Low: Notes on Art & Trash

by Jaydra Johnson

Winner, 2025 Firecracker Awards Winner in Creative Nonfiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses

Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility, desperate to escape the adversity that she saw as her inheritance—and the certainty that she grew up as trash. Johnson’s powerful memoir, Low—selected by acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson as the winner of Fonograf Editions’ inaugural essay contest—tells the redemptive story of an artist who came to embrace her lineage. In the tradition of other outcast artists who have spun refuse into art, the essays in Low reclaim trash as a precious resource and a medium for storytelling.
In this bracing debut, Johnson describes her life and art, including the cut paper collages that punctuate these essays, in vivid detail while offering smart and visceral reflections on a wide range of literary and visual artists who have inspired her, from Shakespeare to contemporary conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As Maggie Nelson writes, “Low’s provocations and attestations stayed with me long after I turned its final page. I found myself rooting hard for its narrator—while also realizing that there is no need, as she has clearly found her way, and is now our teacher.”
An indispensable meditation on poverty and art, and a compelling corrective to conventional memoirs about overcoming disadvantage, Low announces the arrival of an important new voice in creative nonfiction.

168 pages, Paperback

Published November 5, 2024

Reviews

[Marije de Wit]

'White trash was not a new idea when Beecher Stowe popularized it. Poor and trash, like poor and dead, had been related for centuries, in Shakespeare’s time and before, ever since colonial England needed exploitable labor to power its empire, and a linguistic ideology to buttress its mission. British colonizers filled ships with thousands of the kingdom’s poor people—mostly Scots, Irish, and Welsh—to work as indentured servants in the so-called New World. These “waste people” were seen as unproductive vagrants, perfect for dumping into a short, brutal life of hard labor developing the land as it was cleared, by genocide, of indigenous Americans. For a long time after, there were at least as many white trash as enslaved Africans in what is now the United States. The landed class used trash to divide the working class, and to create a separate, dingier world for whites who did not meet their standards of racial supremacy. The term made dehumanization easy and was, ultimately, effective.'

[Sushie · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading an excerpt from this essay collection months ago on LitHub, I asked my local library to order a copy so I could read it. I have never been so glad i requested a book as this one. This is one of those books I read that read me back.
Reading Low made me feel seen in a way I never have and helped me recontextualize my understanding of my own place in the American class-caste system. It also inspired me to write honestly for myself about my relationship with my whiteness, poverty, and capitalist culture of waste and depletion. It introduced me to artists and poets so I can continue exploring.
I hope more people read this really powerful, accessible, quick, and interesting collection.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did your classroom leak and lack? Is the presence of your absence a “glaring lack of grime”? Is “entitlement’s gift to the majoritarian subject the psychic denial of the lack at the core of the self”? If you have felt like the “world’s slowest emergency,” if you’ve lost custody of your eyes, if you’re drawn to “crooked teeth, a home-cut mohawk, patch-riddle clothes, malapropisms, paintings with impossible proportions, and books about garbage or insanity or death,” check out transgenre memoir Low by visual artist and educator Jaydra Johnson. Come when you’re called and know Pyrrhic defeat when you see it. What’s lower than the gutter? Dig a hole. Get in.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Politically-charged art criticism which I found very interesting, with essays that reflect on the author's upbringing. Certainly curious to know what Jaydra Johnson will write next.

[Lauren Greenway · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, solid writing, thought provoking and relatable but lost me a bit towards the end. Would read this author again, thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience