Janice Lee's Blog, page 4
November 29, 2021
University of Maine: New Writing Series / Dec 9
4:30PM EST
Details TBD
November 6, 2021
Willamette University, Salem, OR / Nov 18
Reading at Willamette University (Salem, OR)
Fall 2021 Hallie Ford Literary Series: An Afternoon With Writer Janice Lee
Thursday 5PM, November 18
Eaton 209
Free and open to all community members
October 28, 2021
October 23, 2021
We Make Circles Workshop @ Soul Fire Farm / Nov 12
A 3-part series of poetry workshops for BIPOC land stewards. Attendance is required for all three sessions: November 5th, 12th, and 19th.
I’m really excited to be a guest speaker on Nov 12 of this 3-week workshop, led by Jo Stewart.
More details below and at this link.
About this event*** ATTENDANCE AT ALL (3) WORKSHOPS IS REQUIRED. ***
In Bayo Akomolafe’s book These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, he retells a Yoruba folk proverb in a letter to his daughter. A translation of the proverb goes like so:
“We make circles round the mahogany bean tree, but it is too much to handle; we make circles around the baobab tree, but it is too much to handle; we make circles around the well, but it is nothing to jump into in anger.”
In this writing workshop, we will attune ourselves to those organic bodies that baffle our attempts to encircle them with language or knowledge—who are “too much to handle.” We will notice (rather than grasp at) what slips away, allowing what thwarts us to relax our fierce grip on accuracy, productivity, and arrival. The ambition of this workshop is to learn how to befriend those who stump us and stop us—not in order to subdue or coax into submission—but so that we might practice holding space for the non-linear and inarticulate in our poetics, our lives.
This course is open to Black, Brown, Indigenous, and people of color who identify as land stewards. Stewardship, in this instance, is broadly defined. We hope that folks with varying degrees of experience pursuing land based ancestral practices, who approach their local environment with curiosity and reverence (in both rural and urban settings) will enroll. An abiding commitment to language, in all its bite and nectar, is also encouraged.
The workshop will be led primarily by poet, performer, and educator Jo Stewart, with drop-in visits by writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer, Janice Lee, as well as writer, co-director and farm manager of Soul Fire Farm, Leah Penniman.
One of the most pressing challenges in this course will be to navigate our personal relationships to naming and not-knowing. It is not so much a problem to solve, as a question to carry alongside us as we pursue our individual investigations. It is vitally important that we remain critical of our particular inheritances regarding name-calling, christening, possessing, and fetishizing place while also honing our senses and tuning-in to what lights us up and puts us out about particular spaces.
October 20, 2021
Workshop @ Brooklyn College Women’s Center / Nov 11
Online Event
The Pandemic has brought us all to the portal of letting go of the past and living with open arms, allowing for openness and vulnerability and possibility, and accepting what is while still hoping to create the impossible. Letting go isn’t about eliminating desire, ambition, or hope, but about un-attaching ourselves from those hopes, about no longer clinging to a sense of control, about no longer seeing the world in a linear way. When we cling to the hope of a “better future,” we long for a sense of control that has never and will never exist. This workshop, led by Janice Lee (published writer, teacher, shamanic healer) and author of Imagine a Death, will consist of a guided meditation, a freewriting session, and a communal ceremony (that will be finished on your own). Please bring a small object that represents what you need to let go of, or a small stone, that will be buried in the ground after the workshop.
Register: https://tinyurl.com/WCBC-LettingGo
September 10, 2021
Amherst College / Nov 4
The Amherst College Center for Creative Writing:
Janice Lee: A Reading and ConversationThursday, November 4 • 7:30–8:30 pm VirtualPlease register in advance for this event »
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.
More details at the The Amherst College Center for Creative Writing Events page.
September 7, 2021
PNCA Graduate Lecture Series / Nov 3
Graduate Lecture Series: Janice Lee
Nov 3 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM PST
511 Building – Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design 511 NW Broadway
Portland, Oregon, 97209
The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies is thrilled to welcome novelist Janice Lee. The author will read from her most recent novel, Imagine a Death, as part of the Graduate Lecture Series. Presented by the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Critical Studies.
Janice Lee (she/her) is a Korean-American writer, editor, teacher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima, is also forthcoming in 2022 from Meekling Press. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the concept of han in Korean culture, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, she teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing, and writing, and practices in several lineages, including the Q’ero, Buddhism, plant & animal medicine, and Korean shamanic ritual (Muism). She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at janicel.com
This conversation will be presented in-person in PNCA’s Shipley-Collins Mediatheque and on PNCA LiveVideo, PNCA’s YouTube channel
Free and Open to the Public. All are welcome.
Wxtch Craft: Speaking with the Dead: Janice Lee & Johanna Hedva on Death-Craft / Oct 28
Wxtch Craft
Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten
Speaking with the Dead: Janice Lee & Johanna Hedva on Death-Craft
More details forthcoming. Follow @wxtchcraftkabk on Instagram for more details.
All sessions will be on Zoom. We work with meetings, not webinar format, max capacity is 300, first come first served.
Always on a Thursdays
19:30 – 21:00
The Hague / Brussels time (locus of our cauldron).
OCT UTC+2
NOV UTC+1 (note: wintertime)
All sessions will be recorded again and posted one week after in our link tree in BIO 
… where you can still find ALL the recordings of our last epic year, archived for our ongoing listening pleasure.
There will be Live Captioning & Sign Language Interpreters present in all covens.
Portland State University w/ Michele Glazer / Oct 21
MICHELE GLAZER AND JANICE LEE
October 21 | 4pm | Zoom
Register here for the Michele Glazer and Janice Lee reading. You will receive a Zoom link upon registration.
Michele Glazer’s fourth collection, fretwork, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2021. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Glazer teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Portland State University.
Comments on fretwork include:
“Heir to Gerard Manley Hopkin’s unwavering gaze, Michele Glazer coolly attends to the arbitrary boundaries we claim between nature and culture and lets us witness how elusive and submerged human beings are to each other, especially at close proximity. I felt, in reading these poems, that this is someone who is tracking her world from an altogether different distance than the rest of us, who has an utterly original apprehension of the relationship between depths and surfaces. Death appears at the edges of things, whether or not we want to look—but when we look, we are intensely magnified, made vivid and rare by our kinship with strangeness. I found fretwork devastating, funny, unsettling, and radiant—I felt my life jolted into view.”
–Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields
“Silence is both [Glazer’s] tool and her subject, what she cuts with and through in order to remain attentive. This is superb writing, always precise, unpredictable, authentic to its searching, unnervingly alive. I love this book for all the ways in which it remains gobsmackingly present to real bewilderment, while inhabiting a receptivity continually reoriented by care.”
–Mary Szybist, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry, author of Incarnadine
Janice Lee (she/her) is a Korean-American writer, editor, teacher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently: The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022). A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima, is also forthcoming in 2022 from Meekling Press. An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.
The Writers Center Craft Chat Series / Oct 14
FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern.
The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of fiction! We’re joined by Janice Lee to discuss her new novel, Imagine a Death. Janice is in conversation with Zach Powers, novelist and Director of Communications at The Writer’s Center.
