Janice Lee's Blog, page 5

Virtual Event: Janice Lee and Jennifer Calkins

Imagine a Death: A Novel & Fugitive Assemblage

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Friday, October 8, 2021
6:00pm
Virtual Event (This is a virtual event taking place via Zoom Webinar.)

Third Place Books welcomes Janice Lee, novelist and founder of Entropy magazine, and Jennifer Calkins, writer and evolutionary biologist, for a reading of their latest books, Imagine A Death: A Novel and Fugitive Assemblage, a “lyric noir.”

Thu, Oct 7, 2021, 6:00 PM PDT

Elliot Bay Book Co.

Online event.

Event Page.

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Teresa K. Miller // Borderline Fortune reads with Janice Lee // Imagine a Death

Two writers who are presently based in or near Portland give this virtual joint reading from their new books this evening.

For onetime Seattle resident Teresa K. Miller, it is with her National Poetry Series selected new book of poems, Borderline Fortune (Penguin). “Teresa K. Miller explores startling territories in Borderline Fortune. She addresses the lines we’ve drawn and erased for centuries on the earth—that conform to the borders we cross and uncross in the mind. Yet: ‘I’m asking you to believe in what you’ve never seen or heard,’ she writes, refusing the mind’s limits. Here is the dark power of climate change where she finds ‘the future all danger, heat, & scarcity.’ Blake, Dickinson, and Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets hover (‘birds build—but not I build’), above trees cut down and hope with feathers. The damage done to the earth echoes the damages to the protean mind of the poet—but Miller remains radiantly elusive, an escape artist in these marvelous poems of altered terra firma and revelation.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, who was the National Poetry Series judge selecting Borderline Fortune. “The poems in Borderline Fortune are so sharply crafted, they serve as the pick and axe that dig deep into the granite of the past. Miller questions specific characters, many ghosts from the past that hold secrets to a history she is rebirthing. The poems shape a world created from the knowledge and the mythology Miller has extracted.” —Elmaz Abinader. Teresa K. Miller is also the author of sped and Forever No Lo, as well as co-editor of Food First.

Also reading this evening is Janice Lee, a professor of creative writing at Portland State University, the founder and executive editor of Entropy, the author of seven previous books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, here this evening with a new novel, Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press). “In Janice Lee’s newest work, Imagine a Death, her methodical, dedicated attention illuminates the otherwise impenetrable depths of grief. She invites us to bear witness to The Writer, The Photographer, and The Old Man—each having survived the death of a beloved—as they engage in pathetic but ultimately deeply resonant efforts to shape their lives … Through a panoply of animal interpellators, Lee invokes a world that is audaciously savage and catastrophically familiar, and offers an astonishing take on the saga—sung in a Beckettian key. To truly imagine a death requires attending to how we persist after.” —Juliette Lee.

Rad! Residencies presents Gabrielle Civil (author of ( ghost gestures )) and Janice Lee (author of Imagine a Death) to celebrate their new books.

October 1, 8pm @ Poetic Research Bureau

PRB @ 2220 Arts + Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90057

2220 Arts & Archives Events

More Event Info & Registration

More details & event info here.

Sep 30, 2021, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

CalArts
24700 McBean Pkwy
Valencia, CA 91355
661-255-1050

Butler Building #4-G

Public reading by Janice Lee. Structured around the work of several visiting contemporary writers, the Writing Now Reading Series and Seminar is a required course for CalArts MFA creative writing graduate students that showcases vibrant new modalities for writing that refresh today’s interconnected creative fields.

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/Vf2AuV244rYrXV3r5

All visitors to campus are asked to be vaccinated. Visitors are also asked to check in when arriving on campus, obtain and wear a visitor badge, and wear a mask at all times. More visitor access info here.

4PM PST Sunday, September 26 via Zoom.

Featuring:

Seth Fischer
Meghan Lamb
Janice Lee
Michael Seidlinge

More details TBA.

The Innovative Prose Series at Texas Review Press will be hosting a Zoom celebration for the launch of Imagine a Death on Tuesday, September 21st at 6:00PM PST, featuring Gabrielle Civil & Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

More details TBA.

More details / Register for the event.

Join us Friday, September 17th as we celebrate the highly acclaimed newest novel by brilliant author, writer, editor and healer Janice Lee.

