There must be something in the water in Minnesota. The state has produced an impressive roster of writers, from Louise Erdrich and Tim O’Brien to Ethan Rutherford. And then there’s Bob Dylan.

That tradition informs the work of Christopher Johnston. His debut novel, Where You Come From Is Gone, won the 2026 Independent Press Award for First Fiction and was praised by Kirkus Reviews as “a measured generational family saga about the passing of a way of life.”

At its center is the Brennan family of Worland, Minnesota, who for three generations have run a commercial fishing operation on Lake of the Woods alongside a mink farm. Beginning in 1960 and spanning nearly five decades, the novel traces tensions among the four Brennan siblings and the next generation, set against social, cultural, and political changes that threaten the family’s livelihood.

Where You Come From Is Gone has Minnesota’s and Johnston’s own family history in its roots. While several of its characters are composites, he says, much of its observation is firsthand. The author was born, raised, and schooled in Minnesota. “When I was a young teen, I worked on my grandfather’s fishing boat, and I did various tasks at the family’s mink farm.”

The novel itself originated as a short story. Johnston had taken a short story writing course at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. The tale concerns two estranged brothers who reunite in a bar. As the story unfolds, readers eventually find that both of their older sons were killed, and they learn how and why. The instructor, Ethan Rutherford, whose debut novel, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, told Johnston that while he liked the story, he felt that Johnston was, in his words, trying to put 10 pounds of shit into a five-pound bag. “You should make it a novel,” Rutherford advised him.

Johnston heard about the Novel Writing Project at the same center. “I was in the first offering of the yearlong course. The goal was to learn the basics of constructing a novel and also produce a first draft. That got me going. The novel wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t taken that course.”

Award-winning Minnesota author Peter Geye (2016’s Wintering) led the course. “He was a great mentor,” Johnston says. “He helped me through the whole process even after the course ended. It took three to four years” to complete the novel.

Another literary program helped shape the novel. Johnston participated in an open mic competition for the storytelling platform the Moth. “A key part of the Moth is you have that five minutes to grab the audience and hold [it],” Johnston says. The book’s opening paragraph is emblematic of Johnston’s primary takeaway from his Moth experience:

On the day after I got home from the service, I rejoined the crew of my father’s fishing boat. Dad put me at the helm for the forty-five minute trip from Worland to our nets off Buffalo Point. The bison-head shaped peninsula juts out from Canada into Lake of the Woods. It was the last day I stood on my own.

Johnston grew up in a literary household. His mother was a high school English, French, and Latin teacher. “She loved to read, and I was influenced by that,” he says. His father, too, was a reader, primarily of nonfiction and history.

Johnston read biographies in grade school and high school—an eclectic mix of baseball players, scientists, and inventors. But he got the fiction bug when he read Albert Camus’ The Stranger in high school and was actually cast as Meursault, the existential lead character, in the school play. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was another pivotal read for him.

Where You Come From Is Gone takes its title from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, another novel that Johnston cherishes. It was the last piece of the puzzle. “I had several working titles that I knew were unsatisfactory,” he says. “None were quite right, and I had my antennae up for what I thought a suitable title would be. [O’Connor] is one of my favorite authors. I’m also a big fan of U2. I attended the 30th anniversary concert for their album The Joshua Tree. At the end of a song, Bono recited the line from Wise Blood that I quoted in my dedication: ‘Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.’”

“That’s the title,” Johnston pronounced.

For a novel that spans 1960–2009 and deals with the mercurial fortunes of several characters, Johnston used a corkboard and notecards, each containing a chapter summary. “I initially wrote the story chronologically, which I thought would give me a better handle on how I wanted [to] ultimately tell it. It’s important to go through that exercise. Ultimately, I ended up telling the story chronologically [laughs].”

Johnston also employed a spreadsheet to work out profiles for all his main characters. “I call it method writing,” he jokes, a reference to the acting process by which actors immerse themselves in a character’s life and psychology. “I explored facets to the characters, 90% of which never showed up explicitly in the text: How did they do in school, what kind of music did they listen to, what kind of physical activity did they like?”

As for his favorite part of the writing process, Johnston relates an anecdote about the sculptor Rodin. When asked how he sculpted an elephant, Rodin responded, “You take a very big block of marble, and you remove everything that isn’t an elephant.”

“Revision is the real writing,” Johnston says. “My first draft gives me the material to work with, then I carve out what I’m trying to express.”

Johnston was a management consultant for more than 30 years. During that time, he traveled extensively to rural communities with struggling businesses. He retired in 2022. He did live elsewhere for work—the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand—but Minnesota has always been home. He is a full-time writer; he writes Changing Gears on Substack, “essays on the emotional and physical consequences of work and how they’re portrayed in literary fiction.”

He now lives (where else?) in Minnesota—New Haven, on Lake Minnetonka, where he grew up. “It’s got lots of trees and access to the water,” he says.

He’s currently working on two books. One he describes as a “two-hander” in the tradition of Sam Shepard’s play True West and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. It concerns two characters who are struggling with addiction and other physical issues and who are forced to deal with their family and their relationship to each other. The other takes its cue from the story (1927) and film (1960) Elmer Gantry with a tale about a corrupt modern-day influencer.

Whatever is in the (abundant) water in Minnesota, Johnston is still drawing from it. He’s writing from the place he knows best and the one he’s never really left—and vice versa.

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who is published on vanityfair.com and in The Washington Post and other outlets.