Firing Jennifer Johnson

One of the things I love most about writing short fiction is the chance to sink into some other identity in order to see the world from someone else's eyes. This story, Firing Jennifer Johnson, plays with that in an attempt to explore themes of desire, maturity, and creativity, from a female perspective.

But wait. As a straight white male, is it acceptable for me to tell a story from the first-person POV of a gay woman? My answer as an artist is: Of course! No one can tell an artist to restrict his or her perspective, or to place certain ideas off limits.

But I also understand the view that the last thing the world needs is more straight white men telling other people's stories. So what should I do?

Keep writing, I guess. What else?

Because, going all the way back to the first stories I started dreaming up in elementary school, writing has always been a way for my mind to explore the world. What would it be like to be a carefree billionaire captain-of-industry, running the largest auto company in the world and battling evil Russian spies intent on blasting the space shuttle out of the sky with a super-plasma laser? (That was the plot of my first 'novel,' The Blue Mesa Takeover, starring Race McNelly, written longhand on fifty sheets of loose-leaf paper when I was in the fifth grade, and then bound in a duotang with illustrations and phony blurbs.)

Fast-forward thirty years and my mind went to different places. What would it be like to be a married woman who had to choose between professional success and her longing for the romance of youth? A close friend of mine was working through that dilemma at the time, and I wanted to understand it. That led me here, into the invented life of Jennifer Johnson.

FIRING JENNIFER JOHNSON was published by the Ilanot Review, an international literary magazine based in Israel, and the editors ended up nominating the story for a Pushcart Prize.