We will begin the evening with a reading by Janice Lee from her new book, Imagine a Death.We will continue with a conversation between Janice, Leni Zumas (author of Red Clocks) and Lidia Yuknavitch (author of Verge) in relation to Imagine A Death.

Here at Corporeal we care deeply about your safety. We will continue adhering to state and CDC guidelines: which means masks and proof of vaccination are required. We will be creating safe social distance in our space and we have extra masks, sanitizer, and an air purifier on hand. If the state of Covid changes, we will of course convert this to an online event.This event will have a maximum capacity of 20 guests.

Event begins at 6:30 pm

Corporeal Writing
510 SW 3rd Ave. Suite 101
Portland, Or. 97204

More details / Register for the event.

Click here for more event details and to register for event.

Join us at our September EcoArt Salon with Pakastani American poet and ink painter Sophia Naz in conversation with Korean American writer and healer Janice Lee. Sophia’s paintings and writings from her new book of poetry Open Zero engage with the loss of her home, destroyed by the California wildfires and the erasures and displacements involved with the immigrant experience.

Janice’s writings grapples with collective and inherited trauma and the present and impending eco crisis. Her new novel Imagine A Death explores loss, hauntings of the past and coping with apocalyptic futures.While both artists/writers work with the intimate costs of trauma and disaster, they also engage with the power and possibilities of healing.

This salon will begin with presentations from the artists that will also be streamed on Facebook Live on the EcoArt salon Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/EcoArtSalon/.

You can also choose to RSVP to the Zoom Room, which will allow you to be in close discussion with the artists after the presentations. There is a very limited amount of RSVPs to ensure a deeper discussion.

The EcoArt Salon is a monthly gathering that is free and open to the public for those interested in EcoArt and the environment to share their projects, discuss issues, network, and collaborate together.The ongoing salon gatherings bring together artists, writers, curators, scholars, and the public from the NJ/NY and larger interconnected global community interested in the topic of EcoArts and its potential during a time of environmental degradation and ecological crises.

The EcoArt Salon is hosted by Rutgers University-Newark Paul Robeson Galleries and sponsored by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. The salons are curated by the EcoArt Committee including graduate students Colleen O’Neal and Crystal Robinson and faculty advisor Alexandra Chang.

Click here for more event details and to register for event.

The Dandelions Are Prophesizing: A Writing Workshop Through Plant & Mycelial Encounters

A 4-Week Online Workshop starting July 19, 2021

July 19 – August 14
Workshop Leader: Janice Lee
ONLINE

Cost: $350

More details and to register – see Corporeal Writing Workshop

“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh

“If we are interested in livability, impermanence, and emergence, we should be watching the action of landscape assemblages. Assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this is the story.”
– Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

“Medicine and sickness heal each other.
The whole world is medicine.
Where do you find yourself?”
– Yunmen Wenyan

“How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things.”
– Eduardo Kohn

“Identity is the factoring out and performative denial of our own perceptual immersion or entanglement with forces that generate and undo the boundaries with which we mark ourselves as different from others.”
– Bayo Akomolafe


The dandelions are prophesizing.

What are you afraid to see, in the tenuous space you are being given? For you, what is on the other side of the portal and what pain do you have yet to experience? What more can you learn from the geese, the moss, the dandelions, the mushrooms, the concrete beneath your feet?

How can you orient yourself differently from within, to not see the world as broken—as something to be fixed or saved—but as an entanglement of becomings and worldings of which you are a small but integral part?

What is it that you are trying to protect? In your silence and complacency, what is it that has really been at stake for you? What have you been guarding, protecting, keeping close to you, keeping distant, what struggles have you avoided your entire life, what struggles are you avoiding still? In protecting what you have felt like you have earned, in caring about those in your immediate view, in using exclusivity when it comes to compassion and awareness, how have you contributed to everything that you can so easily criticize in language but have yet to understand your own intimate relationality with these so-called broken systems? How have you contributed to the environmental degradation of this planet, to systemic racism, to the real harm against black and brown bodies, to civil wars and genocides, to the violence in the streets and all over the world, to this pandemic, to all of the suffering in this world, to all of the imbalance? How have you forgotten that you are not an individual, not a self-enclosed ecology but part of a global body, connected to every other being, every other atom on this planet, all of the energy of the cosmos and the earth, of the past and present and future, how have you forgotten what you really are and what change you are truly capable of instigating?

