A chance to finally tell Loretta Swit. After a local stage production she was receiving visitors and I went. For me, she’d always be Margaret Houlihan, rough-edged Florence Nightingale in the 4077th MASH unit playing across from Hawkeye Pierce. I stood in line to tell her just how much the program meant to me, and my decades of attempts to make it better inside. To thank her and the angelic nurses she’d come to represent, the ones who held my hand on that long medevac flight home. Margaret hugged the guy before me, and I could see his shoulders tremble. I knew that once I looked into her eyes, those words would never come.

—Previously curated in Wordpeace (Issue 7.2, Summer/Fall 2022);
appears here with author’s permission.

Publisher’s Notes:

Loretta Jane Swit (4 November 1937 – 30 May 2025) was an American stage and television actress most widely known for her character role as Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the long-running TV show M*A*S*H (1972–1983). Also an animal-rights activist, she founded the Swit♥Heart Animal Alliance, which is still active after her death. Loretta’s website includes The MASH Years photo album:
https://www.switheart.org/my-photo-albums/the-mash-years/#bwg1/3

See also “The ‘awful’ work of the real doctors who inspired M*A*S*H” by Dr. Howard Markel for PBS News (updated 28 February 2020):
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-awful-work-of-the-real-doctors-who-inspired-mash

Kendall Johnson

grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress therapist and crisis consultant—often in the field. A nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescents to young adults.

Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work a few years ago to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written a book on art history, and six books of nonfiction, poetry, and artwork, including most recently: Writing for Vision: Voicing the New Wild (MacQ, August 2025); and Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets, a collaboration with poets Kate Flannery and John Brantingham released on Christmas Day, 2024 by MacQ.

MacQ also published Dr. Johnson’s hybrid collection of essays, memoir, poetry, and visual art: Writing to Heal: Self-Care for Creators (May 2024). His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020, his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021, and his The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022. His Fireflies series is published by Arroyo Seco Press: Fireflies Against Darkness (2021), More Fireflies (2022), and The Fireflies Around Us (2023).

His shorter work has appeared in Chiron Review, Cultural Weekly, Literary Hub, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and Shark Reef; and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Author’s website: www.layeredmeaning.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Seeing Beyond the Clamorous Now, an essay and paintings by Kendall Johnson in Issue 25 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (September 2024); nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Through a Curatorial Eye: The Apocalypse This Time, an essay and paintings by Johnson in Issue 19 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2023); nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Kendall Johnson’s Black Box Poetics is out today on Bamboo Dart Press, an interview by Dennis Callaci in Shrimper Records blog (10 June 2021)

⚡ Self Portraits: A Review of Kendall Johnson’s Dear Vincent, by Trevor Losh-Johnson in The Ekphrastic Review (6 March 2020)

⚡ On the Ground Fighting a New American Wildfire at Literary Hub (12 August 2020), a selection from Kendall Johnson’s memoir collection Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020)

⚡ A review of Chaos & Ash by John Brantingham in Tears in the Fence (2 January 2021)