The Writer’s Center welcomes memoirists Jessica E. Johnson, Tyler Mills, and Sarah Rose Nordgren for a roundtable discussion on the poetics of memoir.
FREE & open to the public. Register below.
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 (New Michigan Press), and the memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home (Acre Books). She is a contributor to Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, and Sixth Finch, among others. Her honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship, many Pushcart nominations, a Best of the Net nomination, and a Best American Essays notable. In Absolutes We Seek Each Other and Metabolics were both finalists for an Oregon Book Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series.
Born in Chicago, Tyler Mills (she/her) is the author of City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, Diode Editions 2021). Her memoir, The Bomb Cloud, received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She lived and taught in New Mexico four years, most recently serving as the Burke Scholar for the Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos, NM, and now teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Sarah Rose Nordgren is an American poet, writer, teacher, and cultural organizer. She is the author of four books of poetry and prose, including, most recently, Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal (Essay Press, 2024), which earned the Essay Press Book Prize, as well as the poetry collections Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh, 2017) and Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; and the chapbook The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions, 2022). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Narrative, and have been featured by PBS Newshour, The Slowdown podcast, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Nordgren holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in poetry from University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from University of Cincinnati where she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Nordgren lives in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina where she teaches poetry, serves as Emerging Poet Feature editor for 32 Poems, and is the Founding Director of The School for Living Futures, an experimental, interdisciplinary organization dedicated to creating new knowledge and possibility for our climate-changed future.
About the Books
A shimmering memoir defined equally by its lyrical prose and profound historical implications, The Bomb Cloud untangles the intersecting strands of information running through a family mystery shaped by national secrets. From craggy cliffs in New Mexico to the haunting White Sands Missile Range, poet Tyler Mills meditates on the journeys that curiosity and research demand. Mills wonders about the nature of memory and writing itself, which surface as subjects – and asks what it means to discover, create, and re-create narratives in a search for illusive clarity. How can one navigate through gaps in the fence around forbidden knowledge and confront what seems to be the truth? Extending from the poems in Mills’ Hawk Parable collection, this memoir wrestles with her grandfather’s likely involvement in a top-secret bomb wing that trained in the New Mexico desert, taking the reader to the very edge of the unknowable. The Bomb Cloud offers a story through essays about ecological crisis, family intrigue, personal and collective trauma, borders and the American Southwest, and mothering and legacy. It also splits open what it means to grapple with a history, a past, a place, and a self through language. The Bomb Cloud includes 10 pieces of original, multi-media art by the author exploring the questions posed by the book.
Designed as a turn of the century women’s magazine that combines memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal explores women’s complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. Originating in the bird-hat controversy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which coincided with both the women’s suffrage and budding American conservation movements, this polyvocal book moves in multiple directions as it examines cases of women and birds from across cultures and time periods, from the Virgin Mary, to Leda, Swan Lake, and Alexander McQueen. As its connective thread, Feathers also follows one woman’s enculturation into the world of bird-women and its inherent violence. What might we learn about gender from the birds?
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.
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