AND COULD THEY HEAR ME I WOULD TELL THEM (JANICE LEE)
Bio: Janice Lee is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021) and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and practices in several lineages, including the medicine tradition of the Q’ero, Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh), plant & animal medicine, and Korean shamanic ritual. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.
Book Title: Separation Anxiety
Press: Clash Books
1. What is something that surprised you during the writing, editing, or publishing process for Separation Anxiety?
These poems existing at all was sort of a surprise to me. I’ve known myself mostly as someone who has an intimate relationship with sentences, with prose. So what started as just a few poems, suddenly turned into several, turned into a whole book.
2. How might you describe the “experiment” or challenge of this book? What form, procedure, sound, or mystery enlivened your mind while writing?
An easy answer might be to say that the challenge of this book was to switch into a poetic mode, rather than a sentence-oriented one. But actually, the freedom from the sentence felt easy, liberatory. It was a different but very welcomed relationship to breath. Learning to trust myself and my intuition, what arose in my body as words, was part of the experiment. That is, many of these poems “arrived” in various parts of my body or around my body, rather than being composed on the page.
3. Can you discuss an edit, idea, response, or interaction with another person that helped this book find its way in the world—aesthetically, materially, visually, structurally, spiritually…?
So in 2019 I participated in a Feminist Poetics and Pedagogy symposium in Los Angeles, co-hosted by Andrea Quaid and Margaret Rhee. After the event, Andrea Quaid invited the participants to submit their work for a critical-creative collection of work from the event. During this time, I was feeling pretty low-capacity, and the paper I had presented had already been published online elsewhere, so I wasn’t sure what to send. Andrea reached out and invited me to send anything, even a poem. So I sent her 5 poems that had kind of just popped up, like weeds sprouting in the soil overnight, and to my pleasant surprise, she wanted to include them. Those 5 poems are the genesis of the rest of the book. That little nudge helped build the confidence and energy to keep watering the seeds, to allow the weeds to grow and reach towards each other, and eventually into the book it is today.
4. Is there a physical place or space you associate with the poems in Separation Anxiety?
The PNW coast is very present in the book. I spent a lot of time with both Benny and Maggie (the subjects of many of the poems) at Rockaway Beach (where some of both of their ashes were scattered in ceremony), and the last trip Maggie took before her death was to the Sou’Wester (where several of these poems were also written).
5. What’s something that feels difficult about having a book—or this book, specifically—come into the world?
There is always the vulnerability of having parts of yourself be so public. The invitation for porosity is exciting and freeing, but also terrifying.
6. What do you appreciate about the press (Clash Books) that published this book?
Leza Cantoral and Christoph Paul are both generous, passionate, very supportive, and bad-ass human beings. I’ve worked in publishing, and I know how much invisible labor, and a lot of emotional labor, goes into making books. So I just really appreciate that they saw something in the book, took a chance on my first poetry collection, and have been so thoughtful and supportive along the way.
7. Do you recall the most recent small press (micro, indie, DIY, university) publication you’ve recommended? What made you want to tell someone about it?
Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Aerial Concave Without Cloud (Nightboat Books) and Dao Strom’s Instrument (Fonograf Editions). In both of these, I admire the layeredness of language and languages, the grappling with ancestral language and non-verbal language (ie. sky, cloud, ghosts). Both of these books are incredibly haunted but are generous and spacious enough to hold my own hauntings within them as well.
8. Is there a text, song, piece of art, or made thing that your book talks to, borrows from, fights with, or is in tribute to?
There are at least two Star Trek references and one Taylor Swift reference :).
9. What adventures are you looking forward to, thinking about, or practicing now?
I am really looking forward to visiting South Korea next summer. It will be the very first time visiting my ancestral homeland.
10. Who will you gift a copy of Separation Anxiety to? Or where will you leave it for someone to find?
I will leave a copy of the book on a trail where the water meets the sky, and the sky meets the sand. It will be there at sunset, and when you find it, you will know it was meant for you.