User:Jeffjohnsonwriter/sandbox

Jeffrey Darren Johnson (born December 30, 1969) is an American author, tattoo artist and Blues musician. He is best known for his memoir Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories and My Life in Ink, published by Spiegel and Grau in 2010. He is also the co-owner of Oregon's oldest tattoo shop, the Sea Tramp Tattoo Company.

Early Life

Jeff Johnson was born in Gloucester Massachusetts, the son of JP Johnson, a scientist in the food industry, and Sandra Jean Johnson, a student of social sciences. He and his family moved to Houston, Texas after a brief time in North Carolina. When his parents divorced at age six, he also spent some years in Los Angeles and rural Missouri. His older brother, now an accomplished poet and rare book dealer, Mark Johnson, encouraged him to read at an early age. Orphaned at the age of fifteen when his mother was committed to a mental hospital, he dropped out of high school and briefly dabbled in crime before entering the restaurant industry, where he learned about small business management and cooking and had the opportunity to work for numerous accomplished chefs. He is still an avid collector of books and rare cooking implements.

Career

Johnson moved to Portland Oregon in 1987 at the height of the punk rock scene and fronted the punk and Blues hybrid band Dirty Bird. He then went on to found Jeff Johnson and the Telephones, a blues and alternative country band. His best friends Benjamin Arthur Ellis, who founded Portland's notorious X-Ray cafe, and Tres Shannon, who went on to found Portland's famous Voodoo Doughnuts, also performed music together in an A capella group called the Lollipops.

Johnson started writing short stories in 2003. His mentor in writing was Robert Sheckley, whom he had a great friendship with for the last decade of the author's life, and he is widely thought of as Mr. Sheckley's only protege. After the untimely death of his younger brother in 2007, Johnson explored writing more than ever before and wrote many of the stories deemed important by his mentor, resulting in his memoir, Tattoo Machine.

Johnson's upcoming crime novel series, Lucky Supreme, is a fictional version of his life and is currently being developed into a television crime drama. After his memoir and novel series were optioned for movie and television development in 2010 he learned the craft of screenwriting and in 2013 was signed to a Hollywood talent management company, the Bohemia Group.