‘Stray City’ set in punk-rock Portland
Chelsey Johnson still suffers from punk damage. Just ask Carrie Brownstein of the band Sleater Kinney and the show “Portlandia.”
Johnson, who grew up in Minnesota before moving to Portland, Ore., in the early aughts, draws on that experience in her debut novel, “Stray City,” in which a young woman leaves the Midwest for Portland’s underground lesbian scene only to find herself pregnant after a drunken one-night-stand with a man. Despite the concerns of her shocked circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.
Johnson teaches at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and is a writer on Brownstein’s upcoming television show, “Search and Destroy.” They spoke to The Times before an appearance at the West Hollywood Library to discuss “Stray City.” The conversation has been edited.
You mentioned that at a recent book event someone asked about punk damage. What’s “punk damage”?
Chelsey Johnson: Punk damage is when you never get over that stage of hoarding things, even long after you should have outgrown it. In a hotel room you’d grab, like, somebody’s leftover rolls from the room service tray, you know? That’s punk damage.
Carrie Brownstein: I just worked with you. You have the most insane punk damage.
Johnson: It’s true. I have not recovered from my punk damage even though I have a respectable job. I’ll never lose that scarcity mentality, which I think was very characteristic of that scene and that time.
Brownstein: It’s interesting because you grew up middle class. It would make sense of if you grew up with food insecurity or something.
Johnson: Nope, I had everything I needed. But I was financially independent from the minute I finished college. I was not a trust fund kid. I actually think — and I just realized this now — the root of my punk damage is the summer I spent in Portland between my sophomore and junior years in college, when I was 19, because I was totally on my own. My parents gave me no money, and so I sold my plasma for a few weeks ... Brownstein: Oh, my God. Johnson: … and ate samples at Safeway for lunch and picked blackberries. They grow everywhere in Portland; they’re a weed. I was, like, “These are free?!”
Why is Part 2 of “Stray City” in epistolary form?
Johnson: I’d been writing the book for seven years and finally had a polished draft that was, like, 500 pages. I sent it to my agent, who said, “I really love this book. I really love Part 1 and Part 3, but let’s talk about Part 2.” I was, like, ‘Is it too long and slow and boring?’ ” [Laughs.]
Part 2 was exactly the kind of thing that people put down, somebody wandering around and thinking for 150 pages. So I thought: What if I just distill it down to calls and postcards and emails and answering machine messages? They were already in there. I cut everything except for the epistolary stuff. It was so fun. Just trashing 35,000 words. Brownstein: Jesus.
Does that sound painful to you, Carrie?
Brownstein: It also sounds freeing but, yeah, both. I’m not very precious about things — editing is such a crucial part of the writing process — but that’s a lot of words. Because there’s some part when you’re writing a book where you’re just thinking in terms of volume, like, “I did it. Thank God. I got that 600 pages, they must all be great!”
In “Stray City” queer identity is the norm and heterosexuality is deviant. Did you want to flip the script?
Johnson: Yes. That was really the intent. I don’t think I’d ever really written anything about my peers. I’d written a lot of short stories and some of them had gay characters, but it would be gay men, nobody who is like me. It was my first time trying to write about my world and my community.
Here, I wanted heterosexuality to be the weird thing you dabble in: how out of character, how offbrand, how strange and repulsive. We will disown you if you do it! I don’t think straight people are used to being the repulsive side of things. They’re not used to being the demonized or othered.