Dave Johnson
I grew up under the seldom clouded, pale-blue skies of East Texas in the ever dwindling town of Thorndale. I spent my teen-age years chopping cotton and hauling hay for cash, hunting patches of mesquite for dove and quail, and spending as much time as possible IN the coolly-shaded San Gabriel River, a tributary of the Brazos. I recall a muggy springtime afternoon spent on a gravel bar--the only place to be safe from fire ants--with my legs half in the swollen river. While I periodically checked for leeches between my toes, I read randomly from an anthology of Emerson's poetry and immediately saw connections between the flooded oxbows and braids and the words on the page.
Since then I've done some rambling around, mostly looking for good fly-only
water, and somehow managed the beginnings of a family and the completion
of three degrees--B.A.s in history and philosophy from Indiana-Purdue
University and a masters in literature from Colorado State. Currently,
I'm a Ph.D. student, and my scholarly interests include ignoble beasts
(specifically Cyprinus carpio), the history of taste as it pertains
to landscape, postcolonial theory and literatures, and the application
of ecocriticism to early modern/renaissance texts. And so that I don't
get too lazy, I am also co-editing a collection of essays about maligned
species, tentatively titled Trash Animals.