All Faculty Profiles

R. Dean Johnson

by Janelle Mejias Trujillo

Becoming a writer was not quite straightforward for Gotham Fiction Writing teacher Robert Dean Johnson. Even as a teenager, Robert was the creative type, but this came with some mixed results.

“I started off college as an engineering major,” Robert says. “My dad didn’t bully me into it, [but he] thought I should be an engineer... He was thinking of me being creative, like creating things. I quickly found out there was nothing creative about it; it was very math-and physics-based.”

So, rather than transfer to a creative writing program, Robert took up a business major and went on to become a copywriter for an ad agency. He began reading contemporary books, rather than the canon books usually assigned in school, and a spark lit up within him. There was no going back after that.

“I was like, ‘Oh, you can write about contemporary things?’ It blew my mind,” Robert says. “I just felt myself wanting to write all the time.”

Robert was convinced he needed to go back to college in order to be a writer. Studying creative writing in grad school provided a wonder of surprises, including meeting his now-wife, writer Julie Hensley, and, thanks to her, realizing that he could incorporate one of his biggest passions into his writing: baseball.

When it comes to Robert and baseball, they’re much like childhood friends: inseparable.

“For me, baseball is so cultural,” he says. “It’s hard to escape it.”

But, like a lot of sports, masculinity is an active player, and Robert knows its impact on a person can be as intense as the game itself. Makes sense, then, that masculinity is something he explores in many of his works.

“It became important to me, especially once I had a son,” he says. “That you don’t have to be the alpha male all the time. If you're not the alpha male, it’s okay to understand that that can hurt and be hard.”

Even so, Robert makes it clear that it’s also okay to never attain that alpha male status. Masculinity is a theme he often finds himself returning to, and while he’s not trying to change the world, he still wants his writing to mean something to others and to himself.

Robert came all the way from engineering to doing what he loves most. In addition to being a Gotham teacher (for twenty years and counting), Robert is a part-time soccer referee and the director for Bluegrass Writers Studio MFA program, where he gets the opportunity to help writers on their own journey.

“I've gotten to this point in my teaching career where if my student’s invested in their work, then I’m invested in it,” Robert says. “And I can geek out about it with them while we’re working on it.”

Robert did eventually earn an MFA, but he makes sure to always remind his students, “An MFA doesn't make you a writer, an English degree doesn't make you a writer. What makes you a writer is engaging in the writers’ world and writing.”