On the hard, flat cement of Corpus Christi, Bret Anthony Johnston got his first unconventional lessons in what it takes to be a writer.
“As a skateboarder, you spend a lot of time on the ground. You are on the ground a lot. You are falling and hurting yourself on the ground constantly,” he says.
“I’m falling all the time in stories, too.”
One takes wood and wheels, the other ink and language, but skateboarding and writing are practically inextricable to the onetime-sponsored-skater-gone-author, whose latest collection of stories, Encounters With Unexpected Animals, arrives Feb. 24 via Random House. In the empty pools and tree-bent sidewalks of the Gulf Coast, a young Johnston, who I imagine boasting a less gray version of the same loosely curled, shoulder-length hair, was picking up the first notes of his deeply intuitive world-building and concise prose.
“Once you become part of even a small skate community, you’re listening to different music, you’re looking at architecture differently. You’re looking at authority differently,” Johnston says. “That change in perspective, that became pervasive to the point of [altering] my DNA.”
Precariously balanced, attuned to minute shifts in gravity and weight distribution, and ostracized from the football culture of Eighties South Texas, Johnston was glimpsing a world on the margins, a “little bit to the left of what everybody else would look at head-on.” By the time he started writing in earnest, the keen observer had internalized another crucial lesson from his bloodied knees and elbows: “If you want this thing to be good, why would you expect that to come quickly or easily?”
If his position as director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, his inclusion in 2025’s Best American Short Stories, and the trick he lands in the cover photo of this story are any indication, time and determination have paid off for Johnston, whose work has appeared in many other prestigious publications and garnered him the Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation, among other accolades.
All skate tricks look pretty impressive to me, but not so for the sport’s premier household name, Tony Hawk, who’s shared ramps and conversation with Johnston for features in the The New Yorker, The New York Times, and GQ.
“Whenever I talk to Bret about skating and skate tricks – he’s in his 50s, right?” Hawk asks me. It’s true. “He’s still after it. And some of the tricks that he still wants to learn or gets advice on, I [am] like, really?” The stoic skater raises an eyebrow. “They’re not the kind of tricks that I’m even teaching [to] 30- and 40-year-olds that are not pro skaters. But he has a really good technique of translating – he does skate big ramps – but he has a good way of translating vert tricks to other smaller ramps too.”
Hawk’s firmly in Johnston’s camp when it comes to skateboarding’s overarching, life-altering educational power. He sees the board’s influence in everything he touches, “all the way to grandparenting.”
“It’s about commitment and perseverance,” says Hawk. “Beyond that, not just learning to accept losses or failures, but embracing that loss or failure as a lesson.”
Pursuing skating, like following any passion – or obsession, as Johnston would characterize it – has rolled the author into the path of unanticipated stories.
“In a practical way, the story ‘Paradeability’ came from skateboarding,” Johnston says of the opening tale in his upcoming collection. In Houston for a skating trip with a childhood friend, the shredder checked in, shins bloodied from a day on the ramps, to a hotel hosting a clown convention.
“We walked into this hotel and there were 400 clowns,” he says. “I would get up super early, and I would go to the clown convention. I would go to the panels and learn about all these things and then I thought, ‘I can’t remember reading a story about a clown convention.’ So it feels like a responsibility to write it, but I would never have been at a clown convention if it weren’t for skating.”
“If you want this thing to be good, why would you expect that to come quickly or easily?”
Bret Anthony Johnston
Obsessions, like the one the protagonist develops for clowning in the American Short Fiction-featured tale, and, certainly, like the one Johnston harbors for ramp tricks, crop up again and again in the lives of his empathetically rendered characters. “What people do is betray themselves in their obsessions,” he says. “That feels endlessly mysterious and revelatory to me.”
His stories divulge this same earnest enamorment with the world, its creatures, and their lives of simple mystery – the kind of open consideration that might make a non-clown attend a clown conference. The desires and insecurities of his characters so often come to light in the glow of their obsessions and, as the title of this collection cheekily suggests, their relationship to non-human creatures. In Encounters With Unexpected Animals, kids’ meal toys offer a father a risky opportunity; an ex-husband searches for a snake in a recently abandoned house; a mother buys “girlie magazines” to soothe her PTSD-addled son; and horses mark the passing of time for a hardworking rancher and his family.
Some of these stories have lived in draft pages for years, relentlessly weeded and pruned into their current form; others came together more quickly in much-needed breaks between Johnston’s two novels. Others still, like “Paradeability,” have been out in the world for a little while. In all of them, you’ll find Johnston’s sharp enthusiasm for editing and intuition for surprise, part of his sidewalk-crashing education in skating, writing, and teaching.
