This interview was originally published in sinθ #12 “THUNDER 雷”. Get it now on BLURB.

Born in Canada in 1986 to a Welsh father and a Taiwanese mother, Jessica J. Lee is an author and environmental historian now residing in Berlin. Lee was first drawn to nature writing through courses on aesthetics and phenomenology in her undergraduate Philosophy program, and her PhD dissertation, completed in 2016, was a portrait of London’s Hampstead Heath in which the past entered into dialogue with the present.

Lee’s critically-acclaimed debut, Turning (2017), recounted her experience swimming in Berlin’s lakes over the course of a year. Her second book, Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory, Migration, and Taiwan, will be released in the UK in November 2019, and in the US, Canada, and Germany in 2020. Both a moving family history and an ode to a land of mountains and forests, the book also demonstrates Lee’s ability to evoke a vivid world out of dashes of sensation. “Built of words spoken quietly to me by my mother,” Lee writes of Taipei, her mother’s hometown, “its streets were paved with her longings. The air was made of memories. In this place, Taipei was a single hillside, a school at its crest and a tenement block at its base.”

In the following interview, Lee provides unique insight on dislocation, community, the nature genre, and writing as healing, and I continue to prove that I’m unable to go an hour without talking about Elif Batuman. This conversation was conducted over Skype in July 2019. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Jiaqi Kang: You said that you wrote your first book, Turning, simultaneously alongside your PhD dissertation. How did you balance academic and non-academic writing in the same headscape?

Jessica J. Lee: My books tend to have really long bibliographies regardless of what I do. The schedule I had at that point was: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I was writing my PhD, and Tuesdays and Thursdays I was writing Turning, and every spare moment in-between I was writing Turning. The most important discipline as a writer is being able to say, “This is the time I’m doing this thing. No compromises, no negotiation.” I can’t say I’m very good at that still.

JK: Whenever you encounter a patch of nature, do you always research it as thoroughly as you did Hampstead Heath? Is knowledge of history essential to engaging with the location?

JJL: I wouldn’t say it’s essential, but I think it helps enormously. There’s a level of engagement I have with a landscape that’s like, “I know nothing about it.” It’s purely aesthetic in a lot of ways. But when I go into something with a bit of research it definitely shapes my experience of a place because you go in with that attention to tiny details, to time passing and change. You’re able to see those things happening in the landscape. I live in a city where it’s so evident. In Berlin, it’s a constant negotiation of past and present and future, because the past here is so heavy. It’s quite literally written into the ground; it’s memorialised. They put plaques on the ground so you’re constantly stepping over history. It’s something central to how I experience place, this tension.

And I think definitely doing my research wherever I go can really help. Sometimes it’s historical research, sometimes it’s scientific research.. I always think of those archetypal male nature writers… They drive me nuts. But there’s also that thing that’s like, the ability to be interested in everything, you know? And just… “Oh, I’m gonna just get into whatever this place offers me and find that exciting.”

JK: Could you talk a bit more about male nature writers?

JJL: [Laughs] For so long there’s been such a strong tradition of what Kathleen Jamie calls the “lone enraptured male”. Man in the wilderness, on his own, with his Romantic poetry and his idea of wilderness, which is itself super problematic… and this sort of security and belonging and, “Yes, this is my land and I get to walk over it,” right? I think as [women and people of color] we don’t necessarily occupy space in the same way. I’ve moved around quite a lot. What I do — and what a lot of other [women and nature writers of color] do — is not taking for granted the right to be in a landscape and to be able to interrogate that and what that means.

JK: A lot of male writing is disguised as “normative”. I’ve been trying to think about how “show don’t tell” might be patriarchal because it implies what you’re saying is universally transparent. Could you tell us a bit more about how you founded The Willowherb Review?

JJL: I founded the project on a train last year. I’d seen the list that came out for the Wainwright Prize [for nature and U.K.-based travel writing] and, no surprise, it was an entirely white list. It’s been something that’s been on my mind for a few years, this issue in British nature writing: “Let’s talk about our landscape, and our landscape only.” I definitely don’t want to be in a position where the thing that’s flourishing is exoticised travel writing, but I think there’s a real gap because… the landscapes that people [in Britain] might be familiar with, that they might call home, might not necessarily be in Britain. In a time period when we’re talking about climate change, which has no respect for borders, and if we’re talking about migration, we need to be able to see beyond borders.

