Books

Cosmogony, 2nd Edition (2025), is a rhyming and metered poem, illustrated with original artwork, for all women who live wild and free. In this narrative poem, the major forces of Nature tell their origin tales to a dreamy teenage girl on a Galveston, Texas beach, and she spins their words into her own tentative life philosophies. Cosmogony is a...

Mental (2023) is Marie K. Johnston’s prequel to Home (2025). Here we meet Evelyn Marie Stuart, Eve, a beautiful, sensitive, intelligent young teacher who must make peace with her childhood traumas in order to live her adult life. Set in multiple Texas cities in the 1990s, Mental is a study told journalistically, but in the vein of magic realism,...

Home: A Novel (3rd Edition, 6/2025) is Johnston’s sequel to Mental (2023), and follows heroine Evelyn Marie Stuart Dufrense through a year marked by losing her teen daughter to madness, divorce and parental interference, as she tries to manage adversity and disappointments in order to find a way to understand herself, her marriage, the...

“Cosmogony (2019)” is a rhyming and metered poem that came to Johnston during a hurricane and subsequent flood in Spring, TX in 1994. In this piece, the major forces of Nature in turn tell their origin tales to a dreamy seventeen year old girl on a Galveston, TX beach, and she then spins their stories into her own tentative life philosophies.

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“But all of the chartreuse buds on the new spring branches are also the brown crispy leaves that blow to the ground in the fall. It’s natural. It’s the way life works.” — Chapter 16, “Mental”

“Mental,” which took twenty years to complete, is based on Johnston’s late teens and early twenties during the 1990s in Texas. Weaving journalistic scrutiny...

“Disaster and Harmony (2019)” is full of poems about personal struggle, difficult relationships, true love(s), searching for peace and finding joy despite chaos and pain. These poems are randomly arranged. Johnston writes frankly about deep depressions, marriage and family, being in love, beginnings and endings, taking joy in little and big...

“Dandelions (2019)” will be a delight for anyone interested in the simple joys of childhood. Charlie Taylor is a little boy who believes adventure will always be found around the next corner. He inadvertently discovers one of Nature’s secrets in the field where he normally plays with his friends, and hurries home to share this new knowledge with...