Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator, and scholar. Interested especially in the relationships between metaphors of consciousness, theoretical neuroscience, and experimental narrative, her creative work draws upon a wide variety of sources. Her obsessive research patterns lead her to making connections between the realms of technology, consciousness studies, design theory, the paranormal & occult, biological anthropology, psychology, and literary theory. She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter(Jaded Ibis, 2011), and Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, October 2013). She currently lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at CalArts & is Co-Editor of the online journal [out of nothing], Reviews Editor at HTMLGIANT, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design.
An excerpt from her novel, Damnation, appeared in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.
Here, Janice Lee answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from her book. Enjoy!
What is writing like?
Sometimes one willingly enters a dark and empty space, the creaking of the loose boards below, the phantom moonlight above.
- I had a dream that I was carrying a wounded deer in my arms. He lay there limp, depending on me completely and solely for the permission to go on living. Then I dropped him into the river. How can you forgive an act like that? Why were we only made to die?
What isn’t writing like?
A little hunched man is hitting him with a stick. His hands are only nubs and so is unable to fight back. But he can open his mouth, and does, and words come out, as if speaking for the first time.
When you do it, why?
Sometimes in fear or just bountiful curiosity, we look out the window to envision a new day, a new world, a place with flowers and fountains and people bustling from place to place. We push the curtains aside, stare hard through the rain, focus, and see a cow emerge from behind a dilapidated brick building across the way. Nothing lies in front of him but a vast overwhelming scene of wet mud and glimmering streaks on the ground that pile up and pile down and zigzag through each other like the traces of many movements across and through the town, the strange blueprints of a dance only the cows seem to know the music to. The single cow slowly becomes many, more brown faces emerging from behind the building, and together they make their way towards the western edge of town. No one leads them or chases them but it seems that they all know their way. They take their time—they have their entire lives after all—and one pauses to attempt to mount another, a loud moo piercing the damp air, and another separates for a moment to look in the direction of someone watching them, a contemplative look in its eyes (what do cows contemplate so early in the morning?). Our eyes shift left and we see a few other cows emerge from an alleyway, mooing at the first herd (what are they saying to each other?), their eyes darting around in different directions and their ears absorbing the silence of the wind (though it is not silence, there is the low droning of the wind’s movements through the trees and between the houses, a particular feeling the wind gives, not necessarily a sound), a crow cawing eerily in the distance, and then the cows again, all together, bunched up on the road in front of the doctor’s house, before heading out on the road north out of town, each matching the pace of the others.
When you don’t, why?
Sometimes we forget what we see the moment we’ve seen it.