Mettlework - by Jessica E Johnson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A memoir 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.

Review Quotes

"At its heart, a story about motherhood, what is means to create a home, and what society determines valuable."-- "Electric Literature"

"In her introspective coming-of-age story, author and poet Jessica E. Johnson writes mothers and their children back into the script, moving their experiences from the edges to the foreground. . . . Johnson is at her best when writing about the impossible standards imposed on mothers and how norms of white middle-class domesticity rely on hierarchies of class and race for superiority. It turns out that homemaking, whether in a mining town or post-recession Portland, Oregon, leans into the fiction of the perfect mother who dedicates everything to her child and, thus, to the nation."-- "PopMatters"

"Through her mother's letters, written during Johnson's childhood, Mettlework beautifully interweaves her mother's journey with her own. . . . What emerges strongly from Mettlework is the magic of reading and writing, especially the value of documenting and writing personal stories to understand one another better. So, not only does Johnson appreciate her mother more fully and the intricacies of what being a mother means, but she also learns what she wants for herself, what home means, and the stories she will pass on to her children."-- "Mom Egg Review"

"[Mettlework] is a story of isolation and the quest for human connection. It is a story of family dynamics and gender dynamics--and the awareness it takes to break those patterns, if desired. It is a story of the vast, enmeshed systems that harm us here in the United States and the infinite decisions--tiny, colossal--we must make if we want to untangle and alleviate our oppression. The book's underlying question: how do we best take care of this world?"-- "Diagram"

"Mettlework is primarily concerned with the elusive concept of home -- how parents and children might (mis)remember it, where it overlaps and intersects with parenthood, what it means in a transient and unconventional environment, and why it's 'something to be tended, something to be cultivated, ' as Johnson maintains."-- "The Inlander"

"Where does one's self end and the spaces in which we mark our days and the people we fill our lives with begin? Mettlework returns again and again to the term selvedge. It's a word that perfectly encapsulates the obsessions of this book, as its author circles themes of home, motherhood, memory, the act of making--babies, books, gardens--and how a woman's identity can be both trapped and expanded by these elements. . . . It is in Johnson's own story of making a home and becoming a mother that this book comes truly alive."-- "Full Stop"

"Mettlework is a precise, lyrical, and searching memoir that interrogates how we love the people who came before us even as they ruined the very land we live on. Johnson has a poet's heart and an oral storyteller's magnetism."-- "Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of "Housemates" and "The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia""

"In Mettlework, we learn about mining as a practice and as labor to maintain one's livelihood, but we are also given a lens into the mining of our own stories--from our family histories to motherhood--and how we go about creating a life and home for ourselves. With prose that is luminous and rhythmic, Johnson invites us in to see what routes lead us to the life we have today."-- "Natalie Lima, essayist and professor of creative writing at Butler University"

"In Jessica E. Johnson's Mettlework we encounter the weight of inheritance--of being a daughter, a new mother, and the legacy of mining that is never far from the author's mind. Emotionally and geographically wide-ranging, rich in history and the weight of work that unmakes the world, Mettlework is a story of how our families--who they are, what work they do--shape us even as we hope to create new stories of what family and home can and could be."-- "Taylor Brorby, author of "Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land""

About the Author

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.