Recorded on Wednesday, December 10, 2025
TRANSCRIPT
Arsean Maqami ’12 All right. Welcome, everybody. And it's great to have you with us tonight. And thank you so much for joining the SwatTalk: “God and Sex and Swarthmore”, featuring Jon Raymond from the class of 1994, who will be in conversation with the artist Ed Johnson, class of 1993. My name is Arsean Maqami, I'm a member of the class of 2012 and I'll be your introductory host tonight. SwatTalks is a speaker series produced by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, the volunteer leadership body of the Swarthmore Alumni Association, which works to engage with alumni across the globe with programs like this one. For those of you who are new to our talks or for our regulars who just need a refresher tonight, this is how this one will run. It'll be about an hour for the first half of the talk Ed and Jon will be engaging with questions. Everybody's encouraged or can submit their questions through the Q&A function. Please include your name and class year and any other information you want about yourself, if you like, but at least name in class year. And I will allow Ed and Jon to continue from here. Enjoy.
Ed Johnson ’93 I will introduce Jon here. It's my great pleasure to do so. Jon is an accomplished, engaging and favorite writer and my friend for over 30 years. He's the author of the books “The Half Life”, a Publishers Weekly best book of 2004. “Livability”, Barnes and Noble Discover a Great New Writers selection and winner of the Oregon Book Award 2009. “Rain Dragon”, 2012. “Free Bird” an Indie Next Great Read Selection 2017 and “Denial”, a New York Times Book Review, Editors Choice 2022 and finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He also published a collection of art writing called “The Community: Writings About Art in and Around Portland”, 1997 to 2016. He's collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, including Old Joy”, Wendy and Lucy Makes Cut Off, Night Moves, First Cow and Showing Up, numerous of which were based on his fiction and on the HBO mini series Mildred Pierce with Todd Haynes, for which he was nominated for an Emmy. He was an editor of Plasm Magazine, an associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and served on the board of directors of Literary Arts. His writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Tin House, Art Forum, Book Forum, and many other places. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, the writer Emily Chenowith, and their kids Eliza and Josephine. His most recent novel, “God and Sex”, has been named one of 2025 Best Books by Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, and was also a New York Times Editors Choice. In addition to “Sex and God” the novel describes a secret love affair, a miracle, perhaps, contains many wonderful passages on trees, on families and on the practice of writing itself. More so as Joan Didion is to Southern California, or Harry Cruz is to North Florida with “God and Sex” Jon has established himself as one of Oregon's preeminent artists, its guardian spirit, its avatar medium in mind. And all of Jon's books and screenplays, the tone and structure of “God and Sex” is exquisite and spare. Deadpan yet heartbreaking, ruminative but always forward moving, occurring at the place where the epic and the intimate converge and sometimes trade places. Jon, so excited to talk to you about this book and wherever else that conversation takes us.
Jon Raymond ’94 And you Ed, that was amazing. I’ll just tell everyone, me and Ed are sitting about five blocks from each other and, basically this is what we would be doing anyway, just reading each other, our bonafides, you know.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. Yeah.
Jon Raymond ’94 This is how we hang out. So, just a peek into our lives.
Ed Johnson ’93 Yeah, well, running down your credits is a much more time consuming fare than mine, but this book, this the last book “God and Sex” it's not a long book, but it's a big book. There's a lot, I think, that we could talk about. But I think a good point of entry is, the writing about writing, in a conversation earlier this year, Justin Taylor called it the best book about writing he's ever read. Other readers I've talked to, respond so positively and lovingly to those parts of the book. And as an artist myself, I really appreciate the, realistic, unromantic, sort of description of the process, the sort of routine, tedium, that, you know, is necessary for something expansive, I don't know if that's “God or Sex”, but I do think that there's a really canny acknowledgment of the limits that need to be established for something sort of inspired to take place. And I wonder if you might start by talking a little bit about that, and, as that might at least specifically initially apply to matters of the spirit relation.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean, in some ways I thought of this book as the craft book that I'll never actually write and for people who are not fluent in this kind of literature, there's a whole genre of writers who write about writing and, you know, books that are used among workshops and by students that, you know, give some kind of insight into different people's processes. And I like that kind of writing. But I don't think it's something I'm ever going to do. But this book offered me kind of a covert way to, just express some of the wisdom, I guess, that I have accrued, in this very strange life of writing. And it is a really weird way to spend your days. I mean, I'm sitting here in the room that I do my writing in and, it is almost just abysmal how much time I spend in this room hunched over the keyboard very close to what is happening right now. And most people don't want to live that way. I mean, most people would rather you know, be out in the air and breathing and moving their bodies and stuff. But this is the life that I have chosen and certain things do happen in that process that are significant to me. And so this book, just also to give you a little bit of a background about it, it's a book that has a love triangle involved. And one of the the points of that triangle is, a writer of, sort of high end new age texts, is how he describes it, I think. He writes sort of quasi-spiritual come, scientific come, self-help-y kind of books that have had moderate success in the world. And so the book, is partly a description of his writing process as he is composing a new book about trees, which he has identified as kind of a new, the sort of emergent commercial subject of, of his form of writing. Kind of tapping into the, you know, Merlin Sheldrake, Richard Powers kind of.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right, right tree porn, I think you described it before.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah, tree porn. And, I love trees, you know, I genuinely love trees like everybody. And so, in essence, I was able to kind of write a book within a book in this case. And so, one of the one of the plot lines, such as it is, is the kind of emergence of this text over the course of a year that also sees a romance blooming and a possible miracle occurring. And I guess, just to, sort of dilate further on this, I mean, I think something that you're kind of getting at is the sort of bond between writing and spiritual practice in some way.
