This week, award-winning author Adam Johnson is back in Tallahassee sharing his writing inspiration and details about a new book.
For Johnson, being back in Tallahassee feels like a homecoming.
“Well, I love Tallahassee, I love FSU. It’s where I wrote my first book. It’s where I met my wife who’s also a writer. There are so many inspiring teachers there that it will be great to reengage with the community.”
That will happen on Thursday of this week. Johnson is known for his fanciful works of fiction. But beneath the plot lines are messages about the relationship between humans and the natural world. That is an awareness he says was also honed during his time in North Florida.
“I remember being a graduate student in the mid-90s in Tallahassee and I would ride my bicycle down the St. Marks Trail, which is like a 50 kilometer round trip. I would see the rattlesnakes, the tortoises, down at the river I’d see manatees. And I believe those things are more scarce and we need to be ever more diligent in protecting those things.”
Johnson’s latest work is entitled “The Wayfinder.” It’s set in a time long past and contains such oddities as talking corpses, poetic parrots and a fan that supplies the breath of life. The setting is Polynesia, what many would consider a tropical island paradise. But there is a deadly conflict raging between warring factions on the island.
“One family’s trying to live within their means, which means their people have to make difficult choices. Very considered and painful choices. And this other community, their way of coping with scarcity is, they go and take stuff from other people. So whenever there’s scarcity, there’s destabilization, you have conflict, you have displacement and sometimes war.”
And Johnson says there’s a very good reason for all this taking place on a remote speck of land in the middle of a vast and unforgiving ocean.
“I think it’s much easier to see how precarious and how easily expended the resources are on an island and how much more quickly they’re felt. And so in a world of climate change and scarcity and displacement, by isolating on islands, I think readers will be able to see the effect of human intervention in ecologies more easily than we can see in this big country like America.”
Johnson will talk about his latest work, as well as the sensibilities that drive his creativity, this Thursday evening at FSU’s William Johnston Building, Room 2005.
https://midtownreader.com/event/2026-02-12/adam-johnson-w-wayfinder
