I'm writing from my desk on a Tuesday morning.
Over the last few years, Tuesdays have quickly become my favorite day of the week. Why? Because that's when I talk to Johnny Wink.
There is no one on God's green earth that I love more than Johnny. There are people I love as much as Johnny, but none that I love more (I stole this line from him, by the way).
Simply put, Johnny is the reason I became a writer.
I met Dr. Johnny Wink my senior year at Ouachita Baptist University. The fact that I made it through three years in Arkadelphia — as an English major, to boot — without ever crossing Johnny's path still haunts me to this day. Thankfully, I took his "Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction" course the fall of my senior year, a fall that also happened to be my final football season.
I'd toyed with the idea of writing before then, penning a few cruddy essays and stories. But Johnny lit the fire that still burns today. In spite of the countless hours I was putting in on the football field, I was soon hammering out story after story and slipping them under Johnny's office door every Friday afternoon.
On Saturdays, I barked snap counts and threw touchdowns for the Tigers, but my mind never strayed far from the OBU English Department. I couldn't wait to see what Johnny thought about my latest yarn. Come Monday, he'd hand over the pages, and I'd retreat to my apartment, scanning every phrase he'd underlined, dissecting every note he'd scribbled in the margins.
For a young writer, there's nothing better than having someone respond to your work like Johnny did mine. I am forever grateful to him for that (I am not the only aspiring writer he's done this for either; not by a long shot).
Maybe that's why I started calling him back in 2019, a few months after his wife, Susan, passed. Maybe I did it as an attempt at recompense. Or maybe I was just worried about him.
I think that was part of the reason I called, but the other part was the fact that we were heart friends.
You wouldn't have thought it to look at us, especially not during my college days. I was a 200-pound, dual-threat quarterback. Johnny was an eclectic, sexagenarian English professor who wore Coke-bottle glasses and T-shirts with phrases like "Beware The Warlock" or "In Winged Speed" printed across his chest.
There's something pure about Johnny Wink. Something magical. If you've met him, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe that's why I called him. Maybe I wanted a piece of his magic.
Whatever the reason, I did, eventually, call him, and was pleased to find that even though I'd graduated nearly 10 years prior to that first conversation, our bond was as strong as ever.
In the beginning, we talked every night. It became part of my ritual. I'd get the kids down, retreat to my office and call Johnny Wink. The pandemic started during the early phase of our phone dates. The calls were good for both of us. We talked through our fears, talked politics, talked about how everything seemed to be changing.
And then, at some point, Johnny asked if we could cut it down to one call per week.
Just one.
A little piece of my heart broke that night, but I finally agreed to call him on Tuesdays. I don't remember why we decided to make Tuesdays our special night. I don't know if it was Johnny's idea or mine, but I know it has worked.
Our conversations are better now than they were when we talked daily. We have more to say, more stories to tell. I usually get the "Spider Goddess" report, along with some zany new adventure involving an anteater. There's no telling what my heart friend Johnny Wink and I are liable to get up to on a Tuesday night, but I do know how every conversation will end.
Each Tuesday, before we hang up and shuffle off to bed, Johnny asks me to read him something. Anything. Whatever I've been working on lately. And, of course, I take him up on his offer. In fact, I look forward to it all week. Every morning, when my alarm goes off and I think about hitting the snooze button, it's Johnny Wink who pulls me from the bed.
Because I know, come Tuesday, he's going to ask me to read him something, and I want it to be good. I want to hear him laughing and gasping on the other line, prodding me into the "paddlewheel of days," as poet John Ashbery once said — that perfect, perpetual creative motion where one day dovetails into the next.
Most authors I know struggle mightily to hit this groove, and once they do they soon find themselves lost again, grasping for inspiration.
But not me.
I'm lucky. I talk to my muse every Tuesday.
Eli Cranor is an Arkansas author whose debut novel, "Don't Know Tough," is available wherever books are sold. He can be reached using the "Contact" page at elicranor.com and found on Twitter @elicranor.