Johnson City and Jo Carson
By Brains on Jun 28, 2010 in Travel
With all the Southern charms that anyone could ever muster, Johnson City has a way of making visitors feel like they’ve never left home. It’s a city that’s large enough to have a local scene, with attractions and plenty of things to do during the days and nights, but also small enough to allow for the chance to really unwind. Anyone who’s ever been in the South knows the feeling of how, when unwinding, it feels as though the bed or the hammock is trying to pull you in to a very delightful nap.
There are also many widely different stories, the biographies of the people in the place. All backgrounds and walks of life speak of different perceptions of the world, and it’s a lovely place to see how this all works together. To understand the complexities of identity, however, it would take a skilled writer, and Jo Carson has been very capable in fulfilling that role. She’s not the only writer in town, of course, but she is one of the most produced playwrights in the country. In a field that’s losing more writers than it gains, because of economic impossibilities, that’s not a small thing. She’s been working for a couple decades now, and is an international name in the literature community.
She’s also been one of the commentators on NPR’s All Things Considered, has written poetry, children’s books, and helped to found Alternate ROOTS , a non-profit that merges art and activism in the South, over 20 years ago. She’s busy, and she’s very prolific. She writes about her own town quite often, giving readers from elsewhere a hankering to check into a Johnson City hotel . Her work has often been commissioned to make plays based on oral histories of a particular place. For these, she has to get very grounded in a community, and be willing to talk to people from all over, in order to get pictures that will tell good stories on the stage.
Lately, she’s been on another campaign, where she’s been struggling with cancer. Her friends , and organizations she’s been connected to, and really the theatre community as a whole, are pulling together to collect funds to help her pay for treatments. This Johnson City writer has a big heart, and now it’s the world’s turn to show its heart to her.