Ed Johnson ’93 Yeah, I mean, you talk about it like almost it's, I mean, not to belabor the point, but almost a monastic kind of practice.
Jon Raymond ’94 That is absolutely true and it's something that actually, crazily, it goes back to Swarthmore in a way. The thesis that I wrote at Swarthmore was, about, it was in the art history department, and it was, about, an altarpiece, in a French monastery, a Carthusian monastery, that was kind of a devotional image that these Carthusian monks used in their prayer practice and like, fascinatingly, they had like, almost a little panopto icon that they had created these little cubbies so no one could see each other, and they're all looking at the same, altarpiece and clearly there are some fascination I had like, even back then, in terms of like, the sort of intersection of art and meditation and the idea of images as being some sort of conduit for divine communication, I guess.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. Connectedness that requires a little bit of like, whatever sort of isolation and negative sort of, you know, negative behavior, I guess.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah and just to kind of go further on that, it sort of is a, you know, a childhood training I had because my dad was a practicing Buddhist. And so I grew up in a household where it was totally normal for a person to wake up in the morning and sit silently ringing a bell, you know, pondering nothingness. And, that has turned out to be good training for the life of writing. I mean, it is a very similar posture that I'm assuming.
Ed Johnson ’93 Absolutely. I mean, I think that I mean, obviously there are very big differences between making a painting and writing a book, but the solitude, I think, applies in both cases. And like what I appreciated about your observations on writing is, is what you're describing. Now, this sort of routine that has to be established. That the action, the kind of placing oneself in this situation is what leads to kind of epiphany and inspiration and these kind of romantic ideas of creation and not the other way around. Like that the inspiration doesn't strike and then you get to work. You have to, like, actually sort of slough through.
Jon Raymond ’94 I might even go farther than that to and that like, yeah, it's true that epiphany does not lead to the creative act, but the creative act possibly leads to an epiphany, right? Let's say that the epiphany is often recognized in retrospect in some way that it's not an actual experience, it's more like, something that you look back at and recognize that something happened, but that sense of presence is, at least for me, not really part of the process. And this, again, has to do with, I think, growing up with a Zen dad and a Jewish mother. Like, that sense of, like, epiphanic experience was not really talked about very much, right?
Ed Johnson ’93 I mean, I feel like, it's not sort of like, I don't mean to sort of imply that this is some sort of, like, cheesy sort of communion that one is hoping for necessarily, but rather a sort of like, the best case scenario of along the lines of something that, like the painter Philip Guston describes, like this unlimited process whereby you go into the writing studio or in his case, the painting studio and everything is, is on your back like that the institution, the kind of critical community and then they disappear and then your, your friends and colleagues disappear. And then ideally, and I'm paraphrasing here, he said, you know, the artist himself, you disappear. So it's like, it's actually it's, a sort of like disappearance, really, than a sort of an assertion that allows for something like a creative act.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah. I mean, I buy that entirely. I think it's sort of the anti Oprah-ism, you know, it's the idea not that you have something to tell or that you're telling it. It's more Wittgenstein, I guess, that you don't have anything to tell and you're telling it. And I mean, definitely the book, again not to get overly, well, we are Swarthmore people, we can get heady if we want to, but the roots of the, the book actually, similar like part of the thesis that I wrote back then, which had to do with this painting, also brought me into contact with, it was a medieval, a medieval painting and it brought me into contact with medieval, discourses of philosophy and, and sort of religious theory, and introduced me to the concept of the apophatic tradition or negative theology, which is, I think akin to what you're talking about here. You know, it kind of proceeds from the idea that the divine is by nature unknowable and that there is, it can only sort of be approached in the sort of negative denomination. Like it's sort of a process of elimination, almost, and that the actual naming or the actual imaging of it is explicitly impossible. And that there's only a kind of, some sort of sideways approach that is imaginable. A theory that has stuck with me since, since kind of seeing it articulated at that time and that sense of a negative and negative path that exists in a lot of different religious traditions. I mean, that Zen one is another, you know, Philip Guston and his particular brand of modernism is another, I think, form of it, Kafka would be another figure, for this particular kink of mind, I think. And so for me, as I mentioned before in this book, there's a miracle that may or may not occur, within the context of this love triangle. It was important for me in, in, in building the kind of theological structure of it, that any sort of, divine presence or sort of announcement of divine power was really explicitly, never present in a particular moment that it is very much structured around the sort of absences of whatever is deemed divine in that particular moment.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. More absences of our understanding,
Jon Raymond ’94 But yeah, that too.
