Mettlework

Interview in Four Way Review

Interview in Electric Lit

“Through her mother’s letters, written during Johnson’s childhood, Mettlework beautifully interweaves her mother’s journey with her own. . . . What emerges strongly from Mettlework is the magic of reading and writing, especially the value of documenting and writing personal stories to understand one another better. So, not only does Johnson appreciate her mother more fully and the intricacies of what being a mother means, but she also learns what she wants for herself, what home means, and the stories she will pass on to her children.”
—Emily Webber, MER

“In her introspective coming-of-age story, author and poet Jessica E. Johnson writes mothers and their children back into the script, moving their experiences from the edges to the foreground. . . . Johnson is at her best when writing about the impossible standards imposed on mothers and how norms of white middle-class domesticity rely on hierarchies of class and race for superiority. It turns out that homemaking, whether in a mining town or post-recession Portland, Oregon, leans into the fiction of the perfect mother who dedicates everything to her child and, thus, to the nation.”
—Elizabeth Marshall, PopMatters

“[Mettlework] is a story of isolation and the quest for human connection. It is a story of family dynamics and gender dynamics—and the awareness it takes to break those patterns, if desired. It is a story of the vast, enmeshed systems that harm us here in the United States and the infinite decisions—tiny, colossal—we must make if we want to untangle and alleviate our oppression. The book’s underlying question: how do we best take care of this world?”
—Mary Ardery, DIAGRAM

“Mettlework: a Mining Daughter on Making Home by poet Jessica E. Johnson returns again and again to the term selvedge. It’s a word that perfectly encapsulates the obsessions of this book, as its author circles themes of home, motherhood, memory, the act of making—babies, books, gardens—and how a woman’s identity can be both trapped and expanded by these elements. They first define selvedge as ‘the plane that marks the difference between metal and nonmetal . . . a word for the divide created by the nature of a thing itself: the self edge.’”
—Amber Wheeler Bacon, Full Stop

“Isolation, both physical and figurative, would define much of Johnson’s childhood. In Mettlework, it feeds into seductive and sentimentalized notions of rugged individualism and self-reliance. The experience would later lead her to reevaluate her conception of motherhood, particularly as it relates to late-capitalist consumer society and the enduring myths of the American West.”
—E. J. Iannelli, Inlander

“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

“In Mettlework, we learn about mining as a practice and as labor to maintain one’s livelihood, but we are also given a lens into the mining of our own stories—from our family histories to motherhood—and how we go about creating a life and home for ourselves. With prose that is luminous and rhythmic, Johnson invites us in to see what routes lead us to the life we have today.”
—Natalie Lima, essayist and professor of creative writing at Butler University