Review by Emily Webber
Jessica E. Johnson’s memoir, Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home, revisits her unique childhood during the 1970s and 1980s. Through her mother’s letters, written during Johnson’s childhood, Mettlework beautifully interweaves her mother’s journey with her own. Johnson examines how people continuously discover new versions of themselves and others and how the idea of home changes as people enter different stages of life.
Shortly after Johnson had her first child, she received an email from her mother with scanned photographs and two letters written by her mother in 1979 and 1980. Eventually, her mother shares all her correspondence, prompting Johnson to look more closely at her upbringing. Johnson’s childhood was built entirely around her father’s mining jobs, with constant moves to remote locations, isolation, boredom, and sometimes even a lack of essential resources. Outwardly, her parents display optimism about their lifestyle as they praise the sense of adventure and individualism that comes with it: “The remoteness, what they thought of as adventure—the possibility of a wild and free good life amid and in search of elements—was the point.” What Johnson uncovers in her mother’s letters is something more complex. Her mother’s letters show a woman with young children writing to convince herself that the family’s situation isn’t as harrowing as it seems, battling inclement weather, scarce resources, and deep loneliness: “She was the person who endured without complaint by altering her expectations. The self she rebuilt could be ok with the way things were.”
The act of Johnson’s mother writing and later sharing her letters with her daughter allows Johnson to see her differently, not just as a mother figure intertwined so deeply with her idea of herself.
Here, the aboveground and belowground divide no longer holds. She and I can be distinct and entangled. We can name our constraints without shame, without smoothing over. We can trace the ways we’ve had to harden, the ways we can still move. We can find the forces we exert, the places where we shine.
In this dimension where I descend with my coffee every morning, our stories need not be the same in order to be true. What I find here, I’m not taking. I am traveling the unseen places where connective tissue forms. It’s a place to breathe with hard problems. It’s a place where we can rewrite ideas of us that keep us from changing in the ways we need to.
Johnson also has a book-length poem, Metobolics, published by Acre Books in 2023, that considers how nature can provide balance and transformation. In Mettlework, she pays close attention to the land and the human impact on it. While her parents told themselves they were lucky to live on “untouched land,” Johnson acknowledges this is a false narrative. In the most straightforward example, she describes her parents’ time in a remote area of Alaska and how they repaired the only airstrip so that they could get food and supplies brought in. Once her parents repaired the airstrip, the man who brought their supplies brought back hunters who killed every sheep on the island for sport. Johnson, who teaches at a community college in Oregon with a diverse population, including many refugees, sees the effects of poverty, gentrification, and the fruits of increased activism. She begins to cast off the idea of total self-reliance from her childhood and instead looks more towards shared community.
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.
Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home by Jessica E. Johnson
Acre Books May 16, 2024 / Paperback
ISBN-13: 9781946724755
Emily Webber has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer magazine, Five Points, Split Lip Magazine, Brevity, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated, from Paper Nautilus Press. You can read more at www.emilyannwebber.com and @emilyannwebber.