived notions of it and see it differently, he said.
“I didn’t want to talk about climate change. I didn’t want to talk about race or misogyny or all the different types of xenophobia,” Mat Johnson said. “I wanted to talk about how we as people deal with issues we don’t want to deal with.”
He hadn’t begun with the central metaphor of the “invisible things.” What he had was a crazy question: What if everyone who was abducted by aliens sat in a North American city on Europa? The “invisible things” came out of the first draft — there was something the characters weren’t talking about.
“Somebody who’s looking at the absurdity of the world and can’t quite identify it — I think this book helps you identify it further,” Mat Johnson said.
“The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo” by Garrett Hongo
“The Perfect Sound,” published February 2022, explores Garrett Hongo’s lifelong relationship with music, combining his family history with the history of amplification.
Hongo, UO professor of creative writing, had three main moments of inspiration for the book. There was his childhood, watching his father build a stereo system at their home in Hawaii. There was his desire to continue his work as a Japanese American poet and answer a call to sing. But a key moment came in Bellagio, Italy, in 2005.
Hongo decided to skip his activities as a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation one day and instead visit Milan. Seeing “La bohème” at the famous opera house La Scala was just something to do, like trying a Michelin-starred restaurant, Hongo said.
At the first aria, “Che gelida manina,” Hongo was so moved he started crying. The character Rodolfo’s dedication to poetry was “exactly how I think of my own,” Hongo said.
“The music from his body came out like a freight train,” Hongo said. “It grabbed me by the spine of my back and shook me.”
Hongo wanted to listen to more opera, so he bought five CDs. He put one into his multi-unit player, but it broke. A local shop told him the plastic CD changer inside couldn’t be fixed.
He called some friends to recommend a replacement. Hongo’s determination to find the right CD player evolved into an increasing interest in stereo systems and music history. All that research is included in “The Perfect Sound.” The book also includes translations by Hongo of Hawaiian song lyrics, French poetry and Japanese poetry.
“The great thing is it called upon all my powers as a writer,” Hongo said.
“This is My America” by Kim Johnson
Despite years of failed appeals, Tracy Beaumont writes a letter every week asking the Innocence X organization to get her father off death row. Tracy’s life gets more complicated when her older brother Jamal, a promising track star, is accused of killing a white girl.
“This is My America,” published July 2020, is the debut novel of Kim Johnson, UO vice provost for undergraduate education and student success. She was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement as well as Bryan Stevenson’s popular 2014 memoir “Just Mercy” about his fight to overturn wrongful convictions. Kim Johnson saw a gap in people’s education about incarceration, she said, so she wanted to tell a story about how it impacts families and communities from the eyes of a young person with an incarcerated parent.
Kim Johnson, 43, didn’t start pursuing fiction until she was 32, she said. Seeing her students do cool things, she thought, “I can still do cool things too.”
She would dedicate three hours every Saturday and Sunday to writing, her sole hobby. When she could, she’d take a week off work to get a story out of her head. Then she’d go back to her routine of Saturdays and Sundays, writing for months until she had a finished draft.
Kim Johnson thought only of engaging young adult readers as her audience when she was writing “This is My America,” she said. But a surprising number of adult readers have picked it up.
“I get just as many emails from 70- and 80-year-old people living in senior homes reading it in their senior home club as I do teens,” Kim Johnson said.
