DJ Lee grew up in Seattle hearing the word “wilderness” but not knowing what it meant. Only when she was in her early forties did she learn about her family’s mysterious history with one of the largest and most remote landscapes in the contiguous US, the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, which led to her most recent book, Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots. Lee is a regent’s professor in the English Department, where she teaches literature and creative writing. She co-directs the Visiting Writers Series, serves as a University Ombudsman, and is an Honors Faculty Fellow. Lee has published over 100 creative and scholarly works including 8 books. Her essays have received special mention for the Pushcart Prize and are shortlisted for various literary contests including the Disquiet International Literary Prize. As a scholar, Lee is recipient of the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship; the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies; an Idaho Humanities Council Research Grant; an NEH “We the People” Collaborative Research Grant to direct the Selway-Bitterroot History Project; and has twice held the Buchanan Distinguished Professor position English Department. In addition, she has been a guest professor at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan and is Lee currently a scholar-fellow at the Black Earth Institute, where she runs the Practices of Hope Reading Series. Lee also has an art practice and has held the Arctic Circle Artist Residency in the International Territory of Svalbard and attended the Women’s Studio Workshop.
SS: Welcome, DJ. What writer would you be most thrilled to hear wants to meet you?
DJL: My favorite writer, W.G. Sebald, who passed away in 2001. Only in a parallel universe would I be able to meet him. He writes about memory, dreams, and the uncanny. He once appeared to me in a dream. I was cleaning up a huge dinner table while all his fans gathered around him. I assumed he didn’t notice me. But then he came over and touched my arm and said, “Don’t try to force the topics you write about. Let them come to you.”
SS: What is a fun or strange source of inspiration that ended up in your book (a name, location, line of dialogue, etc.)?
DJL: In the chapter ten, I encounter a woman going to a family constellation workshop. Family constellation practice is based on the science of epigenetics, which says that we inherit traces of our ancestors’ trauma. Family constellation is designed to help heal those ancestral wounds. The encounter led me to see my writing partly as a family constellation project.
SS: Do you believe in writer’s block? How about reader’s block?
DJL: Yes! And as a teacher of writing and literature (for almost thirty-five years now!) I have two tools to overcome writer’s block. 1. Take a walk. Many authors use walking for inspiration and focus, from William Wordsworth and Friedrich Nietzsche to Rebecca Solnit and Lia Purpura. The fresh air, wide expanse beyond the screen, and sounds and scents replenish the soul, the place we write from. 2. If your writing flags, write this sentence: “What I haven’t told you is….” and then answer it as you imagine yourself addressing one of the characters in your piece.
SS: What was the first book you fell in love with?
DJL: My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. It features a boy who flees New York City to live in the Catskills in a treehouse with a pet falcon and weasel. My grandfather, one of the characters in my book, owned land in Idaho that the family eventually sold. When I was a child, I dreamed of going to live on the land by myself like the boy in the novel.
SS: Where and when is your book set? How did you decide on the setting? The timeframe?
DJL: I wrote Remote in a nonlinear style, so it moves between present, past, and deeper past. The book is set in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana. The odd thing about the setting is this place chose me, I didn’t choose it. I actively tried not to write about it for years, but I couldn’t seem to get it out of my bones until I did.
SS: How do you give back to the writing community?
DJL: My regular offering is my monthly miscellany, in which I provide ideas and inspiration for all kinds of creative practices. Please subscribe here! (http://debbiejlee.com/miscellany/) Right now I’m advising several exciting creative theses at my university, a collection of essays and a YA novel. I also co-run two reading series: the Washington State University Visiting Writers Series and the Practice of Hope Reading Series through Black Earth Institute, which has just concluded.
SS: Did anything in your past push you to write about your book and the conflict(s) in it?
DJL:My book began with a lost family history in the wilderness, particularly my grandfather who died when I was two. Who was he? Why didn’t anyone ever talk about him? Why did he move from Kansas to live deep in the wilderness? Then, my friend went missing in that same wilderness. All of that pushed me to write about this mysterious place.
SS: What literary pilgrimages have you made?
DJL: Two years ago, I spent a few weeks in England visiting every single home of the eighteenth-century poet William Blake, approximately fourteen different places. Blake was a visionary writer, and I thought I’d be able to feel his aura during these visitations. But most of his abodes are now ordinary places: apartment buildings, hotels, restaurants, hair salons, or pubs. Visiting his grave was a truly eerie experience.
SS: Writing is undoubtedly a lonely occupation. John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) says writing is a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it. P. D. James (Cover Her Face) says it’s essential for writers to enjoy their own company. Do you see yourself along those lines? Are you a natural loner?
DJL: I do need some alone time every day, which still mystifies my husband of forty years. But my writing is actually quite collaborative. My writing group meets monthly, and I have several good friends with whom I exchange writing regularly. I also give readings and run reading series’, so the art form feels very social to me. That said, I am definitely an introvert and am managing the isolation of the pandemic just fine.
