“On A Fuzzy Tree” by Jeff Johnson appeared in Issue 45 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
I wrote “On a Fuzzy Tree” in the late 1980s, when people were allegedly seeing Elvis Presley everywhere, even though he’d been dead since 1977. I was working for a magazine called Twin Cities then, and they let me do a column called “A Likely Story”—basically an excuse to write a short piece of fiction every month. The Elvis sightings were tabloid fodder; the people who claimed to have seen him were considered oddballs, crazies, losers, get-a-lifers, etc. I felt a certain kinship with them. So I started there, stole the form of the story from John Cheever’s “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear,” and off I went. The writing went quickly, which is unusual for me. All these years later, I still like the piece pretty well (also unusual for me).
What was the most difficult part of writing this story?
It’s a little hard to remember, but I’m sure I had trouble coming up with the characters’ names—I always do. However, I had come into possession of a cheap newsstand “book” about Elvis’s film career (“All the facts about every Elvis movie ever made!”): plot synopses, production notes, candid on-set photos, and cast lists. Cast lists! Problem solved. All the character names in “On a Fuzzy Tree” are taken from Elvis flicks.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport. It’s 988 pages of (mostly stream-of-consciousness) brilliance, not counting the glossary and appendix. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, whose jury said it “offers a radical literary form and voice. Dense to look at, challengingly epic, the novel is built around one Ohio housewife’s monologue, flowing with dazzling lightness and speed.” Others called it “a jaw-dropping miracle,” “devastating and necessary,” “a wisecracking, melancholy Mrs. Dalloway for the internet age,” and “a book that quite restores our faith in the possibility of literary ‘greatness’ while questioning what forms such ‘greatness’ can or should take.” I can only add that it’s a genuine page-turner.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Kazuo Ishiguro, out of pure admiration. My admiration would render me speechless, but I think we could talk about my fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan. I hear Ishiguro is a Dylan guy.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Right now I’m working on a couple of short stories and a novel that is, so far, a giant mess. And most days I write a limerick in the “voice” of Donald Trump. I started doing this in 2017, took a break during the Biden administration, and now I’m back at it. I must have more than 1,700 by now. It’s a weird project, but I feel it helps keep me sane. Here’s one:
Abraham Lincoln Wasted
An Incredible Amount of Time
Imagine me walking all day.
Imagine me harvesting hay.
Imagine me grieving
A great nation’s cleaving.
Imagine me seeing a play.
Our thanks to Jeff for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “On A Fuzzy Tree ” here.
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Jeff Johnson’s work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Intro, Menominee Review, and other journals. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has won awards for short stories, poetry, essays, and journalism. He was for many years the editor of Minnesota Monthly magazine, where he founded the Tamarack Awards fiction competition. He is currently at work on a novel, as well as a fictional memoir of Donald Trump in limerick form. He lives in Minneapolis with his family and their cat, Magic.