Bret Anthony Johnston wanted to go skateboarding, something he was once paid to do but that I haven’t done since the George W. Bush administration. I was willing to give it a try, but the best time for us to meet was late on a June afternoon, when the scorching sun still shone over a heat-soaked Austin. Instead, we decided to meet indoors at the Michener Center for Writers on the UT campus, where Johnston has been the director since 2017, to discuss his new novel, We Burn Daylight.
When Johnston opened a creaking door to welcome me, it was clear he regards the place as a sanctuary and was eager to be my tour guide. At the Michener Center, Johnston oversees one of the most respected writing programs in the country, where graduate students get funding for three years to hone their skills, critique each other’s work, and take literature classes. Students are not required to teach during their time there, which makes the few spots available annually some of the most coveted in the nation. Notable alumni include Philipp Meyer, Lauren Green, and Kevin Powers.
Endowed by the late novelist James Michener, the center is located inside the historic former home of Texas writer and folklorist James Frank Dobie. The house, shaded by old trees, is now part museum, part library, part classroom. Johnston’s office is on the second floor, steps away from a narrow room—Dobie’s former office, where he died in 1964—with a long table where students workshop their stories. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the house, holding literature by writers both living and dead. Many of the books were penned by former students.
After the tour and a sparkling water to cool off, Johnston led me downstairs to a cozy room. He looked more like an aging skater than a college professor in his vans, jeans, and T-shirt referencing Willie, Waylon, Whataburger, and the late great Texas skateboarder Jeff Phillips. He tucked his long iron-gray hair behind his ears and gazed out from behind thick, black-framed glasses.
The Texas heat affecting our plans seemed appropriate; Johnston uses our state’s weather to great effect in almost every story and certainly every novel he’s ever published. Most of his other work is set in his hometown of Corpus Christi, so high temperatures, humidity, and the awesome power of the Gulf waters loom as large as any characters. In We Burn Daylight, Johnston traded Corpus for the Texas prairie around Waco, and the coastal heat for the cold of an inland winter.
From an early age Johnston realized there was something special about books. “I always saw my parents reading,” he said, “so I understood it had a kind of heat to it.” Despite this early respect for the written word, it wasn’t until many years later, after a brief stint on tour as a sponsored skateboarder was cut short by a broken foot, that he decided to try his hand at contributing to the world of literature.
“It always sounds like a joke when I say this,” Johnston said, “but growing up [in Corpus Christi] at that time, I didn’t know you could still be a writer. I didn’t know that books were still being written.”
After a teacher suggested going to hear novelist Robert Stone read his work, Johnston showed up at a venue in Corpus Christi. “I walked in knowing that I loved to read, and I walked out knowing I wanted to spend my life trying to be a writer.”
When speaking about discovering and sharpening his talents, Johnston expresses respect for teachers who made a difference in his development as a writer. “But,” he insists, “I didn’t have a good education.” Still, after finishing undergrad at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and earning a master’s degree in English, he was accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop, perhaps one of the only writing programs as highly regarded as the Michener Center. There he studied with Ethan Canin, Frank Conroy, and Marilynne Robinson.
After graduating Iowa, Johnston set out on his own teaching career, beginning with jobs in upstate Michigan, followed by a stint in California, then a position as the director of creative writing at Harvard before moving back to Texas to direct the Michener Center.
In all his time away from Texas, Johnston didn’t write a single story set outside the state. His award-winning debut collection, Corpus Christi, features ten stories all set in his hometown. It’s representative of the kind of literary stories in vogue at the time of its 2004 release, more focused on precision in language and pivotal emotional moments in the characters’ lives than on complex plotting.
Johnston’s first novel, Remember Me Like This, is also set in his hometown and picked up thematically some of the same realms where his short stories left off. It’s a novel about a little boy’s disappearance and what it does to his family and the delicate balance of their fraught relationships. When the missing boy returns after years away, deferred grief transforms into something else—a sorrow for the time his family has lost, and what’s been taken from them all.
We Burn Daylight is set in the early nineties. It’s told mainly from the point of view of two young narrators. Roy is the youngest son of the sheriff. Jaye is the daughter of a disciple of “the Lamb,” a charismatic preacher with a compound full of live-in followers outside the Central Texas town where cult leader David Koresh and 75 of the Branch Davidians died in the fiery end of a siege in 1993.
The chapters go back and forth between each of the narrators’ perspectives, beginning with their early interactions, followed by a romance, and then a heightening around the unstoppable, tragic culmination of the federal government’s investigation into the Lamb’s large cache of weapons. Roy is dragged in as his father gets drawn into a siege of the compound, where Jaye lives with her mother. During the standoff, the feds cut power to the compound, and the cold Texas wind becomes as threatening as any of the weapons either side has trained on each other.
