Winner of the 2021 Moon City Short Fiction Award
Michele Finn Johnson’s colorful, witty stories hum with life. Characters in each of these thirty-six stories evolve at different rates, resulting in missed connections, almost connections, and—best-case scenario—close connections. A high-schooler struggles to figure out where she fits into the stereotypical landscape, searching for her space between these castes; Baby Albert grasps the concept of gravitational waves while his parents have difficulty operating the DVD player; bats mate by instinct while pregnant humans struggle to align. Writing about love, sex, loss, and joy, Johnson exposes the core of her characters.
Michele Finn Johnson’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, A Public Space, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. Her work was selected for the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology, won an AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction anthologies. A native of Philadelphia, she received her B.ChE. and M.S. degrees in engineering from Villanova University. She serves as contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband and owns an environmental-strategy consulting firm. Find her online at michelefinnjohnson.com.
“Development Times Vary is a rich and layered collection of stories by one of my favorite writers on the planet. Here, we’re treated to the full range of Michele Finn Johnson’s mastery, to stories full of heart and wit and insight. These stories feature an array of characters at various stages of life, navigating the glories and devastations of girlhood and womanhood and all brought to vivid, crackling life via Johnson’s indelible voice and assured pen. How lucky we are to have such a stunning writer in our midst, to have all these brilliant stories in one place.”
—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
“How can one writer have so many strange and wonderful stories living in her head? Defies the laws of physics. Development Times Vary is at times funny, at times deeply moving, consistently startling. You’ll love living in Michele Finn Johnson’s brain.”
—William Haywood Henderson, award-winning author of Augusta Locke
“‘Things don’t ever straighten themselves up on their own,’ Michele Finn Johnson writes in her hilarious and heart-felt debut collection, Development Times Vary. These are East Coast and West Coast stories, innovative flash and windy trips down memory lane; they explode with lines like ‘The night I stole Baby Jesus it was fucking freezing’; no matter the structure or size, they are pitch perfect studies in comedic timing, startling meditations on faith and ache and want and family, dynamic shimmers of truth; they are love stories, every last one of them.”
—Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace, Lech, and Jerks
“Michele Finn Johnson’s stories are populated with Catholic school girls and awkward baseball players, hot ghosts and cold angels, thirsty girls, harried parents, and dead twins with batwings. Her characters are voracious, sardonic, full of longing. Reading this book feels like watching a talented magician perform a series of dazzling tricks. Development Times Vary is a wild, nimble, playful, and moving book, charting, as the title promises, the unpredictable and uneven ways people, feelings, and revelations grow.”
—Kim Magowan, author of Undoing, The Light Source, and How Far I’ve Come
“Sharply observant children who see the people in their orbit with a bird’s-eye view; teenagers who ache to be seen; lessons about ants, bats, and lunar facts; dead who tend the living; a slew of shitty boyfriends; and lust, lust, lust: These are a few of the ingredients of which Michele Finn Johnson’s Development Times Vary is made. Wise and poignant and companionable, these are stories I wish I could send as love letters to my thirteen-year-old self and, well, my twenty-something and thirty-something selves too.”
—Michelle Ross, author of They Kept Running
“In Development Times Vary, Michele Finn Johnson delivers short stories that will stick with you for a long time. There are moments of absurdity, moments of heartbreak, moments of revelation, and more than a few bats, but what makes these stories really special are the characters, each with a unique and memorable voice. This is a collection that excavates the human experience and finds hope nestled against despair, humor hiding beneath rage, heroism wrapped up in self-doubt, and love sharing space with grief. Johnson is a master of short fiction, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next.”
—Tiffany Quay Tyson, author of The Past is Never and Three Rivers
“Development Times Vary serves up a brew of playfulness and consequence, of innocence and wisdom and sass. Whether a Catholic school girl lost in the shuffle of adolescence, a boy haunted by the bat-ghost of his dead twin, or a fruit-fly-breeding pothead obsessed with a popular jock, Michele Finn Johnson’s characters search, struggle, make mistakes, and often learn more than they want to know. Bursting with Johnson’s inimitable voice, these stories shimmer and sting.”
—Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.
“By turns tender, quiet, and astonishing, Development Times Vary contains deeply resonant tales of unraveling connections. Whether it is ‘School Lessons’ chirping with dolphin shouts, paper football and learning cultures, or ‘Lunar Facts,’ a list-style exploration of the layers that are at times bright then waning, cyclical like the moon, Michele Finn Johnson is an author of singular voice and vivid imagination. She paints a world of characters in a small space and masterfully connects the dots between the loving and the broken in her captivating debut collection.”
—Tara Isabel Zambrano, author of Death, Desire, and Other Destinations
“In Development Times Vary, Michele Finn Johnson captures the pangs of young love and obsession, eerie urban legends, the foreboding elements of nature, and the thin veil between reality and the paranormal. She holds space for the full range of human experience, carrying readers along into a wonderful, expansive daydream. This is a feat of a debut.”
—Christopher Gonzalez, author of I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat
