Touching What's Trashed
an interview with Jaydra Johnson
JAYDRA JOHNSON’s debut collection of essays, Low: Notes on Art and Trash, are defined by art criticism, queer theory, class critique, and political insurgency. Part memoir, Johnson harks back to her youth as white trash—where she stands vigilant from the periphery—and writes into the present where trash is quite literally everywhere. Objects of inquiry include food: who eats what, what it’s made of, how it moves. Clothes: a marker of status and acceptance, then refusal. Sex work: an argument against scandalizing rhetoric. And incarceration: where color is stripped or signaled to reify control. Between ten essays are visual collages made by Johnson that add another mode of praxis to her theories. As definitions of trash kaleidoscope, binary aesthetic and social values turn benign.
I was an early reader of Johnson’s work, having surveyed the initial manuscript she sent Fonograf Editions during an open submission period that Maggie Nelson judged. Beneath comments about the writing itself, clear and unflinching, I had written in my notes: I need a second opinion. In hindsight, what I sought in Johnson’s work was an answer to my own question: what is this thing called whiteness and how do we live with it? Johnson provides no such answers, instead she writes into sites for our consideration.
EG: I want to start our interview in a similar place as your book—with memories. The first section of the book is called Rituals to See Trash #1. In it, you’re a child getting lunch in a cafeteria. You’re poor, so you’re eating state-funded food on a plastic tray (trash lumped on top of more trash). You notice your difference in comparison to kids around you who have Lunchables and food packed from home. This noticing is smart—hyper-vigilant. You write, “I was very young, perhaps seven or eight years old, when I came to understand that I was not just bad, but a special kind of bad. I was trash.” (6) Do you write these memories from overhead, as if watching a scene unfold, or do you write them as the person you were then, reliving them?
JJ: For better or worse, I can inhabit my former selves when I write memories. It can be painful, but it’s also validating. As a child I didn’t necessarily have the vocabulary to articulate what I was seeing and feeling, but I knew something wasn’t quite right about the world. Now I have a political analysis—this informed, adult consciousness—that helps me make sense of what was happening when I sit down to write. I can go back and relive the event as the self I was then, but the scene is clarified by the self I am now. There’s spillage. Like, I did not know how angry I was when I was a child. I thought I felt bad because I was bad. Now it’s so obvious to me that my guts were boiling because I saw how violent the world was. My memory of that lunchroom is so visceral. I can feel the gross gelatinous turkey gravy in my mouth right now!
The sex worker is one (of many) studies of “trash” in your work. You cite Shakespeare’s Othello as the first recorded instance of people, sex workers, being called trash. You write, “This is how trash started as a lie against a woman, a blame game, a power trip, and an unearned punishment.” (7) And then you tie your family to this line of work. How are you thinking about lineage and inheritance in Low?
This book came out of a moment where I was at the river with a new friend who didn’t know my background. She saw me (somehow!) as a fellow member of a more elite class group and made this remark about how disgusting the white trash people were who were taking up precious real estate on the riverbank. I didn’t say anything to her that day, but in that moment I realized I had finally made it. I had shed my trashy status to such a degree that I was passing, and it felt horrible. I saw that in striving for upward mobility, I had disinherited a culture that I loved enough to defend at the expense of my social position. When it was disparaged, I became enraged. I was like, wait, could being trashy be a good thing? So I went in search of stories about people, namely artists, who had made something of their own trashy inheritance.
Low is in many ways about me recovering a connection to and developing a pride about my lineage. It was my attempt to rethink what I had inherited from those who came before me familially. I also reconsidered non-familial lineages of people who were “trash” relative to the rest of society. I wondered how I might be a reverent heir to these legacies, which meant attending to what they had created seemingly out of nothing.
The mother-daughter dynamic also peaked my interest in lineage and inheritance. There’s a moment in Low where you’re talking with your mom about growing up white trash, having a kind of back-and-forth about whether or not it’s a bad thing. In her opinion, there were worse conditions than your own. I want to hear more about how you process your mother’s refusal. Her response was not dismissive or delusional, I don’t think, but reading the scene where she picks you up from school in a car you don’t recognize, that (spoiler) breaks down, so you and your mom have to push the car into a strip-mall gas station makes me think the agreement between you—upholding the image that things aren’t as bad as they seem—requires more attention here.
I think you are speaking to the tension between my understanding and hers and wanting to know more about that. Is that right?
Yes, exactly. I’m asking about the different definitions you two hold about what amounts to the identity of “white trash.”
