Johanna Fox

Johanna Fox has worked on novels in third-floor walkups and rooms so cramped that her head was in one room and her feet in another. Nonetheless, she has completed three novels and has now expanded contentedly into an old farmhouse on the coast of Maine, with a garden that sprawls from the kitchen to the road.

Reck House will be bringing out Johanna's Landscape with Trees in spring, 2012,, and Learning to Drown in late 2013.

In her current project, Artifacts, linked stories connect six generations of one extended family: no one speaker knows all of the facts about any other, but as they explain what they do know – or what they think, or suspect – they illuminate the truth. The following excerpt comes from one of the stories in that book.

From My Grandfather's Trunk:

When they closed the house I don't know what they did with the brass bullets – one empty, a case, the other rocket-shaped and real – that sat in front of the Reader's Digests and the pictures of Raymond and Dorcas and Ann. I don't know what happened to the upstairs refrigerator, whose motor used to wake me when I was five or seven and sleeping beside it on the soft brown sofa. I don't know if they changed the pump, the pipes, whatever it was that made the bathroom sing. I heard that the ornamental ceilings would be kept, but surely there were losses: the green pagoda wallpaper from the dining room, the glass shelves in the window that held cactuses in thimble-sized pots, the burdocks my brother Pete got into, crossing lots to play baseball with one of the neighbors.

It was George's house, though I didn't realize it at the time. To me it was simply the collection of objects and textures that placed me at my grandmother's three or four times a year: the hot, blistered green paint on the front door; the square orange and yellow plates; the etched water glasses; that feathery sofa. We sat in wooden rockers on the glass porch, stewing, like the chicken inside, while the afternoon broadened.

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