Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

PCC instructor published in Harvard Review

Photos and story by James Hill

There is a familiar name from Portland Community College in the latest issue of the Harvard Review.

PCC reading and writing instructor Jessica Johnson’s story, “The Education of the Peppered Moth,” is in the current edition of the publication, which can be found at Richs Cigar Shops in Portland. Johnson’s story is creative nonfiction and is centered on her unusual educational and career path. She first wrote the piece in 2003 while as a graduate student at the University of Washington.

“It came about during a class I was taking in graduate school from David Shields, who recently wrote a well known book called ‘Reality Hunger,’” Johnson said. “He is known for creative nonfiction or mixed genre work; that’s his specialty. He had us attempt a mixed-genre work. That’s when I started writing it. I put it away and didn’t pick it up again until a couple of years ago, and started working on it again.”

Johnson said she went through a lot of drafts and submitted it to handful of national literary publications. As a result, she received a lot of interest, but it was the Harvard Review that picked it up. From there, it was been months of editing and fact checking, and more editing.

“I was pretty excited,” she said. “I also got notes from several magazines including ‘The Paris Review’ and ‘The Atlantic’ (about liking the story). That was pretty great. I had a feeling somebody would take it. I’ve mostly done poetry in the past. So this was really my first attempt at publishing prose, except for reviews. This was my first stab at that.

“I’m writing more prose so it’s been encouraging,” she added. “Unlike poetry it has a wider audience. Through the draft process I can show it to friends and more people can read it. I’m interested in finding ways to continue writing about science although it’s no longer part of my life in the way it was.”

But this isn’t the instructor’s first taste of success. Johnson’s poems and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, and Subtropics, among other journals.

She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was the 2009 recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship. The Idaho native joined PCC in 2009 and teaches College Success classes at the Sylvania and Cascade campuses as well as the Southeast Center.

“I love teaching those classes,” Johnson said. “My experience at PCC has been great. In Writing 80 and Writing 90 we deal with sentences and paragraphs, and those are still interesting issues to me. Like how to make a sentence that really does its job and how to assess what the job is of this sentence or that paragraph. Writing on that level is fun, interesting and fascinating. I enjoy dealing with writing every day and the students seem empowered by those classes.

“I have a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and worked on a fairly high profile plant genomics research project before leaving that field for a graduate degree in poetry,” she said. “Ultimately, my interest in writing led me to the only job I’ve ever truly loved – teaching at PCC.”