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Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson's collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson's wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What's the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What's the difference between empiricism and intuition?
The collection draws together essays that originally appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, All Things Considered and elsewhere, along with new work. Johnson reports from the front lines of the AIDS epidemic, from Burning Man, from monasteries near and far. His subject matter ranges from Oscar Wilde to censorship in journalism to Kentucky basketball.
Everywhere Home is the latest title in Sarabande's Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature.
Fenton Johnson is the author of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds, Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River, and the nonfiction books Keeping Faith and Geography of the Heart. Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He writes regularly for Harper's, and is a professor in the creative writing programs at the University of Arizona and Spalding University.
"In this collection of 26 essays, Johnson contemplates questions of identity, belonging, and belief. With a deft hand and trained ear for storytelling, he explores growing up Catholic in Kentucky, the complex nature of same-gender eros, and the desire to belong. His work is most poignant when he’s bearing witness to the plague years of the AIDS crisis and its effects on the social and artistic networks of so many LGBTQ people. In the collection’s most moving pieces, he reckons with grief after his lover dies of AIDS-related complications. 'From understanding grows compassion; from compassion grows real, enduring, life-affirming change,' writes Johnson. These essays trust in the power of communication to build the capacity for change."
—Publishers Weekly
"In taut, sometimes-tense prose, Johnson shows us so many varieties of human pain as well as many glimmers of hope.”
—Kirkus Review
"Fenton Johnson has, for four decades and counting, been a writer of exceptional talent, and even more exceptional warmth. He is the kind of clear-eyed observer who is able to integrate his deep knowledge of faith and philosophy into his own perspective, his own experiences. . . .Johnson connects everything with his own hopeful worldview, a deceivingly simple one: the world is a hard and often cruel place, but in the lowest of moments of our past and those we've yet to encounter, there is always love--clear and open-minded, big and small--to lead us forward. . . .The author never settles for cliché or platitude, but instead grasps the full span of life's emotional output--the good, the bad, and the utterly painful that he himself is a product of--and manages, beautifully, to derive hope.”
—East Bay Review
"Reading this rich, varied essay collection . . . is a little like following a postmodern teaching peripatetic: it wanders, it tells stories, it stops occasionally to observe, it muses. . . . From the nature of art, the nature of beauty, to the meaning of Burning Man, Tina Turner’s sensuality, and monks in contemporary society, Johnson’s interests are far-ranging and engaging. Both personal and academic, they’re the product of a man who celebrates life through words.”
—Arizona Daily Star
"The essays are remarkably cohesive despite their collective span of more than twenty-five years, in large part because of Johnson’s voice, which is that of a sage elder, a mystic who easily traverses and knits the secular and the spiritual."
—The Pleiades Book Review
Reader’s Note
Prologue
On Fire
Part 1
North of the South, West of the West
Catholic in the South
Father to the Mother
Basketball Days
After Shock in San Francisco
Part II
Journals of the Plague Years
The Limitless Heart
Lucky Fellows
Death into Life
The Secret Decoder Ring Society
All That Is Human Is Mine
Safe(r) Sex
Invitation to the Dance
City of Innocence and Plague
From the Depths: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis in its Second Century
Part III
Power and Obedience: Restoring Pacifism to American Politics
In Between: Fiction Writer as Drag Queen
Ordinary Acts
God, Gays, and the Geography of Desire
Beyond Belief
Part IV
Witness and Storyteller
Shrines and Wonders
Reverence and Irony: On Beauty and the Sublime
Dreamers and Fools: Burning Man
Epilogue
Light in August
Acknowledgments
Publication Acknowledgments