Young Life
It was the countercultural ethos of skateboarding and its exhaustive requirement of patience, balance, and revision that helped establish Johnston’s writerly eye at a young age, but, as he says, “once a skater commits to something, [they] tend to finish.” In the late Eighties and early Nineties, he followed hard-fought skate tricks to contests, sponsorships, and interstate tours until five shattered metatarsals on a ramp in South Carolina sidelined that lifestyle.
Johnston has clearly never let go of the board. That time off his feet, though, may have helped him turn his dogged conviction to his first love: stories.
He grew up loving language and reading but – and the grim-expressioned writer promises this is not a joke – he thought living writers were something of an extinct creature until early in college. “I thought all of the books had been written, and our job as people who love to read was to make it through as many of them as we can in our lifetime,” he says. “I just didn’t know that writers were still a thing.”
A beloved teacher at Del Mar College, Mike Anzaldua – as so many great teachers have – sensed something in his young English student. The professor gifted Johnston a ticket to a Robert Stone reading. “What happened in that hour was I laid eyes on a living, breathing writer for the first time,” says Johnston, emphatic still with the awe of the moment. “Now that I knew that it was possible, I knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t try.” Without Anzaldua, he insists, “There is no world in which I had ever said to anybody: ‘I want to be a writer.’ Why would you ever say that? You might as well say, ‘I’d like to grow wings and fly,’” he says.
His first collection of stories, Corpus Christi, established the landscape most of Johnston’s fiction would come to inhabit: the so-named land of his childhood, hemmed by oil refineries and buffeted by hurricanes, crawling with the occasional caimans and boa constrictors that slither into his storytelling. His two novels, We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This, and this latest collection of stories, remain firmly rooted in Texas imagery, though Johnston wrote most of them while living elsewhere: first, as a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and, briefly, as a teacher there; then as the director of creative writing at Harvard. He held that post for 11 years before he returned to Texas to lead the Michener Center in 2017.
In a 2011 interview with American Short Fiction, the writer speculated that his time away from the state further piqued his interest in its distinct topography and cultural identity. Now, nearly a decade into his return, Johnston finds that being back “hasn’t in any way diminished my interest in writing about Texas.”
“I really, really love Texas, but I do not understand Texas,” he says. “Texas breaks and restores my heart on a daily basis.”
The Beginning of Wisdom
When Johnston arrived in our heart of Texas, the Michener Center’s “jolly” and “generous” inaugural director, James “Jim” Magnuson, quickly became a friend and mentor for Johnston as he settled back into Lone Star soil and picked up the reins of the esteemed writing program. Looking back on many meals the two shared before Magnuson passed away earlier this winter, Johnston remembers a moment in each one where the prolific writer became seemingly overwhelmed by gratitude for his time at the MFA program.
“He would start smiling and shaking his head like he couldn’t believe it, and then he would just look at me and he’d say, ‘It’s the greatest job in the world, isn’t it?’” the second-ever director recalls.
Johnston’s found that to be true for him, too: It is the best job. Bustling from reading to writing to workshop and back, helping students navigate the business and process of publishing, invigorates the teacher. “It never fails to make me want to go home and read, and make me want to go home and write and raise my own standards based on the work that they’re doing,” he says.
“When you arrive at the Michener Center, you can almost feel the ghosts, living or dead, of all the students that came before you,” one of Johnston’s former students, Nathan Harris, recalls. In those hallowed Forty Acres, Harris found Johnston a hands-on, workshop-oriented teacher, eager to tool away at the twists and turns of storytelling – an action the mentor describes with – what else – a skateboarding analogy.
“If you’re trying to do a tail slide, and the board isn’t sliding, that means you need to put more pressure on the tail or the nose. So you try that,” Johnston explains, illustrating with expertly executed hand motions. “When I read someone’s stories – or when I read my own, but certainly when I read other people’s stories – it will often feel to me like: ‘This is working really well.’ ‘You need to put more weight here.’ ‘Here, you need to lean this way.’”
“Bret was the first instructor I had who had a very concentrated focus on craft,” says Harris, now the author of two award-winning novels. “He was there to teach us the nuts and bolts of how a story is put together and taken apart. He demystified the process of writing for me in a way I had never experienced.”
“I want us to apply pressure to the work,” Johnston emphasizes. “I want us to find the spaces in the stories that are soft, that need to be reinforced or need to be revised – but I don’t ever want anybody to be hard on the writer, and those two things are not synonymous.”
Reena Shah, whose debut novel, Every Happiness, hit shelves this month, could feel that delicate separation between writer and writing in Johnston’s teaching. “There’s a lot of care for the writer in his approach,” she says. “He really does care about us as individuals first. He knows that that’s where the writing comes from.”