Ed Johnson ’93 When you were talking, I was reminded of this like, sort of passage at the end of Paul Schrader's, book, transcendental style and, and film where he's discussing, like, kind of, I guess, the guiding principle of this, which is that, like as soon as you try and depict the transcendent in a way that is relatable to humans, you're no longer depicting something transcendent. The image of God is like you say, not something that could even be like, you know, represented or articulated and still be God. Which does come into play when we're talking about miracles a little bit.
Jon Raymond ’94 I mean, miracles, you know, are I mean, it was funny to do a miracle book. I'll just say a lot of the inspiration for this book…
Ed Johnson ’93 Wait, are we spoiling? Do we have to do, like?
Jon Raymond ’94 I don't care. Yeah. All right. There's a kind of influence on this book that's really profound and it's the novel The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, which is a book that I have found really interesting over the years. And that similarly involves, love triangle and a miracle that is debatable as to its truth power. And I mean, it's a radically different book, a radically different tone and grain, but I just always found that as a plot device to be really interesting. You know, the idea of an event like that had to be, kind of, dealt with. There's a part for me to, you know, that, I mean, in a way, religion or these kinds of these kinds of experiences are sort of the original conspiracy theory in a certain sense that these sort of unprovable ways of conceiving of the world that demand either a leap of faith or not. And that in order to really function, really do profoundly rattle a person's preconceived notions of cause and effect and reality itself. And so at a time when, when people are re conceiving a lot of different perceptions of reality, like, I kind of like the idea of going back to a very primal form of reality testing and put some characters through, a situation that became very clear for a Kikagardian in a certain sense, right?
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. I mean, that's the thing that I mean, I think…
Jon Raymond ’94 The book sounds so boring. I'm sorry.
Ed Johnson ’93 We'll get to sex in a minute.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah, there is early graphic sex there too, so.
Ed Johnson ’93 Well, I mean, you know, maybe this is going to be a clunky sort of, like, hodgepodge of a segway into the sex. I haven’t read “The End of the Affair”, but “The Power and the Glory" and I read it so long ago, this Graham Greene book and I'm probably misremembering it, but there's a point where this priest who's like [inaudible] thinks about, like, just the germination of a plant as a miracle. But in a way, that's true, and it's not true. Like, there's it's, at one point when people didn't know about photosynthesis or soil nutrients or something, that would have been a miracle, but like, now it's just an amazing fact, like what happens in your book is really something that cannot be explained.
Jon Raymond ’94 I mean, it kind of abrogates time and space in a sense. And I mean that sentiment appears in the book to that, like a tree growing from an acorn is a miracle. You know, plum is a miracle. And one is wise to recognize the, you know, the awesomeness and majesty of daily life. But the miracle that, I wanted to deal with in the book, was not a quotidian miracle is more like a proper Old Testament miracle where a person is really, asked to in a kirkaguardian sense like to do something, to obey a command or to, honor a contract that is totally unverifiable in a certain sense and it is, by its nature, absurd. That is actually counter to one's own benefit even. So, you know, there's a sort of sense in which, in order for something to really be a display of faith, it needs to be insane. And so hopefully, you know, the idea was to sort of put a character into that, like a cauldron of insanity, where they really have to deal with, yeah, they're having to make a certain kind of jump, anyway. Yeah, but that's not sexy either. [laughs] But that's what I'm dying to talk about sex. That is not like what I'm trying to angle for, right?