So anyway, that’s a tangent. I think I just sent out a tweet saying, “Should I start a journal publishing only writers of color on nature? Because clearly no one else is doing it.” So I did. I just thought, “What’s the simplest thing I can do?” Online only. I paid for a Squarespace website for two years on the spot. The train was broken down and we were waiting to be rerouted, so I was sitting on this train in a railyard waiting forever to get home and doing all this. Thankfully German trains have good WiFi. And I looked out the window and there was this big patch of rosebay willowherb growing outside the railyard, and I thought, “That is a plant that I quite like and a lot of people really dislike because it’s a bit of a migrant plant. It’s a plant that gets into spaces that it shouldn’t…” I was thinking about how the language of ecology and botany also takes on this very anti-immigrant tone. I launched the Kickstarter a few days later and we were funded in two days.

I also started it with the full intention that it should make itself obsolete. I want the journal not to have to exist; that’s the goal.

JK: I’m curious about what you’re using the funding for, is it because you’re paying the authors?

JJL: Yeah, we pay writers. That’s one of my really strict red lines, that I operate the journal from the standpoint of being a writer first, rather than a publisher. I feel like the journal will slowly bankrupt itself. The idea is: writers get paid, editorial assistants get paid. I never paid myself for working on it… I have a certain position as a writer and this is my way of saying thanks, I guess. To my mind it’s like giving the best deal possible for their work. So they can continue producing that work, and they have a platform with a byline to say, “My work is published.”

JK: In your book you’re mention that people in Berlin often come and go and they’re not very permanent. You decided to stay. Has that informed your perspective on environments?

JJL: Perhaps rather than emphasising the fluidity and movement to me, the constant changeability in Berlin instilled in me the importance of deep respect for place, for a host culture. I don’t speak it brilliantly, but I speak German. I come across a lot of people who move here, they don’t bother to learn the language, they don’t bother to really engage. There’s a modicum of respect I feel is required for a place that is welcoming so many of us, especially those of us who are quite privileged… Digital nomads.

I also think it’s just about building a home. Home has always been a really important theme to me. No matter where I go, I’m kind of obsessive about wanting to create a personal history in the place I’m in, and that involves learning something about the place, right? In Berlin, it was just really underscored to me that not everyone walks around with that same attitude. And that, for me, was a particular kind of choice. Maybe it makes me feel a little less entitled when I go to other places. I think that’s also just, like, classic woman mixed-race person. I’m like, “Am I allowed to be here? Can I belong here or there? What feels comfortable?”

JK: That friction is what creates interesting writing. If you don’t actually feel any discomfort, what would you write about?

JJL: I could become the great male travel writer. I picked up a book the other day that was just like a white man travelling through Japan and I just thought, “Why is this being published in 2019?” I’m so tired! [Laughs]

JK: As a magazine made to platform the Sino diaspora, Sine Theta has received a fair share of what we have identified as “diaspora angst”: diasporic writers yearning for some lost idea of homeland, feeling torn by their identities, and generally feeling quite sad. In previous editorial conversations we’ve discussed the possibilities of viewing diasporic and cross-cultural identity as something productive rather than a source of despair and try to encourage our writers to, in a way, ‘move on’; at the same time, in separate conversations with my friend Alexis Luo who runs the zine Homecoming Queen, we’ve spoken about the comfort in angst, especially collective angst or knowing that there are others who feel similarly — part of Alexis’ commitment is to provide a space for people of migrant and diasporic backgrounds to explore these feelings. Where would you locate your new book “Two Trees” within this dialogue? In its treatment of Taiwan and memory, is it angst, anti-angst, or something else altogether?

JJL: I would think it’s a book that is very much a document of the process of me moving through that. It opens with this sense of dislocation, of wanting to find my place… A feeling of not belonging will never go away for me in Taiwan. There’s probably a lot of angst in the book, but it’s productive. How do we get to a place where we’re able to say, “I’m actually really happy with my position,” and also to know that I can hold this place, I can count this place amongst my homes? Always homes, plural, for me: that’s not a singular thing.

