James Robison (author)

James Robison (born October 11, 1946) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet and screenwriter. The author of The Illustrator (1988) and Rumor and Other Stories (1985), his work has frequently appeared in The New Yorker and numerous other journals. He is a recipient of the Whiting Award for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has held teaching posts at numerous universities across the United States, including the University of Houston and Loyola University Maryland.

Robison was born in Worthington, Ohio, in 1946. His father was a graphic artist and freelance illustrator in Columbus, Ohio. Robison attended Worthington High School from 1960-1964. He attended Ohio State University. After working for several years as a commercial artist, he continued his education, and received an MFA from Brown University in 1979, where he worked with Robert Coover, R.V. Cassill, and John Hawkes. His creative thesis was entitled Gold Whiskey and Other Stories. After Brown, he traveled to Baltimore and Boston. In 1988, he began teaching creative writing along with his former wife, the author Mary Robison, at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where he would spend much of the next decade. Since leaving Houston, he has taught at various universities, including as Visiting Writer at Loyola College of Maryland, The University of Southern Mississippiand the University of North Dakota. He's been married to the writer, Mary Ferraro, since 1997.

Alan Cheuse, Grace Paley and James Robison
Bennington College Writers Workshop
Vermont, Summer 1987

Robison's first publications were in literary journals, including eight stories in The New Yorker beginning in 1979, as well as Grand Street, The Mississippi Review, Best American Short Stories 1980 (selected by Stanley Elkin), and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. The Mississippi Review devoted an entire issue to his work in 1994.

His stories were first collected in Rumor and Other Stories in 1985. His first novel, The Illustrator, appeared in 1988. He has at least one screenplay to his credit, 2008's New Orleans, Mon Amour. Since 2010, his work has undergone something of a renaissance, with numerous new stories, flash fictions, and poems appearing in journals such as BLIP Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Blue Fifth Review, and elsewhere. In 2012 he won a second Pushcart Prize for his short story "I See Men Like Trees, Walking" which will be included in the Pushcart 2013 Anthology.

Critical reception

Like most minimalists, he tends to eschew the term. Donald Barthelme called The Illustrator “a remarkable achievement,” and “a brilliant piece of work. It is funny and sinister and affecting and profound, all at the same time." Anthony Burgess said, "His ear is astounding, as is his narrative power, his ability to deal shocks and psychological truths, and his sheer grasp of the form." John Hawkes wrote "his stories are among the funniest, profoundest, and most exactingly written of any appearing in print." Of Rumor and Other Stories, Frederick Barthelme said "The world through James Robison's eyes is such a dazzling show of delicacy and precision that heartbreak turns on the choice of a verb. His dialogue is never less than perfect. Radiant, energetic, and above all, touching."

Recent work

Since 2010, Robison has again begun to publish extensively, with work appearing in The Manchester Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Blue Fifth Review, Commonline, BLIP Magazine, Blast Furnace, Scythe Literary Journal, Metazen, The Raleigh Review, Whale Sound, and Corium Magazine. Normally reticent, he granted an interview to Smokelong Quarterly, in which he discussed aesthetics: "I saw a Nova-like show about dark matter, how scientists know that it exists because some light waves firing to earth bend and curve all around a precisely shaped nothingness. I thought, boy howdy, this is how so much art, plastic or literary, from the 20th and 21st Century behaves: Its true content is what it refuses to describe explicitly, but the shape of its meaning may be precisely limned by implication." Contributing to a piece posted in BLIP, he wrote: "For years, decades, I tried to teach the students to do lightning strike stuff. Bang. Blinding light. Whiff of burnt earth. Then go away and do not worry about anything because you have not done the great damage of boring anybody. It was years of this. NOW many are doing it and NOW, 25, 30 years later, it's good that they are and I am happy to see such stuff and even that its name is FLASH fiction."

He is an active member of the Fictionaut site, of which he said: "Fictionaut is a test track and display room for works in process and as a writer, your readers there make up a community of trusted and truthful equals, eerily reliable so far. Writing into a void is miserable, like telling jokes to a wall. Fictionaut provides a round-the-clock, faithfully attentive audience. It's a post post graduate-level workshop." In an interview with Meg Pokrass at Fictionaut Five, he said: "A story must have three ingredients, like, oral surgery, Puccini’s Turandot, and divorce. Or hurricane science, a niece, and physics. If I have three large thoughts, intuitions or detections about three varied things, I’ll launch a story." Later in the interview, he said, "Before you can be a writer you must make it new and the only way to do that is to run a harrowing, fearless, ruthless self audit. A psychological, emotional, moral inventory. You must know who you are, without delusions or self-deception, and what you find is apt to scare the spit out of you. But that is the truth you must accept and the truth from which you will construct every sentence."

• 1980 Best American Short Stories
• 1989 Rosenthal Foundation Award in Fiction - American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1995 Whiting Award
• 1996 Pushcart Prize
• 2013 Pushcart Prize