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. But, I mean, I think that actually, I really think explicit but tasteful as the sex scenes are. This sounds so terrible. But, but the actual eros in the book is, I think, in your stuff about trees and the kind of these amazing descriptions of the natural world, but also the kind of sublime, terrible aspects of the natural world. There's an amazing account of a fire, of a forest fire in the book that is harrowing. And this is, in keeping with some, I think, a real talent for these, I mean, I don't think anyone would call, your kind of writing, action, necessarily, but, like, there are scenes I'm thinking of that, piece and Freebird to the shooting, in that book that are real gripping kind of page turner. I think within this, these really, like weighty books of ideas like, weighty kind of metaphorically, not literally, but there are things move along really at a pretty good clip. But but the reaction to the fire in “God and Sex” and, the reaction to the, to the miracle, like after at a point like, the mere description of it is enough. I appreciate that there's no sort of like, there's not a lot of philosophizing or agonizing necessarily the kind of the actual incident itself is enough of a kind of statement, to where the reaction to both is almost in a, in the end, sort of like, a shrug and in some ways, I which I think goes back to something that people have said and you yourself have said about, books recently dealing with kind of environmental kind of decline. That this happens yet we soldier on, that our reactions are kind of like banal and ambivalent as they would be to a situation itself that is banal and ambivalent.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah. I mean, yeah, I would say this book in the book before this, called “Denial” were for me, like very much, post 2020 books and 2020 for those living in the northwest and on the West Coast, was abysmal for many reasons. Maybe the most profound of which, in addition to pandemic and fascism and just general social breakdown, was the mega fires that kind of capped it all. And, here in Portland in particular, the experience of those mega fires was really, existentially, profound and traumatic. And so “Denial” is a book that took as its premise, the idea that it's a science fiction book. It's the only book I've written that has any kind of speculative element to it. It's not like a genre I care about that much, but this one took place 30 years in the future, at a time after Global Green New Deal has occurred, and basically, you know, the that has the fantasy that the humanity has actually gotten that shit together and dealt with climate change in some way, and part of those, part of the global Green New Deal that has occurred involved Nuremberg style, trials for prominent, carbon criminals. So, you know, CEOs of petroleum companies, right. The main character is a journalist who discovers a CEO in hiding down in Mexico. And so it becomes a kind of like, Nazi hunter story and like, eco drag is the way I've described it. And so it has a kind of, I mean, just going back a little bit, it has some of the noir kind of narrative momentum that you're talking about. But it always was a way for me to just process some of the things that had happened and to even imagine, future horizon, that was, you know, at least 35 years old, at least as long as, like a mortgage, you know? Just because we had been living in a moment that was so imminently disastrous. And I just needed to find a way to sort of do a thought experiment that allowed me to project at least forward that far in time.
This book, the new one was different, but it also, you know, takes that kind of environmental collapse as a really sad fact of life and, you know, but it also both of them, though, are also kind of involved in an argument with, what I kind of view as maybe the most popular form of popular cultural narrative entertainment in my lifetime, which is the post-apocalyptic genre. And like the fantasy of the world having been destroyed and some cadre of people living after the fact, you know, fighting zombies or cannibals or meteors or whatever. And like in the context of 2020, like, I really, you know, my sort of disinterest in that in that genre kind of, energized a little bit into more active sort of, disdain because it's like parts to feel like, you know, a death wish that humanity is trapped inside of and just this, this constant, repetitive imagination of the destruction of the world and that, you know, we just continually find new and more inventive ways to color in the same dots over and over again. And so in both of these books, you know, I'm trying to, I think, deal with climate and some sort of, not entirely as a backdrop, but in a way that at least starts to like, move off those rails of like what is to me like often sort of barely cover Christian eschatology. You're just like, basically living in this end time over and over again. Like there must be just better, more interesting ways to conceive of reality.
Ed Johnson ’93 I know, I mean, why do you even need a proxy for the apocalypse when it's actually taking place?
Jon Raymond ’94 Right. And also why are people so obsessed with this apocalypse? Is it so unimaginable that the world is going to continue after you die? It's like everyone has assumed that there's an apocalypse, you know? I mean, it's like really literally every generation thinks they're the last one. So, not to diminish the genuine existential problem, but it's like, let's put this in context, right? Not to sound like I had to sound like a climate denier, but [laughs]
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. You know, but I think more so that, the facts are themselves so potent and horrifying that it's actually sort of like to give a scrupulous description of reality is much more fantastic than a science fiction that one might come up with
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah. That too, that too. Yeah. Right.
Ed Johnson ’93 Do you want to, do you want to take some questions, Jon?
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah, sure. Why don't we?
Ed Johnson ’93 There are a few here that kind of go back to…
Jon Raymond ’94 I just keep hoping that people we know are going to be out there.
