Bio:

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 7 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award. A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima, is forthcoming in April 2023 from Meekling Press. An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and practices in several lineages, including the medicine tradition of the Q’ero, Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh), plant & animal medicine, and Korean shamanic ritual. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

Long bio:

Janice Lee is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? As a writer, she is interested in the decolonization of narrative and language, and the systems which we use to make meaning and create reality.

She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness, Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), an experimental novel, Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), a book-length meditation and ekphrasis on the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), a lyrical essay reflecting on the death of Lee’s mother, The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a collection of travel essays inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), a novel about inherited trauma, the apocalypse, and interspecies communication, and Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), her first full-length poetry collection which is a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award.

A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima, is forthcoming from Meekling Press. She also has several chapbooks Red Trees, Fried Chicken Dinner (Insert Blanc Press), The Other Worlds (eohippus labs), and The Transparent As Witness (Solar Luxuriance), a collaboration with Will Alexander. She edited the pamphlets Inherited Trauma and Entanglement and Being for the eohippus labs annex series. She is currently working on several collaborations including a critical book on Béla Tarr’s 7-hour film Sátántangó with Jared Woodland. Their essay “How to Watch Sátántangó” is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films. She has presented scholarly papers on topics such as consciousness studies, psychology, theoretical neuroscience, hybrid poetics, experimental narrative, collaboration, publishing, interactive literature, and interspecies communication at various conferences internationally. She was selected by John D’Agata as Black Warrior Review‘s 2011 Nonfiction Grand Prize Winner.

She holds a BA in Literature/Writing (with minors in Biological Anthropology & Film Studies) from UCSD and an MFA in Creative Writing/Critical Studies from CalArts.

She has currently held roles as Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms and Founder/Executive Editor of Entropy. In the recent past, she helped develop a new program called Codetalk (a program that teaches web development to low-income women housed at St. Joseph Center and funded by Snapchat), with Maggie Nelson launched SUBLEVEL (a new online literary magazine based in the CalArts MFA Writing Program), and was CEO/Founder of POTG Design (a web design & development company that specialized in web design for creative individuals and organizations). She has also recently taught at CalArts, UC San Diego, and Pitzer College.

Incorporating shamanic and energetic healing, Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing, and writing. She is a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine and energy work and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh. She also incorporates elements of ancestral healing work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism) and Korean folk magic, plant medicine and flower essence work, card readings and divination, and interspecies communication.

She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

More on Healing Work:

Born on the lunar new year in the interstices of the year of the pig and the year of the rat, Janice has often occupied and been interested in the spaces between. As a child, Janice often sensed and saw spirits, or magically found missing objects for strangers. Her elders were often bewildered by her expansive intuition and expressed concerns for her prophetic dreams. As an adult, she didn’t understand her gifts and tried to escape into more intellectual understandings of the world, seeking answers by studying with a scholar’s fervor disciplines like neuroscience, consciousness, theology, the history of alchemy, western philosophy, literary theory, phenomenology, and the occult. After a series of synchronous encounters and devastating losses, Janice found herself back in attunement with her intuition, specifically through telepathic communications with plants and animals. (She still considers her first spiritual teacher to be her first dog, Benny.)

Janice is now a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine and energy work (she studied with Rosemary Beam of Rising Fire and completed the Healers Training Program), and is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh. She also incorporates elements of ancestral healing work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism) and Korean folk magic, plant medicine and flower essence work, card readings and divination, and interspecies communication. Her intuitive gifts are supported by her ancestors and her spirit guides.

Currently, Janice offers her intuitive gifts most regularly through her workshops (mainly through Corporeal Writing). She also occasionally offers group guided meditations, various one-day workshops, and limited one-on-one card readings and healing sessions. See the Events page for more info and follow her on Instagram (@diddioz) to stay updated on these occasional offerings.

Interviews and More Info: