Surfing the Truth with Denis Johnson

A film adaptation of "The Stars at Noon" reminds me how much I miss my former teacher, not just his writing but his presence in this broken world.

Photo by Cindy Lee Johnson

By Michael Judge

I saw in the news recently that a film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel The Stars at Noon premiered last month at the Cannes Film Festival. My thoughts immediately traveled back to college and my first reading of the novel, a Graham Greene-like story of violence, depravity, and self-deception surrounding an American woman stranded in Central America during the 1984 Nicaraguan Revolution.

My second thought was how much I missed Denis, not just his writing but his presence in this broken world. A little over five years ago, on May 24, 2017, before I saw it in the news, an old friend informed me that Denis, our teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop a quarter century ago, had died of liver cancer at his home near Gualala, Calif. He was 67.

I’m glad I heard it from a friend, not some distant tweeter, reporter or obituary writer. I thought of Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unc…