Ed Johnson ’93 Well, I'm seeing some, no one we know, but some writers here are logging on. This is from Carol Ephron Pizer. I'm sorry. Carol, if I'm mangling your name, 1973. Curious about major internal developments for you as a writer. Does it seem like sometimes it's a trance-like state when one writes, I mean, do you have those moments where you are like, I mean, I think you touched upon it a little bit earlier, but I feel like maybe total self absence with writing is probably like a difficult thing
Jon Raymond ’94 It’s rare. But now, a trance-like, I mean, there are, it's funny, I once, I think I once heard Dennis Johnson, say that he had come to realize that he had about 20 good minutes of writing a day, and he had stopped bothering trying to write much more than that in the day. And that does actually kind of scan for me. I'm lucky in that I've been able to have a life that allows me to write every day. And I spend a good portion of the morning out, generally the morning is when it happened. I would say in that time, yeah. There's usually about a 20 minute stretch where things feel really excited and available. But, you know, one has to continue planning and shellacking things, even when not interesting. Yeah. Was that the sort of the idea, just that sort of like the mindstate of doing it?
Ed Johnson ’93 I think that Carol was saying that like, because she is a writer as well, publishing a novel. She's also a psychiatrist and I guess is publishing her first novel in October of next year
Jon Raymond ’94 Good job. Fantastic.
Ed Johnson ’93 I'm assuming that, so, but, yeah, I'm that sometimes there is a trance-like state, when you're writing certain and certain moments in certain parts.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely true. And there,I mean, today I was lucky that I was, like, cracking myself up. There were moments where I was actually kind of laughing out loud and that's pretty great. One is pursuing elevated states, for sure, but also, I've come to realize in this life of writing that a lot of, there's also just a lot of self-soothing involved, like being sort of, invested in getting a sentence right and figuring out the exact progression of the clauses. There is a certain banishment of other, like, problems in life and it's made me even sympathetic for, like, these kids on TikTok or people like playing video games all day long. Like, there's a sense in which I wonder sometimes if what I'm doing is really that much different or better than just, like, zoning out and looking at things [laughs].
Ed Johnson ’93 You know, when you pull back and look at yourself it does seem bizarre.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah and I feel like we're giving a pretty romantic and unromantic view of the creative process here. But that's the beauty of doing this stuff - it's many different things. I mean, it is not there's not, right. You know, and there are many phases involved in the process of making a painting or a book and they each have their challenges and they each have their pleasures.
Ed Johnson ’93 And, within the course of a day, even
Jon Raymond ’94 Within the course of a day and definitely within the course of a year, you know, I mean, dealing with novel time, you are in a pretty, pretty long commitment.
Ed Johnson ’93 Yes. I think that as you're saying too, it's almost like a sort of method acting or something. It's like you live it, you live in the role, you establish kind of parameters that must be kind of, observed, and maybe by the second day or something, you're actually kind of, you know, acting or writing or whatever. A lot of, I feel like they're, they're famous examples of, like, say, Vonnegut or Salinger or people like that who literally established bunkers in the case of, like, Salinger, where he would write and like, who knows what went on in there?
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah, we'll never know because he stuck it out there, you know. His bunker didn't work out so well
Ed Johnson ’93 But there are many strategies. And again, going back to what I think was really…
Jon Raymond ’94 I just heard that Dickens liked to just write when everyone was around in the room, he was just, like, just doing his life and just kind of writing at the same time.
Ed Johnson ’93 I mean, that seems like super fun for him, you know?
Jon Raymond ’94 I don't know, Jon Reezy really can tell us if that's true or not.
Ed Johnson ’93 But I feel like I mean, well, that would be the difference between like a method acting and like a Shakespearean actor or something like, I mean, I have like friends who have incredible chops and they can turn it on and turn it off and I mean, I don't know.
Jon Raymond ’94 That's how I am, that's how I am. Turn them on and off.
Ed Johnson ’93 Yeah. But I mean, at a certain point, don't you have to be like, I mean, Jon, because I'm not only like…
Jon Raymond ’94 It's going to be my new thing. It's super easy, it just kind of, like, I just I'm like a radio. I'm just receiving shit, you know?
Ed Johnson ’93 Yeah. I mean, that's the sort of like the, I guess, the maybe the dangerous caricature of where this could all go on our discussion, but I don't know, like…
Jon Raymond ’94 Oh no, it can go so much worse than that.
Ed Johnson ’93 But it is such that you have school aged children, you have a family, you have in your career as a screenwriter collaborators and deadlines where things really do need to be done. So there is on some level, I kind of like, a sense of mission, I guess.
Jon Raymond ’94 There's been a professionalization. Yes. And a mission. Yeah. And a lot of luck, I mean, Emily and the world that she and I have both created. But that Emily really has especially created, we're lucky to have the space and time. Yeah, yeah.
Ed Johnson ’93 I mean, that's even more impressive, the fact that you guys are both writers.
Jon Raymond ’94 Alright, Let's go on other stuff.
