“Write your reality”: A Conversation with Janice Lee

“That is, my nonfiction isn’t any more ‘real’ than my fiction.”

Writer, educator, and shaman Janice Lee pushes the boundaries of language—experimenting with form across several works. The author of seven books that span genres, Janice investigates inherited trauma, interspecies connections, the shape of intimacy.

Her latest work, Imagine a Death is filled with pages of lyrical prose that explores the porousness of language. Centered around three characters who all grapple with loss amid an apocalyptic world, Imagine a Death reckons with the ways that death and life, dreams and reality, past and present, human and non-human entities are not divorced from one another but rather are inherently entangled. Imagine a Death is a gripping novel that plays with the space language can create, occupy, and collapse.

Janice and I chatted over email about her latest work, her writing journey and practice, and her advice to aspiring writers.

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Allisen Lichtenstein: What did your path to becoming a writer look like?

Janice Lee: The oldest memory I have related to writing is with my mother. She used to read to me every night—I still have this very old, torn-up volume of the Treasury of Stories and Verse that is now missing a cover and covered in doodles and handwriting practice—and she would drop my sister and I off at the public library every Saturday where I would go home with just stacks and stacks of books. There is a scene in Imagine a Death when a man in the audience asks the writer, “What do you enjoy about writing?” And the writer really belabors this question. It feels like an impossible question. And finally, she settles on: “It reminds me of reading with my mother, the stories she used to read to me and create for me, and so the narratives I create now are like a way of being closer to her, creating a ghost to properly haunt me.” When I wrote that line, I was definitely thinking about my own relationship to my mother, and how much we both loved literature. But as a Korean mother, she wanted me to be a doctor. After a sequence of tragic events, I ended up changing my major in college to Literature/Writing and my parents were both furious. Really, they were worried about how I would sustain myself, how I would live. She’s no longer with me (though she did live long enough to see my first book published), and I think she would be proud of the path I’ve chosen and the life I’ve managed for myself.

AL: Your writing path has journeyed across multiple genres: fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction—how have you approached these different forms? And what does your writing practice look like?

JL: It’s sort of a shift in vantage point or position. That is, it’s less about the genre distinctions in terms of form, but a different way for me to encounter the emotional resonances I’m writing about. It requires a different position in space, a different attention, a different relationship to language that doesn’t exclude other relationships, but perhaps shift focus. For example, though I’m using imagination in any genre, my relationship to speculation, imagination, the question of what if, is perhaps a bit more visible. Or if I’m writing poetry, I might let go of my relationship to the sentence as sentence a bit more and ask myself to have a different attention to language, to breath, to air. But they’re all about narrative in a way, they’re all about language, and they’re all different ways of articulating reality. That is, my nonfiction isn’t any more “real” than my fiction.”

These days, if I’m honest, I’ve been writing very rarely. I think about writing quite a lot, and I spend a lot of time sitting, walking, breathing, and that’s all part of my practice. But at the moment, very few words are making it onto the page that are legible for others yet. I’m taking more time to exist and not rushing into articulation.

AL: How did you come to this particular book? What was the initial seed?

JL: The initial seed was an image. This reoccurring image of someone, perhaps myself, washing blood off of their hands in a bathroom sink. This image haunted me. It would come to me in dreams, but also when I wasn’t sleeping. And I wasn’t sure what surrounded that image. Where did the blood come from and what had happened? Then, after a trip to New York, (I was living in Los Angeles at the time), Mr. Bungie, a beloved feline companion of my friend and poet Brenda Iijima, appeared to me in a dream. In the dream, the front door bell rang and when I opened the door, there was Mr. Bungie, covered in blood. He kept trying to enter the house and I was frantically trying to block him from entering, afraid of getting blood all over the furniture. He managed his way in, getting blood all over the house in the process, and I had to chase him before I was finally able to pick him up, bring him to the bathroom, and wash the blood off of him, and then, off of my hands. That was it. After that dream, I knew that I had to write about this occurrence. I still didn’t know what the book was about, but I knew that I had to write whatever it was. And much of the book kind of poured out of me in this way that I hadn’t experienced before.

