Gretchen Johnson presents characters you will care about and remember. Among them are a widow reluctantly starting a new life, a young woman who basks in the thrill of unhealthy decisions and runs from the monotony of security, a sex offender who flees town after he is discovered, a slushie machine repairman who knows his work is as important as that of any doctor, and many other people whose flaws, fine points and idiosyncracies will grab your attention and keep you turning pages.

The Joy of Deception and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Johnson, Gretchen

United States

Lamar University Press

Stop and stay a while in this tiny town located just east of Fargo. Meet the narrator, his overbearing girlfriend and meddling mother, and the other colorful characters who reside there. Travel the pages to see the stark beauty of the prairie in winter, feel the pain of marrying the wrong person, taste the recipes in the church cookbook, and feel the fabric of the fields and faces along the way. You'll be surprised how much there is to see.

A Trip Through Downer, Minnesota

Poetry

Gretchen Johnson gives a sensitive and humorous account of dating in Southeast Texas. Paige, the heroine of the novel, is a young, recently divorced transplant from Minnesota and a professor of English Literature at Lamar University. She's fascinated by the culture(s) of her adopted state and trying to find a suitable mate. Her "take" on singleness and the dating scene in Beaumont is alternately witty, hopeful, resigned, and philosophical. The dozen men Paige dates are as real as any of J.D. Vance's hillbillies and as individualized as the folks old Studs Terkel used to interview. Her attitude toward Texas is overall optimistic, though she's aware of the racism, sexism, and classism which her students, her would-be lovers, and at times she herself see as simply natural. Johnson has a poet's keen eye and ear, and something of Sarah Silverman's sense of humor.

Single in Southeast Texas

Romance

Contemporary

Golden Antelope Press

What would it feel like to find your middle-aged self suddenly living back in a college dorm room? Four faculty members at Prairie State College in Minnesota are about to find out after their administration comes up with a bizarre strategy to improve graduation rates - The Faculty Dorm Dweller Program. While the idea seems promising to the administration, it doesn't take long for problems to arise-problems which readers will find appallingly funny, situations they'll find stimulate both empathy and snark. As Johnson says, "It's not so much a fish-out-of-water scenario as it is an older fish returning to a pond she'd lived in years ago." So Juanita Jane Ruckler, a fiftyish English professor, proves that she's not old by having an affair with a nineteen-year-old student. Lyla Benson, recently divorced and thirty-eight, runs into her old college flame and finds herself searching: is there something more than ashes left in that relationship? Bert Rojas, a math professor, is using the program to escape a boring home life with a nagging wife-the woman he's married right after college, back when youth had seemed eternal. As the FDD crew gets to know one another, they provide balance, experience, and understanding to one another. Even fresh-faced and naive young Joy McPherson, assistant professor in Political Science, can sometimes teach her older colleagues-though her own choices seem inexorably wrong. And the students? They're teachers too, in their own inimitable ways.

Young Again

Humor & Satire

Gargoyle Magazine Issue 25/26 Fiction/84

Peabody, Richard

Paycock Press

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Books by Johnson, Gretchen