Raven Raves, Rants, Reviews and Listings

Passing the Three Gates : Interviews with Charles Johnson,

edited by Jim McWilliams

University of Washington Press

2004, ISBN 0-295-98439-2, $22.50, paper

Reviewed by Kathleen Alcal·

Passing the Three Gates is a selection of eight of the many interviews conducted with novelist and scholar Charles Johnson. They range from early in his career, when Johnson was merely an associate professor of English at the University of Washington, to the afterglow following the National Book Award for Middle Passage.

The central idea behind this selection is Johnson's embrace of Buddhism. The three gates are 1) Is what we are about to say true? 2) Is it necessary? And 3) Will it cause harm? ( p. 283) Johnson himself supplies the forward, but a better introduction to Johnson as a philosopher, writer and person would be the preface to Johnson's recent collection, Turning the Wheel, in which he says, "Were it not for the Buddhadharma, I'm convinced that, as a black American and an artist, I would not have been able to successfully negotiate my lasthalf century of life in this country. Or at least not with a high level of creative productivity."

Passing the Three Gates includes an interview by Phoebe BoschÈ which appeared in issues 2.1 and 2.2, 1992, of The Raven Chronicles. BoschÈ asks Johnson (p 91) what happens when people who have bad role models make bad choices. Johnson insists that they are, nevertheless, making choices. McWilliams asks essentially the same question (p 273), using one of his own promising students as an example. The underlying question is, What have you got that makes you so successful, and how do we spread it around?

Johnson's indefagible optimism makes it seem as though we should all be wildly successful, and one gets the sense, in these interviews, that there is a very fine line between chance and will. Maybe that is what Buddhism is all about.

Passing the Three Gates includes lots of kudos for Johnson's mentor, John Gardner, lots of edifying discussions of literature and Buddhism, and is worth a Washington read by other writers who think they might be mentioned in this book.

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Kathleen Alcal· is the author of four books of historical fiction set in Mexico and the United States. She is a co-founder of and contributing editor to The Raven Chronicles, and was recently a visiting lecturer at the University of New Mexico. The title story of her collection in progress, "Cities of Gold," is forthcoming in the 2005 Pacific Northwest Writers Conference Anthology."