I think I’m really excited by the possibilities of this kind of… I don’t know if angst is necessarily the word that I would use, but this sort of dislocation. Because I spent my entire childhood not knowing other people who were like me. And in the past five years in particular, my entire world seems to have filled with women like me in a lot of ways. Now most of my close friends are half-white half-Asian women in creative fields. What is productive about this, it’s the community-building.

Sometimes, it’s like, “Do I need to be upset that they’ve treated me like a white person? I look white, it’s fine.” I also think that these things are so complicated, and I just need to allow that complication to exist. This happened to me three times in Taipei: I would get into a taxi and I’d say where I wanted to go, and the taxi driver would be like, “How do you speak Mandarin?” I’d be like, “我妈妈是台湾人,” and then the response would be, “Well, if your mother’s Taiwanese, why on earth is your Mandarin so bad?” I don’t even know what to do but instead I’ve just arrived at this point where I’m like, “What a funny situation to be in.” It’s up to me to do the work, it’s up to me to learn the language, it’s up to me to build my community… So I think I’ve got to a place where I’m less sad about it and much more enterprising about it.

JK: I think that’s wonderful. But it also makes me a bit sad, I guess, that the responsibility kind of falls on us to figure it out.

JJL: I think it’s not necessarily that the onus should have to be on us. I’ve gotten to know this family I have in Taiwan now. Sometimes we misread each other and of course I would like to say that they should meet us halfway but I also realise that… in my position at least, I’m the one going back there and creating this problematised… Like, “I need to belong, help!” [Laughs] [It’s] about me being able to say, “I wanna learn as much as I can and I want to learn to be comfortable with the position I’m in, regardless.” You wanna convince a 75-year-old Chinese auntie to do anything? Not gonna happen.

JK: You were swimming and you were blogging about it, and then you got a book deal for Turning. When you’re encountering nature, like swimming in the lake, is it actually the encounter itself that’s therapeutic or more the act of writing about it? Does writing non-fiction make it more real?

JJL: They’re therapeutic in different ways. For me, being in nature, in the moment, is so much about getting out of my head and being in my body, which I think as someone who, if you haven’t noticed, is very preoccupied with a lot of anxiety and stress about everything…

JK: Relatable.

JJL: It’s palpable for me to be forced to feel my feet — and feel my body and my skin and everything — when I’m going into water and when I’m walking into a forest. In terms of the emotional processing and memory-making, writing is incredibly powerful. It’s funny because the stuff that happened in Turning, I remember those days with such a level of detail. It’s abnormal. That’s very much about creating such a record within yourself so when you sit down to write it, all of these tiny details become very clear. Obviously this is selective: these are the things I remembered when I sat down and wrote, and I made them even more real for myself by repeating them.

But that process is incredibly powerful because it allowed me to take a period of my life which was quite difficult and to put it on a page and crystallise it. I now look at Turning as: it’s literally between two covers for me. It was such a clean break for me. It’s not lost on me that after I finished it, I got into a super functional relationship for the first time, and things in my life really started to change in very productive and exciting ways that were nothing like the past… Not to say that there’s a simple cure for any difficulty or depression or any of these things, but for me, it was a way of not trailing my past behind me.

JK: It’s like therapy but you get paid for it. [Laughs] I was thinking about The Idiot, by Elif Batuman. It was just her life but with the names changed. Clearly she had kind of a terrible time at university. But then she wrote this book and, to me, it felt like she made it worth it. It made me reconsider my misery, and be like, “Oh wow, so I just have to survive this and write a book about it in 20 years and it’ll all be okay.”

JJL: I don’t think I went into it thinking this. It was only after the fact that I realised that it was just the most definitive way to let go of things. I was quite young when I got married the first time, and I married an alcoholic, and I think for many years that period of time defined me. I let it continue to define me: I let it continue to define the men I dated, I let it continue to define how I saw myself. And being able to put that in an enclosed space of a book was a way of standing back and saying, “Is this me? Is this actually the story I’m going to continue telling forever? Do I need to? Oh, actually, I don’t need to.” And that was really exciting. And I was in a lot of therapy when I was writing it. [Laughs] I was talking to my therapist constantly. She was fantastic. I even thanked my therapist in the back of the book.

JK: Would you consider yourself as writing in the “Anthropocene”?