From the very beginning, Johnston’s spare, direct prose pulls the reader in with the power of a Richard Ford narrator. The first lines of the novel are from Roy’s perspective: “In those raw first weeks of 1993, before my family broke apart and before the March fires, before the world turned its lurid attention our way and before her and before everything else that changed me, I was fourteen years old and learning to pick locks.” In this one sentence, Johnston sets the stage and the tone for the entire novel. The stakes are high, violence is imminent, and our narrators will deliver their tale without sentimentality, though not without an almost rhythmic musicality.
Astute Shakespeare readers will recognize that the novel’s title comes from a speech Mercutio gives early on in Romeo and Juliet. Many Americans will recognize how the story echoes the real-life circumstances of what came to be known as the Waco siege.
Johnston was young, still living in Corpus when those tragic events occurred. He saw what happened on the news, a cult leader armed to the teeth who wouldn’t give in to federal law enforcement. Later, when he read more about Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and what happened, he became fascinated with more sprawling aspects of the history.
“I learned that there were members of the Branch Davidians who lived at the ranch but worked in Waco,” he said. “You could have a job in Waco and have a colleague and not know they were going back to the ranch until you found out they died in the fires.”
He began to wonder what it would feel like if you were not an adult, if you met someone you liked and didn’t know anything about their life back on the compound. The novel grew from there.
There’s a heaviness on every page of Johnston’s tale of doomed young lovers—in part because the reader likely knows how the siege in Waco ended and because Rome and Juliet is perhaps the most famous tragedy of all time.
I was struck, repeatedly, by how grief loomed over Johnston’s work. I wondered if there was a reason he came back to it again and again. We all have losses to shoulder, but Johnston’s fixation seemed significant. “I wonder,” I began, “Where do you think that grief comes from?” He paused for what felt like a long time—at least twenty seconds—and his eyes flitted from place to place in the small room.
“I hope it comes from the characters,” he said. He told me that when people meet him, they often tell him two things: that they thought he would be taller, and they didn’t think he would be funny. It seemed clear to me he wasn’t interested in saying how the grief is connected to him personally. “I hope it’s coming from the characters because I’ve been able to rinse myself out of the telling,” he went on. “Does that make sense?”
It did, in a way, and I don’t think a writer is under any obligation to explain how what exists on the page relates to their own life, but I still find it interesting when you can get some insight into those depths. So, I took a different tack.
A constant in many of his stories—in his first novel, and in this one—are narratives revolving around young people experiencing a cataclysm that alters their worldview. A dad committing a crime you can never forget, the death of a loved one, being the victim of a horrible trespass. The bildungsroman is an enduring arc, but was there a reason why he was drawn to that sort of story?
Another pause, but not as long. “If you put a gun to my head and asked, what drew you to these books? I think my answer would be aftermath,” Johnston said.
This made sense to me. After all, couldn’t aftermath be another way of looking at grief?
“When we think about the word aftermath, in terms of the aftermath of a tragedy, we think of it like the aftermath of a hurricane or a tornado, and that’s true,” he continued. “But there’s another meaning for aftermath. After the harvest of a crop, there’s new growth.”
In many ways, We Burn Daylight certainly aligns with Johnston’s interest in aftermath. The characters are looking back and recounting what happened, trying to make sense of what led up to the horrific events, but also how the events inform what came next.
In this page-turning drama of young love, misplaced devotion, and high tragedy, Johnston is faithful to some facts, but his story is a fictional retelling. Great care is used to humanize every character, from the teenagers the novel revolves around to the adults who clumsily decide their fates. Even the Lamb is portrayed with more sympathy than some would offer Koresh, though the fictional leader’s sins are not elided.
When I asked about the portrayal of the cult leader, Johnston said, “I hope that the Lamb is a complex enough character that the reader passes no judgement on the people who chose to follow him.”
Like all his work, We Burn Daylight is set in Texas, though this time much of the writing happened while he lived here, instead of from afar. Johnston told me that his decision to return to Texas had more to do with his admiration for the Michener Center than it did with his desire to come back to his home state.
“Texas is a really complicated place,” he said.
I asked him why he thought every piece of fiction he’d published was set there. “If I understood Texas, I don’t think I’d write about Texas,” he said. “If you pay close attention to a place like Texas, you are going to understand more than Texas.”
I asked if he thought of himself as a Texas writer. “I don’t ever think about it,” he replied.
Later, I wanted to know if he thought the siege could’ve happened anywhere but here. “I do think Waco could have only happened in Texas, but as forcefully as I believe that I think it could only happen at that time.”
I asked him if he thought we’d learned any lessons since then. “I wish I could say yes,” he said.
Johnston is a Texas writer, whether he cares to think about it or not. Like our greatest storytellers, he understands that the most fascinating dramas in a state obsessed with its own largesse happen in little human moments between characters. The high stakes of federal agents confronting a cult are thrilling, but it’s the quiet spark of connection, understanding, and recognition between his star-crossed lovers that will touch readers long after the novel ends.
Maybe, as Johnston said, we haven’t learned much since the Waco Siege. Perhaps, though, there’s something to learn about Texas from the warmth and empathy in We Burn Daylight.
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