D J Lee is Regents Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Washington State University and earned a PhD from the University of Arizona and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her creative work includes over thirty non-fiction pieces in magazines and anthologies. She has published eight books on literature, history, and the environment, most recently the 2017 collection The Land Speaks: New Voices at the Intersection of Oral and Environmental History. Lee is the Director of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project and a scholar-fellow at the Black Earth Institute.
In her own words:
I’m a writer, teacher, and regents professor in the English Department at Washington State University.
My theory of wilderness backpacking is this: for every day on the trail, you get two days of post-wilderness high. I get into the backcountry as often as I can.
I think teaching and learning are humans’ two great gifts. The most exquisite forms of communication happen in that little petri dish called the classroom, whether the classroom is in a school, a field, a street corner, a mountain, or a dream.
I divide my time between Moscow, Idaho and Oak Park, Illinois.
Whenever I can, I collaborate. I need to spend time a good deal of time alone, too.
from author’s website
ABOUT REMOTE: FINDING HOME IN THE BITTERROOTS:
A tale of survival in a wilderness of mountains and ghosts, REMOTE is one woman’s journey to learn the fate of a friend who has disappeared and to embrace her own family’s troubled past in a vast roadless landscape of Idaho and Montana. Like the surprise connections of a wild trail system, REMOTE is told in a nonlinear structure, engaging with dreams and apparitions, the familiar and the uncanny, and questions of history and memory. The book’s 28 black-and-white photographs act as a complementary visual story.
PRAISE AND RECOGNITION FOR REMOTE:
Part adventure story, part cautionary tale, DJ Lee’s quest weaves through memory and meaning like a broken trail. The ghosts she is searching for–her grandmother, her grandfather, her friend lost in the wilderness and never found–appear and disappear in moments of mystery. Like the archivist she is, Lee pins her investigations to historical and archeological facts, even as she revels in the lyrical otherworldliness of extreme isolation. Her narrative reads like a journal of longing and belonging, bravery and fear, clarity and insanity, celebration and lament. Always, what she offers is a map that we might follow: more than blood, it is story that binds us–all that we have to make sense of our lives. –Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
DJ Lee’s Remote offers profound and moving meditations on nature and narrative, frequently on the two phenomena together. –Scott Slovic, author of Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility
As DJ Lee and her remarkable family and friends circle and tussle around a remote ranger station over several generations, they will draw you into their mountains and mysteries as deeply as they did me. A book to remember. –Robert Michael Pyle, author of The Thunder Tree and Magdalena Mountain
AUTHOR VISITS:
Author visits with DJ Lee are available via NovelNetwork.com.