The characters that populate Janice Lee's stories range widely: from human beings processing grief and loss to pet animals judging their human companions' coping skills in an apocalyptic landscape.
In Lee's expansive, unconventional stories, even the Covid-19 virus has a tale to tell.
Lee, an assistant professor of creative writing, is the author of eight books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, and the winner of the 2023 College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (CLAS) Researcher of the Year award.
Lee's conceptual writing focuses on decolonizing the language of storytelling itself, recontextualizing narrative architecture and utilizing entanglement models (characters or story threads, for instance, becoming inextricably entwined) to tell polyphonic stories of landscape and assemblage. It is not uncommon for Lee's sentences to span multiple pages. Her stories may not offer resolution or redemption for her characters. The journey, not the destination, drives Lee’s work.
Her fluid writing style gives the reader access to her protagonists’ internal thought structures, whether they are humans, animals, plants, or even forest fires. Lee's narratives address profound and complex subjects, including inherited trauma and healing, life and death, coping mechanisms, and the realms of post-life consciousness that may lie beyond this mortal coil.
"I write a lot about familial and cultural trauma and the ways those are sometimes inherited," Lee says, drawing on her relationship with her father, who fought in the Korean War and escaped North Korea. As Lee explains, sometimes her father's retelling of traumatic events was not always consistent or historically accurate. However, her father's processing of those traumatic events informed Lee's exploration of the characters' relationships to events that resonated emotionally throughout their lifetimes. "It allows me to speculate or fill in gaps because even when the facts are known, they're not necessarily reflective of lived experience."
Lee, who started writing early, attended high school in Cupertino, California. Despite Silicon Valley's large Asian-American population, Lee says she was self-conscious about her Korean-American identity. Rebelling subconsciously against what she felt it was to be "stereotypically Asian," her writing revolved around broader science fiction and fantastical elements. Eventually, a point of contention came when, for example, Lee would submit stories to journals soliciting identity-based work by Asian-American writers and told her submissions were not "Asian-American enough."
As an undergraduate at UC San Diego, Lee switched her degree from premed to literature and writing, against her parents' wishes. She received her MFA in creative writing from CalArts in 2008. After grad school, Lee began adjuncting, teaching GED classes at Pasadena City College and SAT classes for local Korean after-school programs, and then college-level creative writing classes at UCSD, Pitzer College, and CalArts. Searching for a tenure-track position, Lee accepted an offer from PSU in 2017.
In addition to teaching creative writing workshops, Lee teaches an undergraduate and graduate-level class titled "The Sentence," where a single sentence structure and the writer's relationship to language are examined (similar to that of an entire story). This class is an exercise in teaching writers how to write with intention and be better readers of other writers' works.
"I thought no one was going to take this class," Lee says. "A seminar on the sentence? They're all going to get scared away." To Lee's surprise, the class filled up and had a waitlist. "Half of the students on the first day didn't know what the class was about, and so I just figured, 'Well, when they find out, they'll drop.' Instead, they all came back."
Set during a "mundane apocalypse," Lee's novel Imagine a Death steers away from classic colonialist sentimentality, featuring survivors processing their feelings and justifications while fighting for survival. Her latest book, A Roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in–a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima–was conceived by both authors during the Covid-19 pandemic as a writing exercise, with each writer taking turns adding to the shared narrative.
Acting as what she refers to as "a rehab project," Lee's first book of poetry, Separation Anxiety–a finalist for both the 2022 Big Other Reader's Choice and the 2023 Oregon Book Award in Poetry–was her respite from long-form writing and prose. "There's a lot more silence," she explains. "There's a lot of white space. That was really helpful for me; processing some of these themes and ideas, not necessarily through my characters, but just even in my own life."
Writing Separation Anxiety helped Lee process not only immediate grief but also anticipated grief, as it was bookended by the loss of her two dogs.
Throughout her writing career, Lee has served as the executive editor for the online literary magazine Entropy as well as an editor and publisher at various small presses. She is currently the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing, which offers creative writing labs led by award-winning and groundbreaking writers and artists, and was founded by the national bestselling and Portland-based author Lidia Yuknavitch.
Over time, Lee says she began to get more in touch with her Korean-American and ancestral Korean identities. Processing her emotions through research of her ancestry, Lee incorporates Korean words, phrases, and ancestral concepts into her work.
Pending her first trip to South Korea, Lee's forthcoming book seeks to explore the ties between the Korean cultural concept of han (an internalized feeling of deep sorrow, resentment, grief, regret, and anger), narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the creation of Korean Hangul script, and revisions of oral mythologies, such as the Korean Myth of Princess Bari.
"So all of this may change totally–radically–after I actually go to Korea and have different experiences," Lee says, noting that she is looking forward to exploring Korea's mountain temples and taking in the spiritual stories and weight of these sacred sites. While her next book is in progress, anything can happen, owing to Lee's creative narrative structures: "We'll see."