JJL: I’m one of the people who is quite tentative about using the term because I’m really wary about centering the human. I think it’s really possible for us to speak about human impact in a way that doesn’t necessarily require us naming a geological era after ourselves. That said, I agree with basically all of the Anthropocene scholarship out there. [Laughs] So this is just me being quite fussy about terminology.

I was doing my PhD around the time all of the Anthropocene hysteria emerged, and… I’m a little bit funny about these very trendy sort of shifts in scholarship. If we take any of these approaches, these are all things to help us frame our understanding of the world. And the most valuable thing I picked up when I was doing my PhD was to pick things up as and when they’re appropriate.

JK: It’s hard to navigate because everyone’s really excited, they want to name everything.

JJL: I also think so much of this just becomes this process of scholarship creating work for itself. I’m less interested in creating these categories. I’m more interested in the very minute storytelling. Getting down on the ground and really looking at something.

JK: I was editing this article about how the term “Anthropocene” is also problematic because by saying, “It’s humans’ fault that climate change is a thing…”

JJL: Not saying which humans.

JK: Exactly. Some of the humans did it but the other humans are the ones who have to clean up after it.

JJL: So much of this is just about really reassessing the communities who have a voice and a stake in things.

JK: Should nature writing be urgent?

JJL: I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t think it was urgent. When I’m telling a story about a place, it’s always with the view in mind that I’m creating a connection for a reader. That connection might generate some kind of investment, some kind of emotional change, some new way of looking at the world.

Nature writing is enormously urgent, particularly because it’s so widely read and so popular. On a more philosophical level, it’s a means of forcing the human stories sometimes to the side, or sometimes in parallel.

JK: In a few days [July 13] you’re teaching a workshop with The Reader Berlin: Writing about Nature in a Changing World. Have you had experience with pedagogy in the past? How did this workshop come about?

JJL: I taught during my PhD at university. The more I think about it, the more I’m just like, “Teaching is my favorite thing, I love teaching!” I developed this course off the basis of a course I taught last year [Nature Writing, August 18, 2018].

People are interested in talking about change, they’re interested in talking about migration, about climate change, about biodiversity loss, about changing how we speak about these things, about creative responses to environmental transformation. I’m really hoping [the course] will have an appeal across the board. I’m using texts for the course that are not necessarily canonical. I pulled passages from novels, from magazines, from some nature writing books, and I’m gonna look at them all equally. ’Cause it’s all just about world-building, right?

JK: Do you plan on writing fiction at some point?

JJL: I’m hoping now, because I have a little bit of time, I might be able to explore that. But this is very much on the downlow. For a long time I really wondered if I have enough imagination to write fiction. I look at the world, I look at the experiences I had in such great detail, but it’s all already there, you know what I mean? I really don’t know if I know how to make things up.

JK: People will be like, [Nasal voice] “Fiction isn’t fiction, you’re not making anything up. You’re just taking life and distilling it!” But honestly, yeah, when I was 12, I wrote fantasy, and now I physically cannot come up with anything that isn’t real.

JJL: Of all the things it’s actually about permission. I always imagine, if I were to write fiction, I would be the fiction writer who does piles of research. I’ve been writing something recently where there’s a radio, and I’m researching radios. I’m like, “Which radio does this have to be?” And it occurred to me the other day that I could just make up a radio. It doesn’t have to be a real radio that exists! And the level of anxiety that caused for me! Someone’s gonna get mad, someone’s gonna be like, “I’m a radio expert and that’s not a real radio!” I could also just give myself the permission. I think that is so much of what fiction writing is about to me.

JK: Does the reception of your work matter that much? Maybe… Is it because, academically, you’re used to writing for someone?

JJL: I think definitely with academic writing… You have to build a fortress around you so no one can question your argument. I’m still trying to shake that habit, to find vulnerability in my writing. Just saying, “This is the thing I think we’re feeling, it can be messy and you might question it and it might not make complete sense, and that’s actually okay.” That is a huge challenge for me as a writer.

And then of course there’s just that very natural human anxiety: “What if someone doesn’t like my work?” We all want to be accepted and we want our work to succeed and it’s so hard to succeed as a writer these days. We all know that. The only writers I know who don’t care about reception are the ones who are already best selling authors and have a million dollar house.