A short life of the author
Bret Anthony Johnston (b. 21 August 1971) is an American fiction writer and the director of the creative writing programme at Harvard University. His debut story collection, Corpus Christi (2004), and his novel Remember Me Like This (2014) earned him a reputation as one of the most emotionally precise realists in contemporary American fiction — a writer whose understanding of working-class Texas is rooted in lived experience rather than sociological observation. Johnston grew up skateboarding in Corpus Christi before academic life took him from Miami University to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to Harvard, and his fiction retains the physical immediacy and class consciousness of his South Texas adolescence.
Life and Career
Johnston was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and grew up in the coastal city’s working-class neighborhoods. He was a competitive skateboarder as a teenager — a background that surfaces in his fiction’s attention to the body, to risk, and to the particular subcultures of young men in Gulf Coast Texas. He attended Miami University in Ohio and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with Marilynne Robinson and James Alan McPherson.
Corpus Christi: Stories (2004) — ten stories set in and around the South Texas port city — was praised widely for its empathy, precision, and understanding of lives shaped by the oil industry, the Gulf Coast’s unpredictable weather, and the economic and cultural proximity of Mexico. Stories like “Waterwalkers” and “In the Tall Grass” render the landscape with a sensory richness that avoids both condescension and romanticism. The characters are refinery workers, skateboarders, shrimpers, teenagers navigating the hazards of poverty and machismo — people whose interior lives Johnston renders with quiet, devastating specificity. The collection won the Flannery O’Connor Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Between the collection and his novel, Johnston established himself as one of the most influential creative writing teachers in the country. He was appointed director of Harvard’s creative writing programme and became a prominent voice in craft pedagogy, editing Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (2007), a widely used anthology that gathered writing exercises from authors including Richard Bausch, Robert Boswell, Amy Hempel, and ZZ Packer. His essay “Don’t Write What You Know,” published in The Atlantic, argued against the workshop cliché and became one of the most discussed craft essays of the 2010s.
Remember Me Like This (2014) was his first novel, a work he spent nearly a decade writing. The premise is based loosely on real cases of child abduction: in Southport, Texas, the Campbell family’s eleven-year-old son Justin has been missing for four years. The town has largely given up hope. Then Justin is found alive. The novel is not about the kidnapping or the investigation but about what comes after — the family’s impossible attempt to reconstitute itself around a traumatised boy who is no longer the child they remember. The father, Eric, is consumed by rage and guilt. The mother, Laura, has begun an affair during the years of grief. The older brother, Griff, has become a competitive skateboarder whose recklessness masks his own unprocessed trauma. And Justin himself is a presence who cannot speak about what happened, whose silence becomes the novel’s structural centre.
The novel was a New York Times Notable Book and was praised by Dennis Lehane, Richard Ford, and Elizabeth McCracken. What distinguishes it from other abduction narratives is its refusal to make the crime the story’s engine — the real subject is grief’s aftermath, the way trauma reshapes not just the victim but every relationship surrounding them.
Themes and Style
Johnston writes about the body in space — skateboarding, swimming, fighting, working — with a physicality unusual in literary fiction. His characters are defined by what they do with their hands and their time, not by what they think about themselves. This gives his prose a concreteness that grounds its emotional revelations: feelings arrive through action and sensation rather than introspection.
His Texas is not the mythic Texas of McMurtry or McCarthy but the strip-mall, refinery, and Gulf Coast Texas of the late twentieth century — a landscape of parking lots, bait shops, and tract houses where the sublime intrudes through weather and water. He has spoken of Corpus Christi as a place where “everything beautiful is also dangerous” — the ocean, the refineries, the snakes — and this double quality pervades his fiction.
Critical Standing
Johnston is widely respected by peers and critics, though his small output — one story collection and one novel across two decades — has limited his readership. His influence as a teacher and his prominent institutional position at Harvard have made him an important figure in the infrastructure of American literary fiction. Remember Me Like This is regarded as one of the strongest first novels of the 2010s.
Key Works
- Corpus Christi: Stories (2004)
- Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (editor, 2007)
- Remember Me Like This (2014)
Collecting Johnston
Corpus Christi (2004, Random House) — first edition in dust jacket brings $15–$40. Remember Me Like This (2014, Random House) brings $10–$30. Both are modest print runs. Signed copies appear occasionally through Harvard events.