“I was deeply inspired by him,” she recalls. Johansen started the book in 2007, taking her initial inspiration from a dream - “an image of ships going over a horizon,” she says. But I always felt that I was trying to write someone else’s story.” “I love school, and every professor I ever had taught that ‘good books’ were literary fiction. “There’s a kind of unspoken snobbery toward genre fiction,” she says. Johansen, who was raised in Mill Valley and lives in Petaluma, says it never occurred to her to write the kind of books she loved to read. The book is finding an audience and is currently in development as a feature film. With its release, Johansen joins the ranks of successful first-time authors. The result is “The Queen of the Tearling,” a sprawling fantasy novel set in a dystopian future. At night, though, she kept writing - this time, for herself. She gradually realized that she just couldn’t write what she calls “New Yorker fiction - people sitting in rooms, having epiphanies.”ĭiscouraged, she decided to go to law school. As a reader, Johansen loved fantasy and horror: Her favorite authors include Stephen King and Frank Herbert.
After graduating from Swarthmore College, she earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the country’s premier destinations for aspiring writers.īut she says she was always out of step with the prestigious institute’s focus on literary fiction.
Johansen, 36, had always made fiction writing a goal. As a young writer trying to break into the publishing world, Erika Johansen did everything right - and she couldn’t understand why everything went wrong.
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