This four-week online workshop will encourage you to expand your awareness and language through new encounters with plant and mycelial networks, to see the world as non-linear and entangled, and to imagine new futures that don’t depend on replicating the energies of the systems we seek to dismantle or the patterns we seek to heal from. We will investigate the speculative potentialities of futures beyond capital and justice-oriented systems, imagine identity and being through the lens of assemblage and permeability, and explore new and porous ways of working towards individual and collective change.

In this generative and healing-focused workshop, we will be supported by writing prompts, guided meditations, intuition exercises, personal medicine work, shamanic practices, divination, communing with plant and animal beings, Buddhist teachings, ceremony, and readings from multiple genres to explore the articulation of an entangled worldview. (Some of the diverse readings will include work by authors such as Bayo Akomolafe, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Vincianne Despret, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Wendy Burk, Brenda Iijima, Fred Moten, and Marisol de la Cadena.)

Workshop Structure:

In order to accommodate both synchronous and asynchronous modes, the majority of the work will be asynchronous and can be self-paced for each week (ie. readings, writing prompts, exercises, discussions). There will be 4 synchronous meetings (via Zoom). The 4 sessions will be Mondays from 11AM-1PM PST: 7/19, 7/26, 8/2, 8/9). Though attendance at these meetings is highly encouraged, it is not mandatory. All meetings will be recorded and posted the next day, for those who are unable to make part or all of the meeting times, with guided instructions on any activities/exercises covered during the meetings to be posted as well. As well, all participants will have the opportunity to have one 1-on-1 conference with Janice during the 4-week period.

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Limited sliding scale registrations ($150-$300) and scholarships for BIPOC and anyone needing financial assistance are available. Please email Daniel at [email protected] for more info.

4-Week Online Workshop starting April 25, 2021

When: April 25 – May 22 (4 weeks)

Workshop Leader: Janice Lee

Where: Online

Cost: $350

***
Limited sliding scale registrations ($150-$300) for BIPOC available. Please email Daniel at [email protected] for more info.
***

More details and to register – see Corporeal Writing website

“What really exists is not things made but things in the making.” –William James

“How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things.” –Eduardo Kohn

On han: “A feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined.” –Suh Nam-dong

How are the frames of reference and relationships between and of living beings activated? That is, how do different bodies and worlds articulate each other, or, how do we learn to be affected? How do we reconcile personal experience with historical fact? How do we reconcile history with memory? How do we reconcile truths with other truths? How does writing open up space while processing trauma or grief?

This four-week online workshop will begin with the unique emotional identity and Korean concept of han and its relationship to concepts of inherited trauma, looking closely at the relationship of cultural history & identity and aesthetics & narrative and exploring how the presence of unresolved corporeal history and the impossibility of articulation or expression leads to new encounters in language and narrative.

Through this generative and healing-focused workshop, we will use writing prompts, guided meditations, intuition exercises, personal medicine work, shamanic practices, divination, mapping, unbinding wounds & trauma, communing with plant and animal beings, and ceremony to explore the articulation of experience and trauma (lived and inherited). We will explore texts from all genres and work directly on developing a personal healing and writing practice while exploring lived/embodied experience, the body as both a compromised site and as a site for resistance, and connections to thinking about healing from other lineages, including plant & animal medicine, Buddhism, and different lineages of shamanism.

Workshop Structure:

In order to accommodate both synchronous and asynchronous modes, the majority of the work will be asynchronous and can be self-paced for each week (ie. readings, writing prompts, exercises, discussions). There will be 4 synchronous meetings (via Zoom). The 4 sessions will be Mondays from 11AM-1PM PST: 4/26, 5/3, 5/10, 5/17). Though attendance at these meetings is highly encouraged, it is not mandatory. All meetings will be recorded and posted the next day, for those who are unable to make part or all of the meeting times, with guided instructions on any activities/exercises covered during the meetings to be posted as well. As well, all participants will have the opportunity to have one 1-on-1 conference with Janice during the 4-week period