Jessica E. Johnson & Janice Lee: A Reading & Conversation

Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry, nonfiction, and things in between. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, River Teeth,  Poetry Northwest, Tin House, DIAGRAM, Four Way Review, The New Republic, Sixth Finch, and Dream Pop, among others. She is an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient and an Oregon Book Award Finalist for her chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press). She teaches composition, creative writing, and environmental literature at PCC. Metabolics (Acre Books), a book-length poem, is an essential study in the ecologies of contemporary parenting, with adults and children affected by screen time and “feeds” as their bodies metabolize food, the environment, and Excess Feelings, including rage. Johnson employs scientific idiom to construct an allegory about a family in the Pacific Northwest. From climate change to kombucha to smart phones to curated produce, the smallest details of daily life in “Plasticland” catalyze a larger examination of selfhood. Metabolics is her debut full-length collection.

Janice Lee is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, most recently Imagine a Death Texas Review Press, 2021) and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). She writes about interspecies communication, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing, and writing. She is a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q'ero tradition of medicine work and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh. She also incorporates elements of ancestral healing work, Korean shamanic ritual, plant medicine, card readings and divination, and interspecies communication. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State.