We’re excited to share a new series of interviews exploring craft. In these conversations, we’ve asked writers to take us behind the scenes of their finished works, showing us the process behind the poem, the scene, and the story.
First is our conversation with Jessica E. Johnson, on her memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home. This memoir explores her unusual childhood during the 1970s and ’80s, when she grew up in mountain west mining camps and ghost towns, in places without running water or companions. These recollections are interwoven with the story of her transition to parenthood in post-recession Portland, Oregon. In Mettlework, Johnson digs through her mother’s keepsakes, the histories of places her family passed through, the language of geology and a mother manual from the early twentieth century to uncover and examine the misogyny and disconnection that characterized her childhood world– a world linked to the present.
Considering the focus of these conversations is on process, we’d be remiss to overlook our own process in conducting the interview! We’d like to give special recognition and thanks to our 2024 summer intern, Kirby Wilson, who helped shepherd these conversations from initial readings to their final form. Kirby was instrumental in crafting the conversations you now see before you.
Enjoy!
