Fireside Chat with Author Jessica Johnson

Fireside Chats at Grit City Books is a literary conversation you won't want to miss! Join author Jessica Johnson in conversation with Jay Aquinas Thompson as we discuss their memoir, Mettlework.

About Mettlework:

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.

About Jessica Johnson:

Jessica E. Johnson (she/they) is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Poetry Series), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press), and the memoir Mettlework (Acre Books). Jessica is a career community college instructor based in Portland, Oregon. They are interested in inclusive learning environments, knowledge production, radical care, and the relationships between art, friendship, community, and social change. They work to make spaces for thinking, feeling, and learning together. Their honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship, many Pushcart nominations, and a Best American Essays notable. They are a two-time Oregon Book Award finalist in poetry.

About Jay Aquinas Thompson:

Jay Aquinas Thompson (they/he) is a poet, essayist, and teacher and the author of the memoir The Resurrection Appearances: Fragments of a Daybook (Gold Line Press). They have recent work in New Delta Review, Neon Door, Essay Daily, Adroit, Guesthouse, and Poetry Northwest, where they're a contributing editor. They've been awarded grants and fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Community of Writers, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and King County 4Culture. They live with their child in Seattle, where they teach creative writing to public school students and incarcerated women.

Host or Publisher Grit City Books