SS: Which scene did you find the most challenging to write and why?
DJL: In chapter fourteen, I braid my grandmother’s mental illness with my grandfather’s obsession with parachutes. I had a hunch these two ideas went together, but I couldn’t figure out how until I cut the chapter up and pieced it together like a puzzle. (see photo)
SS: What are you working on at the moment?
DJL: Several projects! A mother-daughter novel set in Hamilton, Montana, during fire season told from two points of view, and a collection of essays about “edge effects”—border spaces where two ecosystems meet. I interpret edge effects as ecological, spiritual, emotional, and familial.
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Part spiritual quest, part survival tale, DJ Lee’s memoir follows a difficult journey through memory, meaning, and some of the world’s most rugged landscape. When her friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, Lee travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly ends her fifteen-year search to uncover her family’s troubled history in this remote place. During these difficult treks, Lee struggles with wild animal encounters, dangerous river crossings, bush plane flights in fog, and strange characters who have come to the mountains to seek or hide. But what she learns about the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her come to terms with the land, her family past, and her friend’s disappearance. Throughout, Lee engages with dreams and spirits, history and memory, and the nature of narrative itself. The book’s twenty-eight photographs provide a complementary a visual story. A short book trailer her filmmaker daughter made, using her grandparents’ historic film footage, hints at the story: https://youtu.be/WSoHHXG_6wc
Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots is available through:
Amazon | B&N | BookPeople of Moscow, Idaho
All orders from BookPeople of Moscow, Idaho will get a free art print from Wilderness photographer Dick Walker, a character in the book.
Proceeds of sales from BookPeople of Moscow, Idaho go to the Connie Saylor Johnson Wilderness Education Fund. Go here for more information.
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An excerpt from Remote:
Chapter 1 Bridge
October 10, 2018
My phone buzzes, and I pick up. It’s my father.
“Did you know Connie went missing?” he asks. I hear his metallic voice through the speaker, but the meaning slides and blurs, is lost.
“You’ve got the wrong person,” I say to my father. An image of Connie’s husband, a rugged mule skinner who died three months ago of a heart attack, flashes before me. “It’s Lloyd who’s missing.”
“No,” my father says. “It’s Connie.”
I’m at home in Moscow, Idaho—low sun through big windows, leaves tumbling across the lawn—but my mind flies away to Connie, who should be ninety miles south in the tiny town of Nezperce or at one of the ranger stations where she volunteers along the Selway or Lochsa Rivers. “Maybe she’s just late. She’ll be back.” I say this, but I’m lightheaded, unable to stand. I stagger to a chair and sit. My father mumbles something to my mother and hands her the phone.
“Connie’s been missing for more than a week,” she says in a flat voice. “It’s in the papers. She and her dog Ace. They both vanished in the Selway-Bitterroot.”
I stand and head to my laptop, where a Google search turns up dozens of entries. I click an article: “Search efforts are underway for seventy-six-year-old Connie Johnson, who was working as the cook at a hunting camp in the Fog Mountain area of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.”
Skimming down, I see the Idaho County sheriff ’s official statement: “Honestly, we don’t know what happened.”
It doesn’t make sense. No one understands the Selway-Bitterroot better than Connie. No one knows its valleys and creeks, meadows and peaks, moose and bear, kingfishers and thrush, salmon and trout as she does. No one knows what’s buried there in more detail than she.
“It’s very sad,” my mother says, voice trailing away. “You know what they say? If you want to disappear, you go to Idaho County.”
My mother is right. The Selway-Bitterroot is one of the most remote places left in America. The federally protected wilderness drapes across the Idaho-Montana border in the northern Rocky Mountains, where it’s joined to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness and the Gospel Hump Wilderness to form the largest area of roadless land in the contiguous United States.
I own several maps of the Selway-Bitterroot, and on each one the wilderness is a splash of green—thick and bulbous to the south, tapering to a neat stem in the north. I’ve also flown over it dozens of times in small planes. From that angle, the land appears exposed and pulsating, canyons and mountains like ripples and convolutions of a human brain. In spring and summer, it’s like the nervous system of a giant being, as the whole region melts down mountainsides and through ravines to the Lochsa and Selway Rivers.
Hundreds of trails snake through the Selway-Bitterroot, with scores of access points, some expansive with horse corrals and vehicle parking, some just a pull off on a dirt patch, and a few dark and secret with one spot for a tent. I’ve been there—sometimes camping overnight next to a trailhead, sometimes striking out on foot for a few miles, sometimes going deeper—with fires raging and smoke thick as fog, in crotch-deep snow or under curtains of rain, and in the mellow seasons, late spring and early fall, when the land is waking up or going to sleep. But to Connie, this place is home.
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You can subscribe to DJ Lee’s monthly miscellany, witness~wilderness
See the short book trailer DJ Lee’s filmmaker daughter made using her grandparents’ historic wilderness film footage:
