Jessica E Johnson with Jen Soriano

Jessica E Johnson launches her debut memoir with the help of memoirist and friend of the store Jen Soriano. Mettlework tells the story of Johnson’s unusual upbringing during the 1970s and ’80s, interwoven with the story of her transition to parenthood in post-recession Portland, Oregon. In the weeks after her first child is born, Jessica E. Johnson receives an email from her mother that contains artifacts of the author’s early childhood: scans of Polaroids and letters her mother wrote in mountain west mining camps and ghost towns—places without running water, companions, or help. Awash in love and restlessness, Johnson begins to see how the bedrock images of her isolated upbringing have stayed with her, even when she believed she was removing herself from their logic. As she copes with the swirling pressures of parenting, teaching at an urban community college, and a partnership shaped by chronic illness, Johnson starts digging through her mother’s keepsakes and the histories of the places her family passed through, uncovering the linked misogyny and disconnection that characterized her childhood world—a world with uncomfortable echoes in the present and even in the act of writing itself. The resulting journey encompasses Johnson’s early memories, the story of the earth told in the language of geology, bits of vivid correspondence, a mothering manual from the early twentieth century, and the daily challenges of personal and collective care in a lonesome-crowded Pacific wonderland. Mettlework traces intergenerational failures of homemaking, traveling toward presence and relationship amid the remains of extractive industry and unsustainable notions of family. Jessica E. Johnson is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics, the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and is a contributor to the anthology Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Paris Review, Tin House, New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, Diagram, Annulet Poetics, Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch. She teaches at Portland Community College and cohosts the Constellation Reading Series at Tin House. Jen Soriano (she/they) is a writer, performer, social movement strategist, and author of the chapbook “Making the Tongue Dry.” She writes from the body about silenced and sidelined stories that long for the space to shine. Jen’s essays have received the Penelope Niven Prize and the Fugue Prose Prize, and she’s been awarded fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Hugo House, and the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. Jen was also a finalist in the 2019 Ploughshares emerging writers contest. Jen currently serves as the writer-in-residence for Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. Originally from a landlocked area of southwest Chicago, she now lives with her husband, son, and seven-month-old water dog on Duwamish territory, Seattle, near the Salish Sea. Her book, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, is available now.

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