Eric Johnson

Eric Johnson likes to point out that he is a War Baby, not a boomer. Born in 1943 and raised in a progressive family in the SF Bay Area, he attended Reed College and San Francisco State as a literature student before dropping out permanently in 1964. He took part in the radical movements of the Sixties, deciding in 1965 to follow his dad's footsteps and become a union carpenter. Although maintaining a life of study and writing, he married, had children, and worked on the big civic projects of...See more

Eric Johnson likes to point out that he is a War Baby, not a boomer. Born in 1943 and raised in a progressive family in the SF Bay Area, he attended Reed College and San Francisco State as a literature student before dropping out permanently in 1964. He took part in the radical movements of the Sixties, deciding in 1965 to follow his dad's footsteps and become a union carpenter. Although maintaining a life of study and writing, he married, had children, and worked on the big civic projects of that time. After retiring with a union pension in 2003, he began to see the literary possibilities in his experiences as a carpenter. The freedom of retirement allowed him to devote himself to his deferred practice of poetry and graphic art...which led to the discovery of letterpress printing as a medium he could take on wholeheartedly. For the next twenty years he developed a public printshop where he produced many experimental works and chapbooks of graphic poems. Now in his 80s, Johnson has retired from the printshop and is devoting himself to publishing his memoirs and playing with ink. See less