Johnny Payne

Background

Johnny Payne was born in 1958.

Education

Payne received his bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He then graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Alabama. He completed his studies with a Ph.D. at Stanford University.

Career

Johnny Payne has looked at fiction writing from many different angles: as a literary critic, as the producer of a guide to fiction writing, and as a fiction writer himself. His 1993 Conquest of the New Word: Experimental Fiction and Translation in the Americas compared writers from the United States and Latin America, focusing mainly on the 1970s and 1980s. Payne’s contention is that the so-called “boom” novels from Latin America, most notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, had received such excessive praise and publicity that they overshadowed less-known writers of what Payne would call 'the Americas.’ Payne attempts to put the writers of the Americas into dialogue with each other by examining North American and Latin American works side by side. Chapters of his book juxtapose the work of Nelson Marra (Uruguay) with Donald Barthelme (United States), Teresa Porzecanski (Uruguay) with Harry Mathews (United States and Paris), Ricardo Piglia and Manuel Puig (Argentina) with John Barth, and Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina) with Kathy Acker (United States).

In 1995, Payne published Voice and Style, aimed at fiction writers looking for ways to develop character and their own individual hallmarks. Payne devotes chapters of his manual to different qualities and elements of voice in fiction: to indicate the habits of a character’s mind, to make the character believable, to establish atmosphere, to act in dialogue, and to place a character through regional elements of voice, among other matters.

Payne puts his ideas about voice to the test in his own fiction-writing. Each chapter of his 1997 novel Kentuckiana presents a different voice - that of a business-man who is building a subdivision in Lexington, Kentucky. In his next novel, Baja, Payne describes his main character, Vic. The story follows Vic as he breaks up with Andrea, his loving girlfriend, and drives from California to New York to pursue a corporate job; on the New Jersey turnpike, he loses heart and heads back westward, making it to Nevada before a hitchhiker steals his car after giving him a deed to land in Baja. Vic sets off in pursuit with Beth ("Beef") Wellington in tow; they hitch a ride with a fleamarket salesman and head down to Baja, picking up Andrea - the car’s owner - along the way.

Achievements

• Johnny Payne is an outstanding writer. His books were highly praised by readers.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Bedfellows

    (What does a South Florida philosophy professor turned car...)

    2016
  • Baja

    (Adrift in a limbo of rejected prospects and failed commit...)

    1998
  • North of Patagonia

    (This darkly humorous fourth novel by Johnny Payne takes u...)

    2001
  • Heaven of Ashes

    (Equal parts heartbreak and humor, Heaven of Ashes draws i...)

    2016
  • Conquest of the New Word: Experimental Fiction and Translation in the Americas

    (Latin American fiction won great acclaim in the United St...)

    1993
  • Chalk Lake

    (When Serena returns to Kentucky from New York to be near ...)

    1996
  • She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales

    (For readers tired of everything postmodern, this collecti...)

    2001
  • Voice & Style

    (Voice and style are tangible as air and just as real. Rea...)

    1995
  • Silver Dagger

    (The witches are chasing Liam Boyd. Can he keep them from ...)

    2011
  • Cuentos Cusquenos 1984

• movie

  • Kentuckiana

    (Set in a decidedly postmodern subdivision in Appalachia, ...)

    1997

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001