Official Author Website

C.L. Johnson

Author of the forthcoming memoir Elephants and Flowers: Finding Myself Through Prince

A memoir of music, memory, disability, faith, and becoming.

Coming Saturday, September 12, 2026.

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Cover of Elephants and Flowers: Finding Myself Through Prince by C.L. Johnson.
Cover illustration and design by Sandra Klein.
© 2026 C.L. Johnson
The Book

Elephants and Flowers: Finding Myself Through Prince

At three years old, C.L. Johnson heard Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and turned toward a sound that would follow him for the rest of his life.

Born three months premature with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, Johnson grew up inside a body often lifted, positioned, assisted, and interpreted by others. Prince’s music reached him differently. It did not need a ramp, a transfer, or permission from his muscles. It came through the air and opened a private world where rhythm, faith, longing, grief, desire, and self-definition could begin to speak.

In Elephants and Flowers: Finding Myself Through Prince, Johnson traces a lifelong relationship with Prince’s music, not as celebrity worship, but as spiritual formation. From childhood discovery in small-town Minnesota to grief after his grandmother’s death, from a suicidal crisis interrupted by “Purple Rain” to the complicated dignity of living inside disability and dependence, Prince’s work becomes a companion through the hardest and holiest questions of Johnson’s life.

Intimate, reflective, and spiritually searching, Elephants and Flowers is a memoir about music as survival, disability as embodied complexity, fandom as community, grief as love in motion, and the long practice of learning to answer with a life of one’s own.

Elephants and Flowers: Finding Myself Through Prince will be available Saturday, September 12, 2026 through Amazon KDP in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle formats.

  • Genre: Memoir
  • Status: Forthcoming
  • Release date: September 12, 2026
  • Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, and Kindle
The Author

About C.L. Johnson

Author C.L. Johnson smiling in a studio portrait.

C.L. Johnson is a writer, podcaster, and lifelong Prince listener whose work explores the deep places where music, memory, disability, faith, grief, and self-definition meet. Johnson is the creator and host of the Purple Knights Podcast, a long-running project devoted to thoughtful conversation about Prince’s music, legacy, community, and cultural impact. Through interviews, commentary, and fan-centered reflection, his work has contributed to the wider field of Prince scholarship, especially in the areas of fandom, spiritual interpretation, disability perspective, and the emotional lives of listeners shaped by Prince’s art.

Elephants and Flowers: Finding Myself Through Prince is his first memoir. In it, Johnson brings together decades of listening, writing, questioning, and remembering to tell the story of how one artist’s music helped him find language for his own life. He lives in Le Center, Minnesota with his mother, Linda, and their cat, Gary.

Production Status

Where the Book Stands

Elephants and Flowers: Finding Myself Through Prince is currently in professional line editing and copyediting with Staci Kleinmaier, with editorial work scheduled for July 2026.

The memoir is planned for release on Saturday, September 12, 2026 in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle editions. Cover design and final production materials are in progress.

Ordering information, signed-copy details, and additional publication updates will be posted here as release approaches.

  • Editing: In progress
  • Cover design: In progress
  • Planned release: September 12, 2026
  • Retail path: Amazon KDP
Contact

Get in touch

For reader notes, interview requests, podcast invitations, review inquiries, or questions about Elephants and Flowers, please write to:

info@cljohnsonwrites.com

Elephants and Flowers is not endorsed, sponsored, or approved by the Prince Estate or Paisley Park Enterprises.