Ed Johnson ’93 Yeah. Anyway, Okay. Yes. Sorry. We have a lot of questions kind of about this process with you like to speak more about that or? And here's just one sort of like asking for you'd like your top four. If you could replace Mount Rushmore with four literary greats that you admire.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah. I mean, that's a toughie. You know, I'm opposed to the basic premise, but it is not to insult the premise, but it is of course, like one wants to destroy hierarchies, but I'll play along for sure. It's like, different things for different people. Mavis Gallant is, to me, like one of the ultimate Olympian writers. She was a sort of a long form short story writer, I guess you would call her, mid-century, mid 20th century, wrote a lot for the New Yorker. But she was one of those people where you're like, I don't understand how you can know these things. I don't know how many lives have you lived that you're able to imbue this many perspectives with such convincing reality? She's a mind blower. Not surprising for a person of my age and demographic, but Dennis Johnson was a big, important person for myself. You know, “Jesus’ son” is a good one, but the other ones are equally as great. Charles Portis was a huge person for me. A big person for me has, I don't know how many we're at right now, Sherwood Anderson has been really important for me. And I was like a writer that I found at, at a crucial moment, I think, in my mid to late 20s, having exited Swarthmore and tried a handful of creative endeavors, you know, with, dabbling in art and video making and, a certain kind of cable access filmmaking, and had sort of figured out that writing was the thing that actually gave me energy as opposed to a lot of the other more dilettante ish things that I was trying. And, Sherwood Anderson was someone that showed me a writer who was not necessarily a virtuoso technically, it was not like Nabokov or something, right? Who I found, really powerful and moving and allowed me to conceive of writing fiction in a way or that made it seem possible to write fiction that was honest and genuine and unflinching and, worked with the tools that a person can write, and so, you know, I mean, it's that's, I guess for musicians, they might have found that in the Ramones or something. But to me I have the person I'm like, okay, you don't have to be. You don't have to memorize the encyclopedia. You can be a writer that works your own little patch of ground.
Ed Johnson ’93 Yeah. No, I think that that in talking about Dennis Johnson and Sherwood Anderson both, I think, I'm struck by your kinship with, with those people along the lines of this kind of unfussyness and sort of,I mean, you have an amazing kind of, you know, vocabulary and kind of sensibility. But like, that is all been the sort of like that's apparent in, the kind of exclusions that result in this very, sometimes even dry language. But dry yet robust too, you know, like stripped down, like, and I do think that that like, that that's a kind of hallmark of the sort of minimalism that you practice.
Jon Raymond ’94 I mean, again, just to talk about it in a negative sense like that, I do like things clean, I like prose, not in life, but on paper I like things clean. I mean, to me, getting a sentence to the point that I'm satisfied is really about getting it to a point where it doesn't bother me anymore. You know, whether it is actually sticking out that is, that seems off or wrong and that can be a really arduous process to pare something down or try it out in a lot of different ways, to sort of put it on the lathe and continue to try it in a lot of different fashions. And, it's rare, I mean, occasionally, there are sentences that I'm extremely thrilled by and that I feel like channel something. And there are then sometimes sentences or paragraphs, I mean, I any sentence to have a little bit of color to it. T there should be some sort of, like, the least minor surprise involved in every word, I think. But it has to happen within a certain amplitude, I guess, for me, so that it doesn't distract from, like the overall breadth. And you know, I think to me, I really do value books that are finishable. I'm someone who doesn't always finish a book. I mean, I'll generally go to like, at least three quarters before I give up on something, but I like a sense of drive in a book. I like a sense of what they used to talk with James Kane about, the unputdownable quality of a book. That doesn't have to be like a crime thing, it doesn't have to be plot oriented. But I do like the idea of writing books that seek to entertain and seek to hypnotize in some kind of way. And, I mean, I think most of good writing does that. It is a form of sorcery.
Ed Johnson ’93 I mean, I think that you're advantaged and you're kind of, your abilities just in a kind of formal level along those lines, but you're very canny about picking certain, sort of devices that also enable a kind of, whatever, like diagnosis or whatever, like the secret love affair, like, will they get found out? That, hunting the environmental kind of criminal, will he be caught?
Jon Raymond ’94 I mean, ideally, like any book has a moral question hovering over it that is a genuine question. That's not like, a fake question, like, oh should the lovers stay together when they really love each other? Like, yeah, of course they should. But like, a sort of a more interesting question for me is something, I mean, to me this is interesting, like, in “Denial”, should you punish corporate executives for the crimes that they presided over? Like, that's a question I actually don't entirely know the answer to. And that's very interesting for me to explore it in a fictional form and sort of go through the crime and punishment, sort of questions, not entirely knowing how it's all going to come out in the end because genuinely the scales balance for me in a certain way.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. And I think that that's also another kind of benefit to your experience and your style. One's never wanting those answers, reading your books. Like posing the question is oftentimes way more interesting.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah. I mean, whether or not I do that, I think that is the part of the job of a writer is to pose a good question, you know, and that is, at least 10% of the battle.