In the neighborhood where my mom grew up, their family was better off than a lot of others around them for all the reasons listed in that essay: they were homeowners, they had a car, that sort of thing. My mom never did a lot of traveling and her highest level of education is an AA from a community college in a medical coding program. I don’t say this to demean her intelligence or question her understanding of her own experience, but I think it’s important to note that I have a lot more education than her, particularly around sociology, politics, and labor. Since she isn’t very formally educated and hasn’t traveled much, she and I have very different perspectives almost in a literal sense. I have seen very different things than she has.
Then there is this other layer which a lot of scholars and activists working in critical race theory have been talking about forever, which is that she benefits from seeing herself as above others. Living in precarity is super uncomfortable and often very dehumanizing, so it can be a source of power (albeit false) to say something like, “We were never that low.” Maybe there is a gentler way to think about this which is that she is trying to emphasize her own resourcefulness or effort. She wants to resist the downward pressure she’s facing and maybe doesn’t know how else to do it other than saying I am not like them.
And then I’m over here thinking, Mom, you’re crazy. We are so white trash. But I have the luxury of doing that because of my privileged position. I have that broader political understanding I mentioned, and I can do annoying things like what I am about to do, which is to reference The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam. The argument made in that book is that failure is a beautiful way to undermine hegemonic systems. Like, it’s super cool to be a loser! You’re fighting the good fight by being white trash. That work heavily informed the development of my thesis in Low. But my mom doesn't read much queer theory, so she hasn’t espoused that particular opinion (yet).
Since Queer Theory is such an expansive realm of study, can you say more about your specific influences?
This isn’t easy for me to answer because I am not very educated in Queer Theory. I definitely read some Halberstam, Butler, and Sedgwick while writing this book, but I am by no means a scholar. Most of the stuff I read by queer writers is creative rather than theoretical. It’s why I wrote this book as a personal and art-critical project instead of doing a scholarly dissertation type thing. I lose patience with theory when it’s not immediately transmuted into praxis.
A lot of my understanding of queer theory comes from lived exposure, mostly through gay and trans friends. I listen to them talk and watch how they move through the world and read stuff they tell me to read. Like, I’m straight, but somehow I always end up aligned with and in love with queer people. Through these different forms of intimacy, I’ve learned a lot about the ways queer people are trashed by society and how they resist that in very ingenious ways. I’m really inspired by the chaos they create, whether it’s by virtue of existing or through a more organized disruption.
Low presents the very mechanical, political, structured, and therefore, intentional ways that poverty gets passed on, namely through capitalism and racism which exacerbate extreme wealth discrepancies. Is this a political book? How did you consider whiteness along the spectrum of inequity?
This is a super political book. It is my attempt to make some meaning of how these systems have acted upon me and some of the people I love, and to take creative, political action. It’s an imaginative project.
It helps me understand what is and isn’t my responsibility, so parsing that out was something I was interested in while writing. I think I have a responsibility to live in a way that is transgressive. I want to be hostile toward these larger forces. I’ve done union organizing, teaching, and other work that has been more direct. Writing and art feels less direct, but is another way I can do my part to pick apart/ridicule/critique things like whiteness and racism and capitalism. Like, I don’t buy it! And here’s why. I would love to see a broad-based, multiracial, working-class struggle coalesce in my lifetime. Maybe this book can be my little part of bringing that to life.
I wanted to also complicate ideas such as choice. Like, yes, we all have choices, but some people have better choices than others, or more choices. Lots of books out there that talk about poverty focus on poor choices (cough JD Vance) and I don’t agree with that perspective. Now that I have the lived experience of being in more elite spaces, I can give you seven hundred examples of people I’ve met who had really different choices available to them than I did, or than my mom or friends did.
“Trash,” “trashiness,” “trashed,” “white trash,” “trashy,” “trash talk,” comprise a lexicon of sorts in your book. In this way, the reader constructs varied meanings for what trash is or means. How strategized is this language and did you prepare the lexicon before writing or did it result naturally along the way?
It’s both considered and almost incidental. If you look at the OED entry for trash, you will find some very interesting stuff! Chiefly, you’ll find that the entry is quite long, which means English-speaking cultures have varied meanings for this word, too. The trash talk is already there, but I was intentional about highlighting it. Some of the feedback I got from earlier readers was that they weren’t always seeing how everything connected back to trash, and so the repetition of that word was in part to leave bread crumbs for readers to trace my thinking about trash and all the ways I see it showing up in my life, in art, and in the world. I didn’t prepare it in advance, but the project developed out of that word and how it had been used against me and other people. The different permutations of and synonyms for trash emerged as I wrote.
