Writing, says former teacher and poet Thomas Penn Johnson, is akin to mountain climbing. He quotes a poet’s answer to the question of why they write: Because the poem was there to be written. “The same is true for me and stories,” Johnson says. “They were there for me to write.”

Now 82, Johnson, who once aspired, he says with a laugh, to be “the greatest scholar in Elizabethan literature in the history of mankind” has drawn deeply from his own life to populate his first short story collection, Cora and Martha and Other Stories. Kirkus Reviews praises the book as “uniquely American, encouraging readers to think about the essential themes of American literature in the context of racially marginalized groups.”

Johnson says he was inspired to write short fiction by a friend he’s known for nearly three decades. “You’ve got the biography for it,” the friend told him. Johnson was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. His father was a factory worker, his mother, a chef in the Home Economics cafeteria at the University of North Carolina. They divorced when he was an infant, but both remained part of his life.

He and his older brother were raised primarily by their maternal grandmother, an elementary school teacher who cultivated their love of reading. (Johnson lives in Winston-Salem, her ancestral home.) “She had the entire Joel Chandler Harris collection of Uncle Remus stories,” Johnson says. “She was a great reader and teacher. After she finished the newspaper, she’d give it to us and tell us to circle first the one-letter words, then the two-letter words, and so on. By the time we were two years old, we could recognize words on the page.”

Still, it wasn’t until 10th grade that reading became a passion. Johnson credits his English teacher, who, as he puts it, “said those magic words that changed my life: ‘Tommy, you should read.’” She gave him a book list he still keeps today, including Brave New World, The Old Man and the Sea, Kim, The Black Stallion, and The Yearling. “Wonderful books,” he says. “I’ve been a reader ever since.”

Accessing those and other books was not easy. “We had a library in town, but Black people weren’t allowed in,” Johnson says. “My mother conspired with her employer at the University to check out books from the UNC library and send them to me.”

Poetry wasn’t yet on Johnson’s radar, but that changed during his junior and senior years of high school, when poet Owen Dodson served as a guest instructor in Johnson’s daily dramatics class and later judged the school’s spring drama festival. “He was eloquent and elegant, a dashing figure,” Johnson remembers. “I followed him around like a puppy.”

Dodson was the first of three writers who profoundly influenced Johnson’s life. The second was Alan Pink, his professor in a literary criticism course, who admired Johnson’s facility with Latin. After class one day, Pink said, “Thomas, you should write poetry.” Johnson hesitated. “I told him I wouldn’t know where to start,” he says. “He told me, ‘You need to talk to my friend Ralph Waldo Ellison.’”

Pink promptly called Ellison, author of Invisible Man, and put the young student on the phone. The two spoke for twenty minutes. “He gave me sage advice,” Johnson recalls, “and for the first time in my life, I considered the possibility of writing poetry.”

Ellison told him to “write what you know.” That guidance inspired Johnson’s first poem, about living with his mother during the final stages of her struggle with alcoholism. She died of cirrhosis of the liver that same year.

In 1973, while in graduate school, Johnson witnessed the awe-inspiring sight of comet Kohoutek and wrote his first sonnet. Two years later, he set aside the final chapter of his doctoral dissertation on Milton to devote himself entirely to poetry. “I never looked back,” he says.

His first collection, If Rainbows Promise Not in Vain, appeared in 1982, followed by Swerving Straight in 1991. Johnson also served as editor of the definitive three-volume The Poems of Emily Dickinson, which reflects the same meticulous attention to language that shapes his own verse.

Cora and Martha and Other Stories represents another mountain Johnson was compelled to climb. “These are stories I felt I had to write,” he says.

The story “Chisholm,” he says, kicked his short story writing into high hear. It was inspired by childhood visits with his “very dear” first cousins, who grew up in the Morningside Homes projects in Greensboro. “It was demolished long ago,” Johnson notes. “When my cousins visited me, we got to reminiscing about Morningside. They told me I should write a story about growing up in the projects so that the experiences we had wouldn’t be lost.”

Being a poet, he says, made him a better and more lyrical writer. It also gave him new meaning to paring his writing down to essentials. “When I wrote ‘Chisholm,’ I was sitting at my desk with my clothes off,” he says. “A paragraph came to me quickly, so well that I said, ‘I’m going to stay naked while writing the rest of this story.’ It helped to focus my vision. For the next three stories, I refused to put clothes on.”

Several of the stories are autobiographical and created to preserve people and places from his life. He said one such story, “Really Drunk?,” begins with the harrowing arrest of a drunk driver:

The investigation halt was anything but routine. When the officer went back to his squad car to run the man’s name, the man took off…The officer threatened to release his police dog, and the man responded, “Do you want to die?” The dog caught up to the man and chomped down on his right leg, but the man kept running. In the ensuing melee, the man continually shouted, “Do you want to fucking die?” while attempting repeatedly to grab the officer’s handgun, and eventually he disarmed the officer. After another minute of struggling, the officer succeeded in handcuffing the man, who shortly thereafter apologized for the incident, claiming he didn’t remember reaching for the officer’s gun or shouting “Do you want to die?” because he was “really drunk.”

“To be perfectly blunt, that story was my attempt to save a friend’s life and throw him a lifeline,” Johnson says. “At that point, I hadn’t talked to this person in 35 years. I wrote to him while he was in jail and reminded him of who I was. When he got out of jail, he sent me a work of art he had done. It was clearly a farewell painting; he knew he was going to drink himself to death. He never saw it, but he lives in this story.”

“The Doughnuts” recalls Johnson’s youth in 1970s Valparaiso, Indiana, where integration was fraught. The story is set on Locust Street, “where the poorest of the poor lived,” Johnson says. “But it’s a story that shows the humanity and the love there.”

Johnson’s stories depict characters as creatures of their environments and communities. They are an attempt, he says, “to capture the beauty of their lives.” Several, such as the title characters in “Cora and Martha” are entertainingly larger than life. When asked what he hopes readers take away from his stories, Johnson replies, “I hope they fall in love with these people.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who has been published in Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, and other outlets.