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Date: 11/3/2021
BELCHERTOWN- With three novels and one poetry collection already completed, Belchertown author and Ludlow High School teacher Eric Johnson recently released his second poetry collection “Transitions” on Sept. 29.
While “Transitions” is a work of poetry, Johnson said the book uses a narrative structure following a young man during his first year of high school.
“‘Transitions’ is actually a narrative written in verse. So, the whole thing when taken from beginning to end tells the story of a young man who is going from middle school into high school and follows him over the course of a year from August into June,” he said.
Johnson said the novel follows the young man as he struggles with depression, attempted suicide and his recovery back to the light.
“It tells the story of his life trying to find his place in high school and the world when things are not going well for him. He runs into trouble at home, and because of an injury, his father becomes addicted to pain pills and becomes abusive of his mother and toward him. He ends up finding his father’s pills and alcohol and starts experimenting with that and his life goes downhill until he attempts suicide. The rest of the book is about his recovery and to claw himself out of depression and back into joy,” he said. “And it has a happy ending.”
He said he was inspired by this story through seeing the effects of suicide on people he knew.
“My inspiration writing this came twofold. The first is that I have known a lot of people who were young and did not have a happy ending to their stories, who contemplated and attempted suicide and were unfortunately successful in those attempts. I have seen what that has done to the people around them and the pain that leaves behind,” Johnson said.
Johnson said he contemplated suicide himself before realizing the support system he had to help him.
“That makes me think of my own life and how I was a young man in high school and got to the point where I was contemplating suicide and I wrote a note and hid it in my bedroom that said, ‘If I find this in a year than I’ll do it,’ and luckily enough I was able to get myself past that point,” he said. “When I found the note again a few years later I had worked my way through that darker point and had gotten to a much better place by realizing the support system I had around me.”
Johnson said he decided to write “Transitions” in the form of poetry because he said there is a magical quality to poetry that is hard to replicate in prose.
“I think poetry is a way to get to some of the deeper ideas and concepts in a very quick manner. You can do it in prose, but poetry has a magical quality to it that allows you to evoke emotion both through the way it looks on the page, the way it sounds when you hear and the unique aspects of rhyming and line length,” he said.
Johnson also detailed his writing process for “Transitions” and said he started with a macro view of 15 key scenes before working on each individual poem.
“I outline the 15 key scenes that I want in the whole story, and I did that with my novels and with ‘Transitions.’ Then I spread that out and I knew I wanted to do two to four poems per month, and I ended up with 59, then I plan the five key steps of the story, like your inciting incident, your turning point and climax for each of the poems and I designed each poem so when taken individually they told their own story that fit within the greater scope, like a chapter in a book,” he said.
With “Transitions” published, Johnson said he is already planning his next poetry collection which will focus on the concept that while people may be heroes in their own stories, they may be villains to others.
“I have another collection in the planning stages. My next collection I want to focus on the fact that we are all heroes in our own stories, but we tend to be villains in somebody else’s. I am going to focus on five different characters, bring each of them through a hero’s journey but they are the villain of one of the other five characters,” he said.
Johnson said he initially started writing poetry in middle school before diving into it more in high school to help process the world around him.
“I have been writing, particularly poetry, since middle school, but I did not really like it back then. When I hit high school, it became a way for me process everything. It was my way to deal with the stresses that came with being in high school, meeting people, falling in love the first time and all that stuff,” he said. “It was a way to process the world around me and see the good in it even when situations do not always make that obvious.”
To date Johnson said he has written two collections of poetry and three novels.
Along with planning his next poetry collection, Johnson said he is actively writing the third book in his “Dreamweaver Diaries” series, which he hopes to release in early 2022.
“I am working on book three of my ‘Dreamweaver Diaries’ series, I have book one and two out for that, but I am about a quarter of the way through book three. I was hoping to get that one out this year, but it is looking more like it is going to be early next year,” he said.
Johnson added that he thinks “Transitions” is his best work.
“I think this is my best work that I have ever done. It is by far the most heartfelt and the one that brings out the most vulnerability. It is the work I am the proudest of at the moment,” he said.
Interested readers can purchase “Transitions” and Johnson’s other books wherever books are sold and online at https://www.ericjohnsonwriter.com.