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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.
Jaydra Johnson’s Low: Notes on Art and Trash is part instruction manual, part genealogy, part art criticism, and part memoir - all of it pulsing with urgency and necessity. It’s written in wry, straight-ahead prose that hits no false notes, and feels honest and earned at every juncture.
Johnson has a real gift for metabolizing and conveying the importance of everything from Othello to performance art to the political activist Emma Goldman. She moves fluently between such analyses and her own vivid, expertly-rendered memories of growing up 'trash.' She structures her prose artfully (using a 'sonnet crown' motif here, different forms of address there), but always with a light touch, such that her experiments feel vital, buoyant, and without pretension. I especially admire how she leaps over stale binaries about elitism vs. outsider status in art, and claims a place for her artistry (and that of others) fiercely and tenderly on every page.
Despite traveling under the humble (if noble) tradition of 'notes,' 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. The sensibility and achievement of this book deserves widespread circulation and contemplation; I hope being chosen as the winner of this contest will provide such an opportunity.