Willis Johnson

Background

Willis Johnson was born in 1938.

Career

Early in his career, Willis Johnson worked as a reporter for the Associated Press.

Johnson is the author of The Girl Who Would Be Russian, a 1986 collection of seven stories set in a small town in 1950s Maine colonized by Russian immigrants. In one story, “The Great Valentinova,” an aging ballerina gives her annual performance of the “Dying Swan,” accompanied by an unreliable record player and, perhaps, the laughter of her audience. The title character in “The Girl Who Would Be Russian” begins speaking with a Russian accent and learning to play the balalaika in an effort to abandon her true identity as an obese thirty-one-year-old living with her mother. When a man’s decrepit farmhouse is overrun with rats in “The Last Song of Exile,” he relives his beating by government thugs who also murdered his wife and child. “Perhaps, Johnson seems to be saying, we are all to some degree misfits and exiles,” noted Anne Lambert in Multicultural Review, citing the darker side of The Girl Who Would Be Russian, along with its humor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Girl Who Would Be Russian: And Other Stories

    (A collection of stories that chronicles the ups and downs...)

    1986
  • The Year of the Longley 1978