T.L. Johnson

There is a version of this story that begins with the writing. But the honest version begins with the body.

Over the past several years, a rare connective tissue disorder — and more than thirty surgeries — changed the shape of my life in ways I didn’t choose and couldn’t negotiate. The career I’d built as a science educator ended earlier than I’d planned. The days grew smaller. The body, unreliable.

But the stories didn’t stop. If anything, they got louder.

I write across genres — literary fiction, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, personal essay — because no single room has ever been large enough to hold everything I want to say. My work tends to circle the same questions: what do we owe each other, who gets to decide, and what does it cost to stay human in a world that keeps finding new ways to make that difficult. Sometimes I ask those questions through a philosophical English detective with a taste for the absurd. Sometimes, through a former science teacher who just wants to understand how we got here.

I am, in the end, a lifelong reader who became a lifelong writer. A former scientist who never stopped finding the world astonishing. A person who believes, without apology, that stories are not decorative — they are how we survive.

My work has appeared in Creative Wisconsin, and I write regularly on Substack, where the conversation is ongoing, and the door is always open.

This site is not an archive. It’s a beginning.

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