Ed Johnson ’93 The questions now are kind of like pouring in, Jon. And they're all actually pretty interesting. How important and intimate must your experience like a forest fire be in your creative effort? This is from Neil Holtzman.
Jon Raymond ’94 I’ll say not very. I think it takes a small little sort of catalyst to allow you to imagine some stuff. With a forest fireI have experience whenever I've been around fires, like, I know a little bit about it. Then there are lots of diaries by firemen and women, and there's like, you know, there's ample stuff out there that you can write, get in there. I mean, a lot of it is, with any art, I think is smoke and mirrors and you're trying to kind of use a tip of an eye to make some metaphors here, to use a tip of an iceberg to imply like, a much deeper kind of object. And so, a little bit of experience and then, a fair amount of research and some of that research really being around vocabulary, you know, like, I mean, just finding, right, kinds of, words to sell one's expertise about something when it may really only barely exist.
Ed Johnson ’93 And that's something the protagonist of God and Sex like is sort of doing.
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah, that is this. This process is described in the book for sure. That is part of his process is to sort of, become enough of an expert about his subject that he can beguile you
Ed Johnson ’93 Right, right. I mean, I don't remember where I heard this. It's Truman Capote who was, like, basically saying that experience is sort of overrated. [laughs]
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah, in my life that’s true.
Ed Johnson ’93 Rather if one is, is writing something tragic like you cannot kind of put yourself through tragedy to every time you want to render, right?
Jon Raymond ’94 I mean, that said, I will say that there is a certain experiential ballast that I think kind of drags behind you by 10 or 15 years where certain kinds of emotional tones or certain perceptions become sort of available to you over time through your experiences and through your processing of those experiences. So I think, experience is overrated, but it also kind of happens regardless of whether you're trying to get it or not.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right, right. It's being able to kind of, I guess, have the experience and being able to kind of, I guess take away from that and like,
Jon Raymond ’94 Or let it baste for a while, you know.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right. Lots of questions here about kind of…What would you like, something sort of short and to the point or something a little like, there's a lot of questions about faith and religion, as well. I would say, like, this is an interesting just kind of sentence from Becky Voorhees. Oregonian. Do you ever read nonfiction? And if so, like what? What kind of type of nonfiction?
Jon Raymond ’94 Yeah, I do, I read nonfiction, mostly with a sort of practical purpose in mind, I mean, at this point, various shelves of nonfiction that kind of, collect around particular projects. And, that might even be more the case with the film writing that I do, which has delved into sort of different periods and different kinds of historical moments, I guess. But really, most of the projects end up having a kind of bibliography in that way for me. And so for this one, I did read a lot of the current tree literature, partly as a way to sort of become fluent in the current platitudes and cliches around trees, of which there are many. People love talking about mother trees now and the rhizome and, the sort of interconnected forest and all that kind of business which I believe in and is great. But it also becomes a little bit rote at a certain point. And so, you know, for me, part of this kind of discourse analysis, which is very Swarthmorean, is to kind of recognize the, you know, repeating structure so that you can diverge from them in some way. I mean, it's funny, the writer in the book is a kind of concoction in my brain of a certain kind of writer, and I didn't have a precise, like, model in mind for this person until after the fact of writing the book. And the book takes place in southern Oregon, and there was a writer named, that I, ended up being turned on to by Swarthmoran Mod McCrory and her husband, who live down there, and it's not this book, but a different one called the Klamath Knot. But this guy, David Rains Wallace, really, kind of embodies. It's just one of those nice, interesting things where he kind of embodies the person that I was imagining in the book. And belatedly, it kind of came to me like, okay, this person does exist. This is like this character has enough reality to him that I can recognize him now and I see him. And the kind of books that he wrote, that he kind of worked in a Thoreau kind of ecological spin lane, but in a, in a modern kind of would have been helpful to find earlier, but, like trying to find the find when I did. So, yeah, anyway, there is nonfiction definitely in the media diet.
Ed Johnson ’93 Right, right. The stuff that you're, you know, saying about, sort of, the fashion ability of trees and sort of research and everything would kind of, as you say, kind of demand a sort of like, going outside of the wheelhouse.
Jon Raymond ’94 I mean, that's the fun of doing this as it is. And again, this can be like a Swarthmore plug, but it's like it is an ongoing education getting to do this kind of work. You know, I mean, you really do have to put yourself through seminar after seminar. And you become mildly expert in a lot of different things. And it is a training that, like a liberal arts college gives you, that you understand how to find out the information that you need and you understand how to historicize things. You know, just different kinds of critical mechanisms. I might be one of the few people that uses my liberal arts education on a daily basis.
