Award-winning author Tim Johnston, "who broke onto the literary scene in 2015 with the New York Times bestselling novel Descent," died on May 26, the Gazette reported. He was 63. Johnston had already won numerous honors when he published Descent, a literary thriller that "tells the story of a teenage girl abducted while trail running in the Colorado Rockies, and of her father and brother, both tormented by her absence."
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| Tim Johnston | |
Johnston aimed to write stories that were ''interesting, compelling, true--and importantly, there is nothing unrealistic about them," he told the Gazette in a 2019 interview. "I'm not trying to come up with the most thriller-y situations.... I just have to write the book I want to write. I think it's important to keep evolving."
As an undergraduate focusing on creative writing at the University of Iowa, he took a course taught by John Leggett, then director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He earned his M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and in the 2010s taught writing at George Washington University and the University of Memphis. Johnston made a living for 25 years as a carpenter.
He published a novel for young adults, Never So Green, in 2002. The Gazette noted that his 2009 short story collection, Irish Girl, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, "and many of the individual stories in the collection garnered honors. The title story caught the eye of David Sedaris, who included it in an anthology he edited, and the humorist and essayist has been a champion of Johnston's work ever since."
Johnston's novel The Current (2019) "explores the aftermath of a deadly winter car accident in Minnesota, which links to a series of unsolved murders," the Gazette wrote, adding that his final novel, Distant Sons (2023), "sees key characters from Descent and The Current caught up in a decades-old child abduction mystery in rural Wisconsin."
"As someone who has worked with his hands in the heartland," he told Neal Thompson of Blood & Whiskey in 2023, "I feel a strong connection to such people, men and women. But I've also done my time in academia, as student and teacher, and I feel these two backgrounds--blue collar guy and college guy--simultaneously within me, and I do like to get both experiences in play, sometimes at odds with each other, in the storytelling realm."
In an interview with the Gazette, Johnston once said, "I'm not a religious person at all, but I do marvel at how the world works... how one small thing can change your life."