Jessica E. Johnson, author of “Mettlework”
Inside a rented house on bluff in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, I’m one of four women on a DIY writer’s retreat. A wall of tall windows shows a blue scene: a bend in the Mississippi River, cloud cover, deciduous trees, buzzards tilting just beyond our overlook. Inside, having run or walked or stretched to clear our surface energy, we spend the days staring at screens, fluttering keyboards, scratching notebooks, pausing to search an inward space, returning to the page. Headphones on, headphones off. A cup set down impatiently, then picked up slowly. We write and move, read and move. I favor the table, others prefer couches or beds.
I’m from the West, and this landscape is strange to me, with its dense air, bugs, and thunderstorms. It’s strange, too, inhabiting uninterrupted creative energy with others. Strange, not having to furtively steal time from responsibilities.
We pause for meals: set the table, take turns cooking, tidy up, wipe down. It’s an odd feeling, removing dinner from the compromise logic of the family-with-kids. Unfamiliar and wonderful: keeping a house with other women simply in order to write in it.
To get here, I flew into Chicago where my friend Sara picked me up. We drove hours through corn and soybean fields, passing some of her childhood landmarks. Before settling into the house, we crossed into Iowa to buy groceries. It might have been nothing more than my vowels and the cut of my jeans, but the checker looked me up and down and said, “You’re not from around here.” I wanted to tell her that I’d grown up walking the aisles of another small-town IGA in a state beginning with “I,” where my mother had searched for ingredients to match recipes dreamed up in better-stocked places.
I thought of my mother while listening to an interview with novelist Zadie Smith, in which Smith referred to traditionally female-coded domestic labor as “the art of life,” insisting that such work should be held in high regard as community keeping, on par with writing books. My memoir Mettlework chronicles, among other things, my mother’s domestic work—the work that taught me what it means to make a home—in sometimes-extreme conditions. Whether we lived in a tent or a cabin, a mining-town Victorian or an exurban modern house, my mother’s daily project was arranging what we had into simple, good, and often beautiful meals just as she arranged visual vignettes on the walls and ledges. Homemaking—as she would have called it—was her creative field, whether conditions were adverse or favorable, whether a trip to town took all day over bumpy roads, whether we were down to a few odd ingredients, whether we had running water, whether she had nothing but a cast iron skillet and a fire to cook with.
If I run into anyone now who worked with or visited my family during our years in mining camps, they will mention something my mother cooked “in the middle of nowhere,” seemingly by magic. Sometimes she cooked just for us, other times for the men working there. Once, when I was a teenager, a man who had worked with my parents in the desert visited us and sheepishly asked my mother if she’d consider cooking the red beans and rice he’d been longing for for years.
We learn it from each other: the making of a day and the meals that gather us. We see what it means to craft everyday occasions and larger ones, experiences we want to return. We discover how to arrange things, how to gently impose an order.
I learned to cook standing at my mother’s elbow, and when I left her house, preparing artful dinners was the way I knew how to be an adult. In my first apartments, my best friend Jenine and I would go for long hikes or lake swims, then collaborate on a hippie-ish, vegetable forward dinner from Moosewood or Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. When my husband, early in our courtship, left a pie pumpkin on my doorstep with a poem attached, I turned it into a curry and invited him over. After we were married, we went out seldom but had people over for dinner often. The implements of hosting were my most treasured possessions.
In the bluff house, we dine on crisp pizzas, watermelon salads, elevated veggie burgers, and a good deal of home baking. Many of the recipes are culled from the New York Times, which is now my mother’s main source of starred favorites.
I delight in my companions’ ability to make lovely things for us to eat, but it becomes clear that I’m in a different place these days with dinner, and maybe the art of life in general. As my need and ability to focus on writing has grown alongside my paid work and my thriving children, I aim for what will be fast, easy, and nutritionally complete. I no longer remember how to make an occasion out of a meal. This is especially true since I started writing Mettlework, an investigation of my mining camp childhood and all I inherited with it. I have turned away from my mother’s domesticity. Maybe I have turned away from too much.
At the end of our stay, Sara remembers a recipe that will turn leftover ingredients—various cheeses, onion, and a bag of frozen spinach—into a baked spread. In a cooler, The Dip, as we call it, travels with us back to Chicago. The Dip is sharp, salty, and satisfying. With bread or crackers, a little goes a long way. We stop at the Scandinavian diner where Sara waited tables in high school and acquire a giant sour cherry pie. When we can’t eat more of The Dip or The Pie, we’re pleased to find soup dumplings in Madison. Our conversation travels along tangents. We process our days of writing and reading, the swirling sensory overload of The House on the Rock, our mothers, our motherhood, our complicities, our place in the world. We connect and co-define and cackle.
This too is the art of life, though it’s more of a riff, an improvisation, a going off. We’re not feeding the inherited rhythms of the heteronormative family and its workaday systems or the stickier developmental needs of children, but an anachronistic girlish wildness.
I love this feeling, and I know it from somewhere—my mother. During brief periods when I visited her as an adult, before I had kids, and when my father was working somewhere else, we too have practiced wilder art of life. Once, she spent a winter in San Francisco’s East Bay to take a class, and I visited her for a weekend. We hiked, we talked, we went to a museum. We ate when we were hungry, whatever was at hand. She made things nice because that’s what she does. At the end of the day, she’d fix us a quick, stunning platter of radial snacks, the effort of preparation minimal enough to afford even the one who prepares it maximum pleasure in body and spirit, as dinner sometimes can.
***
Jessica E. Johnson (she/they) is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Poetry Series), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press), and the memoir Mettlework (Acre Books).
Jessica is a career community college instructor based in Portland, Oregon. They are interested in inclusive learning environments, knowledge production, radical care, and the relationships between art, friendship, community, and social change. They work to make spaces for thinking, feeling, and learning together.
She is a contributor to Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, Dream Pop, Terrain, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch, among others. She co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series.