Ed Johnson ’93 Well, I think it's true, especially like for someone who is creative to realize the implications of choices and as you say, like now that this kind of like, tree literature, is it kind of established, like maybe what you, what choices you want to avoid making or where you don't want to go. And I think that is a lesson that we may have learned a long time ago.
Jon Raymond ’94 Right. I mean, I'm all for glorifying trees and people for our time immemorial. I think there's a tree renaissance of literature going on lately. I think that that's happening. But I also could be wrong, it might not even be happening that much. But I think it is.
Ed Johnson ’93 But also too, I think it's a kind of… you mentioned, a book, that in a syllabus that you put together, like following the release of “God and Sex”, called “The Names” by Don DeLillo. And he talks about kind of natural places or these kind of like places in the world, like, you know, Delphi or these kind of like, follows or whatever, the sort of Near Eastern Desert and that these are sort of like, and I think in our case up here in the northwest, trees maybe serve as this kind of metapsychotic kind of cue, that allows for a certain kind of like, the sort of what we're talking about in a very sort of specific local place. A place with limits and boundaries, but that in itself is kind of, eternal, that is expansive, that is sort of infinite. And it's kind of like archetypical perfection.
Jon Raymond ’94 Sure. Yeah, that's true. Like Archetypal perfection. And that's not a thing I like groove on. But I will say like, going back and I, we should be attentive of the time because the bell is going to ring momentarily here, but I would say the, going back to the Sherwood Anderson a little bit, who is like a, sort of an avatar of regionalism and of like modernist regionalism. I mean, part of what I found interesting in his writing is that he treated his region like actually not entirely as an archetypal pure sort of rendition, but actually as a place with history and that has a particular relationship to, in his case, the rise of industrialism or the influx of new immigrants or the terraforming of the Midwestern Plains, like, these are things that happened in specific places to specific people, in specific ways. And, to me that has been a kind of compass that I've used in a lot of the writing is like what is what is the history of this place? Like, what is the, and how does it relate to sort of larger patterns of history and like, what are the things that really kind of only would happen here or what are what are the things that I can see by just sort of centering this particular patch of ground, which, you know, for me has been kind of, generally the West Coast and the American West in some kind of way. And it's just interesting, like certain histories and certain figures kind of, emerge a little bit, with that lens on things. And so, a kind of new age love triangle in southern Oregon that involves forest fire starts to feel regionally, maybe it does end up sort of feeling, like, archetypal in some kind of way. But I'm trying to get at it from just sort of paying attention to, sort of how time plays out in a discrete kind of area and like, not, not working, not working too hard to do anything deep with it, but just trying to describe it in some kind of way. And yeah, if it becomes resonant with other people, if it is a good description, I feel like the eternal archetypes will sort themselves out, you know?
Ed Johnson ’93 Yes, for sure. And I think that that's what's really like, maybe just a wrap what's really beautiful about your work, that it is actually like starting from something very specific with any ambition into something larger, but that in that kind of like, very prescribed place becomes, everything starts to happen there. You know in the best case scenario for, for your fiction, I think that that's, you know, that's the sort of like, you know, balance that you're kind of expertly striking, I think, especially throughout “God and Sex”. It is, something again, like, that's literally kind of like, supernatural, but then also something that is incredibly like, day to day and mundane. And neither is privileged as kind of foreign to me.
Jon Raymond ’94 And we’ll kind of wrap it up, but to me that was part of the challenge was how would I respond if a miracle happened? How long would it be until I started whittling it down into like, oh, that didn't really happen? Or like, that wasn’t that big of a miracle, you know, like, I mean, it would be like a minute, it would be like minimizing it within seconds of it happening. And thank you for all of your, like, amazing questions and to all the people out there as well for your attention
Ed Johnson ’93 Thank you, Jon,
Jon Raymond ’94 If I do know any of you - get in touch. And Ed, I will buy you a drink, like, momentarily. We will go meet
Ed Johnson ’93 Wonderful. Well, the first round is on me. We'll get these../ because there are a lot of great questions we didn't get to. And we'll try and get those to you. And maybe, in some form kind of for you to consider and possibly respond to. But, thank you so much for including…
Jon Raymond ’94 Oh, and thank you to Jason and to everyone involved in putting this stuff together. It's like, this is sort of a fantasy to get to talk to that Swarthmore alumni world. That's great.
Ed Johnson ’93 All right. Awesome. Thanks again, Jon.
Jon Raymond ’94 All right. Take it easy. Bye bye.
