In Conversation: Jessica E. Johnson & Tyler Mills
Writers Jessica Johnson & Tyler Mills join the Notebooks Collective to discuss their new memoirs, Mettlework and The Bomb Cloud, which both invoke their family history and how the personal and the politic intertwine.
About Mettlework
“…The resulting journey encompasses Johnson’s early memories, the story of the earth told in the language of geology, bits of vivid correspondence, a mothering manual from the early twentieth century, and the daily challenges of personal and collective care in a lonesome-crowded Pacific wonderland. Mettlework traces intergenerational failures of homemaking, traveling toward presence and relationship amid the remains of extractive industry and unsustainable notions of family.”
About The Bomb Cloud
“A shimmering memoir defined equally by its lyrical prose and profound historical implications, The Bomb Cloud untangles the intersecting strands of information running through a family mystery shaped by national secrets…Extending from the poems in Mills’ Hawk Parable, this memoir wrestles with her grandfather’s likely involvement in a top-secret bomb wing that trained in the New Mexico desert, taking the reader to the very edge of the unknowable.”