The energy he gets from his students is evident in his glowing recitation of their plotlines, structural formations, and world-building elements that seem to rest at the top of his mind, waiting to be recalled. His deep attention to people is one of the things Shah sees illuminate his writing as well as his teaching.
“He has a lot of care for his characters. You see it in the language. You see it in how these characters develop,” she says.
“The characters feel incredibly rich with life and interiority. [They are] three-dimensional, and so their actions, when they take them, feel earned,” Harris agrees. “His talent allows him to really write whatever he wishes and for it to feel realistic.”
“He really does care about us as individuals first. He knows that that’s where the writing comes from.”
Reena Shah on her mentor, Bret Anthony Johnston
Playing the Ghost
Once, for an anthology that never got published, Johnston was asked to find the earliest piece of writing he’d done. That short story, penned in third grade and preserved alongside photos and other school projects, reported of a sneakily given puppy, a surprise from the writer’s father. He titled the piece: “Is It a Bear?”
“You’re writing about the same things now that you were writing about when you were a kid,” he realized. “And for sure, the three things that I write about are animals, families, and secrets.”
Across his latest collection, animals appear as gifts, as reminders of loneliness, or testaments to loyalty. The dream of having a pet boa in “Young Life” illustrates adolescent aspirations and the fear of them, feelings of ineptitude. In other places, they crawl into sentences as distinct similes – “like a silver fish flashing through murky water”– and as common idioms – as in “never look a gift horse in the mouth,” a subtle reminder of how omnipresent our non-human companions are.
“When I read stories that don’t have animals in them – not always, but a lot of the times – it feels claustrophobic in a certain way, like we’re not acknowledging the spectrum of existence and consciousness. Which sounds very heady, and I don’t really mean it that way,” Johnston explains. “I mean it feels limited. It feels too linear.”
As unwieldy as even human characters can be, Johnston situates them in an ecosystem full of beings that take on pseudo-symbolic lives while living out personalities of their own, like a neighbor’s opossum-chasing dog and a surefooted horse seemingly delivered by hurricane. Or, sometimes, animals are simply part of encyclopedias read to a grandmother at bedtime, a normal and mundane part of quotidian life.
Families, cut into fragile pieces or entangled in sticky friend networks, live their lives with and around these creatures. The secrets they keep, and occasionally exchange, often take such a looming form they might as well be characters themselves.
“I don’t think I’m going to exhaust those subjects, and I don’t think they lend themselves to the stories being repetitive,” Johnston says. These things that life is made of spring eternal, constantly finding new forms in our mundane experiences and rendered relatably magical on Johnston’s carefully crafted pages.
The backdrop of these familiar dramas and everyday tragedies is another boundless source of weighty tales: Texas. “Texas is America writ small. It feels like if you look closely at Texas, you are going to see what’s happening in the country on a very small scale,” says the author. “We can talk about Texas’ relationship to violence, we can talk about Texas’ relationship to compassion. We can think about Texas’ relationship to cities, and we can talk about Texas’ relationship with rural populations. And I don’t know that there’s really any other state in the Union where those things are so available.”
Across the Lone Star State’s wavering hills, knotted swamplands, and sun-beaten coasts, Johnston tracks his characters’ lives, prodding at their location-specific relationships, their motivations and histories. In this collection’s titular narrative, a father wonders what an older, green-haired girlfriend sees in his scrawny son. In another, a neighboring family makes a temporary move to Florida, mystifying the young narrator, whose parents offer, by explanation, a simple catchphrase: “They’re Republicans, Joshie.”
The prize Johnston’s keenly trailing, with the instincts and training of a reliable bloodhound, is a surprise. Through small-town gossip and high school rumors – “I heard the stain looks like a pot leaf” – the intrepid author draws out his prey, waiting for surprise to pounce just as we readers do, furrowing our brows and flipping the pages.
“If I know what happens next, I’m bored out of my skull,” Johnston drawls, with a hint of that stereotypical skater-slacker sensibility – minus all the slacking. The surprise, always a step out of sight for the reader, is squirmy and unruly.
All these years into a career in writing, you might think those thrill-seeking senses are foolproof, but for Johnston, the path just becomes more complicated. “The longer I do it, the harder it gets,” he says. “Writing feels really easy at the beginning, and then the longer you do it, it gets harder and harder and harder.”
Like all those kickflips and fakies and frontside blunts on the rims of the empty pools of coastal Texas, the challenge isn’t an obstacle for this author: It’s the point. If it wasn’t getting harder, he’d move on to another trick.
“There is a kind of victory in the act of a story being told,” he says. “It’s the greatest feeling in the world – with the possible exception of riding away from a skateboard trick you’ve never done before.”
This article appears in February 20 • 2026.