But they’re all about narrative in a way, they’re all about language, and they’re all different ways of articulating reality. 

AL: That is such a striking image that resonates with what’s happening in the book on the level of language. The book breaks down the borders of dreams and realities, showcases different points of view that stretch across species, offers nonlinear narratives, and is filled with run-on sentences. What made you interested in these experimental styles?

JL: It feels important to say that yes, I’ve been very much invested in experimental and innovative writing for much of literary life. I remember, through really radical ways of reimagining what a text could be, being given permission from one of my earliest writing teachers, Anna Joy Springer. I remember on her syllabus for the class “Experimental Writing” was this quote from Carole Maso: “If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering, and it is capable of great passion and also great nuances of passion—the passion of the mind, the passion of the body—and if syntax reflects state of desire, is hope, is love, is sadness, is fury . . . if the motion of line is about desire and longing and want; then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional straight models?” This quote has been so important for me, and I still include it at the top of all my own syllabi. Because of what I learned from so many teachers along the way, I learned to develop new relationships to language and narrative.

I contextualize all of this because though a lot of my work has been much more intentionally experimental, that is, I’ve been much more conscious about what I was upholding and resisting in my work, this book is much more a product of everything I’ve absorbed in my life, and is more an articulation, or at least a reaching towards articulation, of real and lived experience. Another way to say this is that I’m not trying to be difficult or obtuse or break rules. The thing is, those rules never included me anyways, and the pre-existing forms and narrative containers can’t hold the excess and blobular and meandering nature of trauma, of reality as I experience it. We call sentences run-on because there is a departure from what a sentence is supposed to look like (and what this brings up for me is how terrible I was at running the mile in PE class).

For me, Imagine a Death is very much a gesture of anti-colonialist sentimentality. The narrative doesn’t offer resolution or redemption. And the long sentences don’t offer the comfort of familiarity or concision. The book also doesn’t adhere to the hero’s journey, or the valuing of any single individual’s journey, for that matter, and that’s why it matters that the pigeons, the dog, the moss, the dreams, are all a part of these entangled vantage points.

AL: Amid these intimacies and links that language creates, you’ve also shown the ways that death is so linked to life. Can you speak a bit about how you approached writing into these themes?

JL: I am a person, who has perhaps had an uncommonly large amount of loss and grief in my life. But I think that continued relationship with death (and love), and loss (and clarity) have really allowed to me to be present in the world in a way that has allowed me to write this book.

This quote from Bayo Akomolafe comes to mind: “Death needs a new cosmology. Death is not a black hole where things cease to be. If you want to live well, keep death close. Hope includes hopelessness and grieving is showing gratitude for that which has been lost. What would it be like to treat grief as power? Even our hopelessness as a form of decomposing and falling away that is sacred.” It’s important to remember that death is not the opposite of life. Death and birth are the two events that bookend a life, perhaps, but living and dying don’t exist in opposition to each other. The novel mentions this several times, that living and dying are synonyms, and this continuation of cycles, of composting, of love, is what I want to focus on rather than giving into fear.

AL: I’m curious to know what other texts or practices have influenced your work?

JL: One writer in particular, at least for this book, is Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Though our sentences are different, his meandering, apocalyptic prose has been hugely important for me. Film continues to be a huge influence. I’m fascinated particularly with the long take in film (directors like Bela Tarr and Tsai Ming-Liang), and the different ways in which time can create different spaces, often unsettling ones, that have different capacities to create relationships with the self. I’m interested in slowness and the spaces for contemplation that can be created. And other practices that have influenced my work include gardening, running, and watching fires.

AL: What advice do you have for writers who are interested in pursuing more experimental forms of prose?

JL: Please, do write your reality. Do reach for the articulation that feels impossible. Go deeper and deeper into those crevices and unlearn everything you need to in order to become more your true self.