on finding god in the work: leah johnson in conversation with jeanna kadlec
and also on financial security, pentecostalism, & the west wing
If you’re going to talk about authors who are revolutionizing the YA space, you have to talk about Leah Johnson.
The bestselling author of the critically acclaimed You Should See Me in a Crown and Rise to the Sun — which is out today wherever books are sold! — writes coming-of-age rom coms for queer, Black, Midwestern protagonists. In Leah’s case, she is quick to point out that she writes these stories because she was once a queer, Black, Midwestern teenager, and that those are the kids she is still writing towards and for.
Leah joined me over Zoom to discuss how her own deeply religious, Pentecostal upbringing in Indiana informed her relationship to writing and creativity — and how God still shows up in her writing today.
This interview has been edited for length
Jeanna Kadlec: Leah! Amazing to have you here. If you could introduce yourself to Astrology for Writers newsletter readers?
Leah Johnson: I'm an educator and the author of the books You Should See Me in a Crown and Rise to the Sun. And I’m a Midwesterner. That’s it! I write books and I teach kids.
JK: Just to dive right in: What is spirituality or faith to you at this moment in time?
LJ: I have an ever evolving relationship with the institution of the church. I was raised in the church and the Pentecostal tradition, so I spent my life, until I turned 18, actually going to church on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Monday night Prayer, Tuesday night Evangelistic Services, Friday night worship, Saturday choir practice. Most days of my week were spent within the physical confines of the church. To me, that embodied what it meant to be someone who faithfully practiced. It took a lot of years for me to divorce myself from that idea that you had to be in the physical space.
Right now, I think faith looks a lot to me like finding God everywhere and in everything. That feels like a really hokey thing to say, but it’s true of my experience — like, God is on the page; God is in the way my dog is trying to eat a fly outside of the patio; God is in the way I'm able to love my friends. Spirituality is still very much bound up in this idea of the God that I was raised with, but the practice of that has changed quite a bit.
JK: That makes total sense to me, that there’s been a shift in— how to put it — like the barriers you had to go through to find God, to this discovery that God is actually accessible everywhere.
LJ: So I was raised in the Church of God in Christ, which is like your quintessential foot stomping, hand clapping, speaking in tongues, we’re all on the floor. One of the things that I didn't understand when I was growing up is that for a lot of the history of the Church of God in Christ, this is a space where Black folks got to go and be their own gods. This is why we have these massive chairs, why we pontificate the way we do. These are people that we hold up to be the messenger between God and us. We had to create spaces in which we got to be the masters of our own universe. And so much of that was performance. It was how the space looked. It was how we carried ourselves within the space. That's why you have your massive sun hat. That’s why the First Lady is wearing this bomb suit. That's how we can consecrate ourselves through performance.
Now, I'm disinterested in performance entirely [when it comes to] my relationship to God as I know Him now. That was freeing to me, to realize that I don't want to be bound by all these expectations and rules and parameters that we placed on each other and ourselves. I know my walk with God is whatever I decide that it's going to be.
I think a lot of that has to do with coming out and taking ownership of my queerness and realizing that, like, oh, I can't perform, so why not just completely remove myself from the reality of that?
JK: I did want to ask, because of having grown up in such a devoutly Black Pentecostal tradition, which is so fucking specific, how that informed your scripture reading and Bible study growing up, and then how that impacted your relationship with literature and how you write?
LJ: That is a fantastic question. I've never talked about faith in this way before, actually, and it's interesting because it plays such a huge role in the way that I still understand and metabolize story.
First of all, I knew that I could read when I went to church and we stood up, which we did every Sunday morning, because you know how it goes. So, we were doing the scripture on our feet, and I looked down at the program, and I was like, whoa — I’m identifying words. And it was such a huge moment for me as a child full stop, but also as a child of God, because I realized that I could be a part of this in a way that I'd never been a part of it before.So this thing that had kept me separate from everybody around me and the way that they practiced, I now got to be enveloped in. Reading the Bible really opened everything up for me.
I think for all the things that the church did wrong — and there is a laundry list of items — it also made me very bold in ways that some of my friends that were not raised in the church are not bold. Like, I don't have the same barrier for embarrassment or humiliation, that I think a lot of my friends do because getting up in front of one hundred people and speaking in tongues or shouting or falling on an altar before God and like, you know — *laughs*
JK: *laughs* Oh yes, I am familiar.
LJ: Those things are embarrassing! If you spend time with them, to make yourself so vulnerable that you cry and snot and fall out in front of all these people — that’s a pretty humiliating thing when you break it apart. But it was not a humiliating thing for me, because I was taught that it was the ultimate connection. If you can move yourself out of the way and allow God to speak through you, then you, then, have tapped into something that is sacred. And I wanted that.
JK: That’s devotion. Like going up to altar calls and being prostrate at the altar — that’s devotion on Sunday morning, that was a sign of a strong faith.
LJ: I was doing it right. If you’re doing that, then you’re doing it right.
Church gave me a sense of boldness, and I think that boldness has translated into my work. I don't experience shame anymore when I write, because if God is in the work, then the way that I can be devout in the work is to approach it shamelessly the same way that I would if I was praised dancing or shouting or going up for an altar call.
