Halvard Johnson was born in Newburgh, New York, and grew up in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Baltimore City Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has lived and taught in Chicago, Illinois; El Paso, Texas; Cayey, Puerto Rico; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; and New York City. For many years he taught overseas in the European and Far East divisions of the University of Maryland, mostly in Germany and Japan. Currently, he lives with his wife, the prize-winning writer and visual artist Lynda Schor in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.
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1. Athos
While hunting in pairs can last all night, the waterfall
shows no fluctuations. The tribe’s first-ever non-smoking
organization held monthly, if not weekly, meetings, resulting
in enormous public debt. Monks rose to their feet, applauding.
The tribe favored some kinds of dirt over others. God’s last
hotline, long ago shut down. Inflatable modules available to all.
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2. Things Writers Know About
1. Brevity
Dead. The word itself, deadly. His art is dead.
Buried in dread is dead.
2. Length
The sentence takes you in, meaning in a vortex
sucking you in, swirling and turning, a maelstrom,
whirling people and objects around you, you,
never meaning to be swept along with all around
you, never really meaning to take all this time
on one spiraling prolixity.
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3. Mission Statement
My aim, as always, is to make the typos, etc., indistinguishable
from strokes of genius.
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