Author: DJ Lee
Book: Remote
DJ Lee, a former SBFC board member, is Regents Professor of English at Washington State University where she teaches literature, creative writing, and experimental courses. Her creative work includes over thirty award-winning non-fiction pieces in magazines and anthologies. Lee has published eight books on literature, history, and ecology, most recently The Land Speaks. She’s co-director of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a scholar-fellow at the Black Earth Institute. Her book REMOTE is based on 15 years of research and on-the-ground travel in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness as well as memory and family lore.
When Connie Saylor Johnson went missing in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in October 2018, DJ Lee traveled there repeatedly to remember her mentor and friend. That journey unexpectedly ended her fifteen-year quest to uncover her family’s troubled history in the remote place. Throughout those years, Lee struggled with wild animal encounters, dangerous river crossings, bush plane flights in fog, and people who had come to the mountains to seek or hide. Yet she realizes that what she learned about the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, Nimíipuu land practices, and wilderness history from Connie is all she needs to embrace the land and her family’s past. Told in a nonlinear narrative structure, the book engages with dreams and ghosts, the familiar and the uncanny, as well as questions of history and memory. The 28 black and white photographs sprinkled throughout the book act as a complementary visual narrative. Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.