I think shifting those gears but reapplying those same principles to the work has actually been an incredible means for me to stay in touch with the thing that I thought I had to give up.
JK: My heart is just bursting hearing you talk about it like this. It’s fucking rad.
LJ: I’m glad I get to talk about this with you. I'm glad you get it. A lot of writers are weird about God. I also think it’s uncool [these days] to be somebody who believes.
JK: Whatever you believe! Like, I talk to folks who are Jewish, who are ex-Christian — like myself — but we still do other witchy stuff. It’s not the postmodernist skepticism.
LJ: And “uncool” is not exactly the word I’m looking for, but you know what I'm saying?
JK: I do.
LJ: Like, there's something to being a Walden Pond-like, “I am my own God” type of writer. This, the self as the ultimate. I'm not interested in the self as the ultimate. The self is actually the least important thing, in my opinion, in the writing process. I think that, too, is a result of faith.
JK: It’s interesting — the self features very prominently in the memoir I’m working on, but it’s still in the tussle of losing my Christian faith and knowing that I still can’t be an atheist because I’ve experienced too much of the spiritual realm. So what and who am I instead, when I believe we’re all connected and that everything has a spirit? It’s still not the pivot to that realm of, well nothing and no one matters and I am entirely self-determining.
LJ: In the personal essay —which I occasionally dabble in — you know, it’s me, I am the main character. But to your point, there is a bigness to thinking of the self in that context, that I wouldn’t write this essay if I didn’t think that this was also about you, and this was also about us and the way that we work together.
JK: Absolutely. I did want to ask what your writing routine is like, because you did say that God shows up for you on the page and I’d love to hear about that.
LJ: My writing routine is pretty chaotic these days. When I wrote You Should See Me in a Crown, it was super regimented because I was so broke. I was working three jobs at the time. I worked at Catapult, so I was going to work from 10 to 6. I was taking an hour break to walk from Flatiron to Union Square, where I could call my mom, get something to eat, and I'd sit down at The Bean right across the street from The Strand and write for four or five hours before taking the train back to Bushwick. I was also doing social media for Electric Lit at the time, so when I got back to Bushwick, I would do social from like midnight to 2 or 3 am, however long it took. Then I’d wake up and do it again the next day. So my writing practice had to be very strict, because otherwise I was never going to get the book done.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I think about this in the same way that I think about the way that I was taught to practice Christianity, it’s very similar [in how it was] highly regimented. That’s the way it has to be, so you can show God “I respect you enough, I hold you in high enough esteem, that no matter what else is going on in my life, this is a thing that takes priority.”
It was urgency. That urgency doesn't ever go away for me, but also, I had enough respect for the book and story to know that I had to show up for it every time I got the chance to show up for it.
JK: You said that the process for this new book, Rise to the Sun, is more chaotic. So my question is, is this newer process what your routine actually looks like with more financial security?
LJ: Let me tell you. When I started making money, everything was easier. When people are like, money doesn't buy happiness — oh no, it definitely does. And you’d know that money could buy happiness if you've ever been dirt poor. Part of why my process is so different now is because I have a type of security I never had before.
I have to write quickly because my publication schedule is sort of stressful. I write and put out a book per year. In 2022 and 2023, I’ll actually be writing two books per year, because I have a YA and Middle Grade schedule. But every time I sit down to write, it no longer feels like somebody is holding a gun to the back of my head — if you don't do this, you’re done. That’s not how this feels anymore.
But if you want to talk about class, that’s a lifelong holdover. I was poor my entire life until I got to my mid-twenties. My writing process did change quite a bit when I was able to buy my way out of desperation.
JK: I super appreciate your transparency on that, and just like so many, many amen amens to the people who say money can't buy happiness, like —
LJ: It’s absurd.
JK: Fuck those people.
I did want to ask, as someone who is also a Midwesterner, and you write protagonists who are Black Midwesterners. Can I ask how it's been for you in the publishing world, writing against that insistent coastal media narrative of the Midwest as a white rural space?
LJ: For me, I never felt like there was an option to do anything else. Like even when I was in grad school — and I went to Sarah Lawrence, so I was on the East Coast for some time. Even when I was there, I was always writing towards home. I had this professor once who told me and this other guy in my class — one of my friends who was from Jersey, and he loves Jersey — and my professor was like, “Places like New Jersey and Indiana only exist so that people will leave them.” I was like, that is the most absurd, but also one of the most offensive things that anybody ever said to me.
And I have had some offensive stuff said to me — obviously, I'm Black and queer — but that really stuck with me, because everything I do is for the place that raised me. All the stories I tell are for the Black kids that are growing up here because, like, what else do we have? It’s not like we have a lot of media that reflects our experiences. It's not like, even within our lived experiences, we have a lot of people around us who can affirm us or validate what's going on.
All of my work is deeply Midwestern and also deeply Black, even if there are a lot of white people populating these stories, because for me, there is no alternative. This is all I know, really, is what it means to be a kid growing up out here.
And in a practical sense, I have a lane that nobody else occupies. When I look around, I'm not seeing a bunch of other Black queer women from where I'm from writing rom coms. Because I'm one of the very few people who does it, then it behooves me to keep doing it. It’s good for me as a writer so that people know what to expect every time they come to my books, but also, it's just good for me as a person, because it feels really restorative to write back to that.
JK: The fact that you use the word restorative — if the work is feeding you, what more could you possibly want?
LJ: I had to have this conversation with my agent recently, because like I said, I write a lot of books, and I have to write them in a short period of time. And I am starting to get burned out just from the pace, but also — I feel like I should be doing something more inventive. In this next phase of my career, what kinds of stories am I going to write that are going to push this narrative even further? I've done what I've done a couple of times now. It’s good. It's working. Okay, but what else? Very Jed Bartlet, what's next?
JK: *laughing* I did not expect you to pull out Jed Bartlet!
LJ: You know what, there is this episode [from The West Wing] where Jed is standing in a cathedral and he's cursing God in Latin for all the horrors that he’s wrought. I’m not going to do it. I could do it in Latin.
But he does this thing where he smokes a cigarette, throws it on the ground in the cathedral, and he stomps out. And that was insanely blasphemous to me at the time when I watched it [in high school], but I was also like, this is so sick. That was a moment.
JK: I love that you remember watching it for the first time. Back to the earlier part of our conversation, and how religion has taken a major backseat to other major themes [in pop culture], where [writers’ or characters’] relationships with God have really dropped down the list when it comes to artistic themes — like seeing a character on a show like that actually have a major moment with God was like. Wow.
LJ: That was huge for me. So rarely have I seen people [do that], even now. That’s the whole thing about Jed Bartlet’s character, is that he’s actually devoutly Catholic, but he has so much trauma related to being Catholic, because of his father and class stuff, and to watch a character who up until that point has been branded as a person who really knows his faith to be like, “God, how dare you? How could you take this from me? After everything I’ve given you? After everything I’ve done for you?”
Maybe I didn’t know it at the time — maybe I did — but it definitely planted a seed of being like, oh my God. Wait a minute. I don’t have to follow without being cognizant of what I’m following. It was a permission-giving moment for me in pop culture. One day, I’ll write a YA novel that writes directly into religion or faith.
JK: I would love to read a book of yours that talked about religion. I did want to ask my last question, which is just, have you had any particularly magical creative moments this last year?
LJ: Absolutely. Now, I want to say this happens very rarely. Writing for me feels like a job. Some days it's fun, and some days it sucks. But it always gets done, is the point.
But I was really going through it at the beginning of this year. I had just finished writing and editing Rise to the Sun all during the pandemic, and so I was writing in isolation. I was writing about music festivals when I couldn't go to any concerts. I had knee surgery at the end of last year. It was a tough writing process for me, and I was tapped out creatively. And then I still had to turn around and write another book in the spring that was due in May.
Every day I sat down to write, I was just miserable, which had never happened before. Even when it was hard, it didn’t make me unhappy. I just didn’t want to write.
So I was talking to a friend of mine about working on a project together. He writes rom coms, but they’re speculative, so I was trying to come up with some rom coms that were different than the stuff I would normally write so that we could find some common ground. I had this idea, and I was like huh — that’s kind of good. What if I didn’t give that to him?
When I tell you I sat down, and the voice of a character has never come to me so quickly. In 24 hours, I had written 10,000 words and a full proposal for a Middle Grade series about a Black girl who develops the power to bring things back to life through touch, and she has no idea what to do with it. In one weekend. I cannot overstate how unusual this is for me, but also how out of body it felt to work on that project. I knew when I did it — sometimes, when you write something, you’re like, I’m in my bag. I didn’t know I was in my bag as I did it, but once I took my hands off the keyboard, I was like, okay I think that’s it. And then I was like, oh. That’s it.
I sent it to my agent, and she wasn't expecting it. I hadn't promised her a new book, because I had multiple other books that I was already behind on. We took it out on submission a week later and sold it at auction in two weeks. But it all began with this day of writing that — I just knew. I was like, yeah, this isn't even totally me, this is something else going on.
That was the most magical writing experience I had in the past — well, ever.
JK: That is one hell of a, catching an idea by the tail and just pulling it in.
LJ: Sometimes I'll follow the thread of an idea until I figure out whether it's good or not, and then sometimes I get an idea that I’ll write as a log line in my Google doc that I might come back to later, but very rarely does something like that happen, where not only do I think this is good, but also I can't not do it right now.
JK: It hits you in the body fully formed.
LJ: The urgency of it was like, I could touch it. It felt like a presence in the room. That’s what I mean when God is in the work. That’s what it feels like. This is not just me. Something else is happening here.
JK: That sounds really special. And especially after such a fucking rough time with this last book. I'm so glad that you got to have a really refreshing and easeful experience — that also sold at auction. Congratulations.
LJ: Thank you. Easiest writing I've ever done. Biggest paycheck I’ve ever had. I was like, something isn't adding up. The math isn't math, but whatever, I'll take it.
Leah Johnson’s sophomore novel Rise to the Sun is out today wherever you like to buy your books. Be sure to follow her on Twitter and Instagram!