Brently Johnson’s work has been published in journals such as River Teeth, Ascent, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He has an essay forthcoming in the North American Review. Currently, he is working on a book-length memoir based on a three-week family odyssey in an RV chasing an insect through Montana. He teaches at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

In answer to our question of why he writes, Brently responded:

“I write for many reasons—joy, guilt, reckoning, witness, celebration, contemplation, connection—and find that certain essays or poems arise from their own particular motivations. ‘The Raisin Invasion,’ for instance, began out of fear, really, an anxiousness on my part to begin recording the dimmer memories, the ones where when I try to call up the finer details, flicker on and off, threatening to finally burn out. Now that I am a father, I have noticed how capable I am of forgetting entire years, it seems, when looking back at old photographs and realizing that the memory contained within could have as easily slipped away. Writing is an act of preservation for me, not in the dusty, archival sense of the word, but in the way it keeps the past familiar, relevant, and purposeful.”

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