Mental health and access in Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots with DJ Lee
Episode 6
Transcript created by Frankie Martinez.
In this episode, we discuss
DJ Lee’s book Remote: Finding Home In the Bitterroots. How does “place” function as an archive? How is writing also a spiritual experience? What were mental hospitals like in the 40s and 50s? What does it mean to write through shame? How is mental illness in some ways un-boundaried like the wilderness?
Highlights include:
- The process of writing the book through finding her grandmother’s memoir box (2:54)
- Place as archive (6:36)
- Writing the memoir alongside exploring grandmother’s memoirs (11:03)
- Grandmother struggle with mental health and experience in mental hospitals (16:00)
- Writing through shame (20:23)
- The wilderness and bipolar disorder as un-boundaried (22:33)
- What is so beautiful and healing about the wilderness (24:13)
- What are instructors and universities doing for students with mental health issues (33:06)
- Gathering up the courage to ask for help (37:02)
- How we are all connected (38:38)
Resources Mentioned
- DJ Lee’s Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots (Oregon State University Press, 2020): https://amzn.to/2WZ6t2D
About DJ Lee
DJ Lee is Regents Professor of literature and creative writing at Washington State University. Her creative work includes over thirty non-fiction pieces in magazines and anthologies. She has published eight books on literature, history, and the environment, including the collection The Land Speaks (Oxford 2017) and the hybrid memoir Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots (Oregon State, 2020). Lee is director of the Selway- Bitterroot Wilderness History Project and a scholar-fellow at the Black Earth Institute.
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