This year we welcome Dr. Austin Johnson into our 10/12 English department. Dr. Johnson, a passionate reader and lover of all types of literature, is excited to share his enthusiasm for storytelling in his classes. Previously, Dr. Johnson taught at the Trinity Valley School, in Fort Worth, Texas. I sat down with Dr. Johnson to learn more about him and what he is looking forward to this school year.
Dr. Johnson “loves nothing more than reading books and stories and poems and having people who I can have intelligent, interesting discussions with about it.” He says he first fell in love with these skills during college and grad school.
When asked about a book that he recommends everyone should read at least once, he responded with, “Everyone should read Hamlet. There are books that I like more than Hamlet, but…every time I come back to Hamlet at a different stage in my life, it does something different for me.” When he first read it, “it was a story about who you want to be and how you want to be in the world.”
As a lover of books, Dr. Johnson didn’t hesitate when I asked him what his favorite book was in high school: The Lord of the Rings. “You feel that you’ve accomplished something. When you finish Lord of the Rings for the first time, it’s like waking up from a daze.” This is the feeling he gets after finishing a difficult and long book. “You’ve just been in this completely other place.”
It’s a dream of Dr. Johnson’s to meet the late English poet, John Milton. “I want to know if he really is a heretic.” Milton’s reputation from his writing has always sparked controversy. “He was a fascinating man, a central figure in the English Civil War, a deep thinker, a brilliant writer, but just a person with a lot of inherent contradictions.”
He is excited to teach new classes Albuquerque Academy has, that his previous school did not have to offer. “I’m most excited about getting to teach the subject oriented classes that we have here. The way the junior year is broken up here is that you have these perspective classes that you can take.” The juniors this year can take American literature, non-fiction, or beyond reality. After years of teaching AP Literature, it was time for a change. “Talking about the basics of story and how do they work, I was just getting exhausted with that.” Dr. Johnson said that he is excited to get into some “weird” books this year with the junior class.
After being asked about his favorite quote in literature, he didn’t pull something from Shakespeare. “A quote that has always meant a lot to me is at the end of Watchmen by Alan Moore” which is a comic book that he has taught before, “there’s a character who’s done something awful to try to save the world and there’s another character who is basically God.” The character who’s done this awful thing asks the God character, “‘Is it going to be okay? Did I do what’s right in the end?’ And the God character says back to him, ‘In the end? Nothing ever really ends.’” That is something that he doesn’t necessarily live by but bears in mind. “I think it’s important to remember that nothing ever ends. That it’s always ongoing and that time is going to keep unfolding and we are going to keep doing what we do no matter what”