High and low art is a subtle, underlying argument in Low. For example, airbrushing on t-shirts is deemed “low” art according to broad social consensus. You challenge this notion in a scene where you witness your uncle spray painting after being released from jail. You say color is a luxury for people in prison and write, “the significance of this memory is that it predicts a life interested in low art, an intimacy with the carceral state, and an obsession with the ways people use color to conjure meaning from the abyss.” (67) Here “low” seems to mean something radically other than “poor taste”—what does it mean?
I think about low in the same way I think about trash, which is that it’s only bad if you’re buying into the prevailing ideology. Being a “low” artist usually means you’re making work that’s subversive in some way. You might be operating outside institutions or using ill-gotten materials or deploying visual language that’s illegible to powerful people. A lot of art that is revered as “high” is a) abstract paintings and b) a speculative commodity, so it needs to fit into narrow parameters dictated by, basically, rich guys. Low art rules because it’s messy, expressive, multifarious, ornery, blood-filled. It’s cool precisely because it isn’t tied up in all that nonsense at the top. It’s more free.
And you really understand this because you’re a visual artist too. When I saw your show Hark at Mother Foucault’s in Portland you told me that someone had coaxed you into sharing it. You said something like, “I need external validation.” I knew exactly what you meant—it’s so nice when other people tell you to keep doing the thing you’re doing! Tell me more about your written and visual work as a relationship. Are there things you garner from one you don’t from the other? When do you resort to writing, when do you resort to making visuals?
God these are good questions.
While I was writing this book, I often stalled out. During those times, I would make the trash collages that you see in the book. My thinking was that while I manipulated actual garbage, my subconscious would be working on the words. After a while of, like, photocopying trash in my apartment, or photographing my favorite trash piles in the neighborhood, I would run out of art ideas and go back to writing. The two were a great escape from each other, and I think they complemented each other in ways I am still coming to understand.
As far as when I turn to one or the other, I have recently found that when I want to express a feeling, I am more likely to turn toward visual art. When I want to express an idea, I go to prose. That’s a simplistic way of putting it, but it’s generally true.
The facts of my day-to-day life also dictate which one I pick up. With writing, I need chunks of uninterrupted time, and I don’t always have that. Making art also feels better than writing, which is mostly impossible and grueling, and I can make it even when I’m mentally depleted. I get tremendous satisfaction from writing, though, and it can feel a lot like working in sculpture or, to put it in more vernacular terms, construction. It’s more methodical and rule-bound. Visual art, meanwhile, is more like cooking, which I can do without thinking… it’s more intuitive and carnal.
But I need both! I have this line I try to write by: make it so beautiful they can’t look away. I’m a really dark person and love horrific information. If I want people to read what I am writing about depression, destruction, and violence, I had better provide an experience that’s aesthetically pleasurable. Otherwise, most people will reach their threshold and put it down. The visual art helps make my writing more sensual and descriptive.
Religious connotations are a thematic constant in both your written and visual work. You write, “God saves the poor, I heard, provided they are good and faithful, which, it seemed obvious to me, my family wasn’t.” (11) And in Hark, your visual exhibition, angels are a divergent image: part-animal, part-women, part-man, part-ephemera. In regards to goodness, a trait you yearned for as a child, what do you believe now?
I believe that Goodness is a lot about honesty and courage. It is just so fucking brave to make stuff that is true to you and put it out into the world. It’s brave to show up to your job that sucks because you have to take care of yourself and other people. It’s Good to do anything in our power to express our humanity, which I believe is rooted in love, even though we can all get fucked up from living in this world. It’s Good to throw a trash can through the plate glass window of a bank when you’re pissed off. I really do think that we are all Good and we all have art and love inside us, we all have courage, and it’s my imperative to live as if that’s true.
JAYDRA JOHNSON (b. 1988 Springfield, Oregon) is a writer, visual artist, and educator who splits her time between Portland, OR and NYC. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Epoch Review, Guernica, and Sedition magazines, among others, and she has shown her visual work in NYC, LA, Portland, and Columbus, OH. At Hunter College, she co-edited the journal Solar while earning her MFA in Creative Writing. She was also a grateful recipient of the 2022-23 Creatives Rebuild New York grant. Johnson is the author of Refuse Report, a bi-monthly newsletter exploring the tension between high and low art, currently hosted on Substack. You can find more of her work (or get in touch <3) at www.jaydrajohnson.com and on Instagram @jaydranicole.
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