Book Launch: Mettlework

Wednesday, May 29th, at 7:00 pm PST

Powell’s CIty of Books (1005 W. Burnside St.), Portland, OR

Celebrate the release of Jessica E. Johnson’s debut memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home. Jessica will be joined in conversation by Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State.

“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

“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