Jahan Brian Ihsan
NOVELIST OF DREAD AND PLACE
Dark literary fiction rooted in theology, abjection, and the landscapes that refuse to let the past stay past.
The body knows things the mind has not yet accepted. So does the land.
Raised in the American South, a Bahá'í travel teacher in Kaunas and Ukmergė, Lithuania, and twelve years inside Portland, Oregon's occult underground, Ihsan has been a witness to belief in enough of its forms to know it is always leaving a residue on the body.
For readers of Shirley Jackson, Han Kang, and Flannery O’Connor.
The Burl
Teasel House, June 21, 2026
Three months after her infant son lived for twenty-seven minutes and died, Claire’s body continued producing milk. The letdown reflex fired on schedule. Her breasts filled in the night. Her body, as she told the lactation consultant, did not understand he was gone.
It kept its instruction.
Set in Brownsville and Philomath in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, The Burl follows Claire and her husband Noah as they move into a rental house on floodplain soil and find that the life around them does not remain separate from what they have brought into it. The valley’s wetlands, winter floods, and agricultural edges shape the novel at every level.
Place bears on the couple’s grief and alters the terms in which that grief is lived.
The Burl is a novel about the postpartum body, about grief as a physiological condition, and about what happens when the body continues beyond what the mind can accept.
Featured Publications
Valley Versus Vector
Teasel House, September 22, 2025
Ellis Horning is a nurse at a hospital in Corvallis, Oregon, a man whose life has been organized around the management of other people’s bodies. When a boundary fails that should have held, his sense of himself begins to come apart in ways that feel less like madness than like discovery.
Set in Corvallis and the Willamette Valley, with a second landscape in Greenville, South Carolina, Valley Versus Vector follows Ellis through a fracture in identity that opens onto the unstable relation between self and environment. As his sense of personhood shifts, the novel tracks the pressure exerted by landscape, memory, and the porous limits of the body.
This is a novel about contagion, transformation, and what survives a rupture. It is strange, exacting, and grounded in recognizable Oregon terrain.
Valley Versus Vision
Teasel House, June 20, 2024
Romas is a Lithuanian immigrant working in a Corvallis hospital whose quiet life begins to come apart under the pressure of a historical obsession. At the center of that obsession is Franz Edmund Creffield, a real cult leader whose early twentieth-century presence in the Willamette Valley continues to shape the lives that follow.
Valley Versus Vision is a novel about historical trauma and the way it resurfaces in bodies that did not originally bear it. The past does not remain past. It enters the present through memory, fixation, and the pressure of a landscape marked by belief, grief, and devotion.
Portland Witch House
Blurb, May 2022
For twelve years, Jahan Brian Ihsan photographed Portland’s occult underground using antique and vintage film cameras. His subjects were figures working outside the boundaries of mainstream religious practice, including artists, ritualists, and participants in countercultural belief.
Portland Witch House brings those photographic portraits together with short fiction moving through related territory.
Among the subjects are visionary artist Paul Laffoley, author Tracy Twyman, musician Rachael Kozak, and Diabolus Rex Church. Ihsan’s photography also appears in The Essential Paul Laffoley, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.
About jahan ihsan
Photography in my family goes back to the 1890s.
Elbert Monroe Snipes ran a portrait studio in Anderson, South Carolina, from 1892 to 1910. His son continued the work in Pelzer through the 1930s. The impulse to document, to sit people in front of a camera and make a record of the fact that they existed, ran in the blood long before I inherited it. I did not know, growing up, that I was inheriting anything. I thought I was simply watching. But watching is the first discipline, and it is not passive, and it was never mine to refuse.
I was raised in Greenville, South Carolina, close to where Elbert Monroe's studio once stood, in a landscape that had never fully separated the present from the dead. The antebellum architecture was still standing. The churches were still full. I do not mean full the way a room is full of furniture. I mean full the way a body is full of blood. Belief, in the South, is not an idea. It is a pressure. In the Appalachian foothills nearby, that pressure found its most honest expressions. Snake handling. Faith healing. Ecstatic communion. The sacred and the dangerous occupied the same body at the same time, and I recognized this before I had language for it, the way a child recognizes that a parent's mood has changed before anyone speaks.
At nineteen, I went to Lithuania as a travel teacher for the Bahá'í Faith, posted to Kaunas and Ukmergė. My sense of purpose was intact while my sense of belonging was not. That year taught me what it costs to carry a belief into a place where it has no established roots. I am no longer a Bahá'í. The experience remains.
At twenty-three, a dream about Portland, Oregon, changed the course of things. I packed what I had and rode a Greyhound bus across the country to a city I had never seen. It was the year 2000. Portland became home for the next sixteen years.
In Portland, photography began. I used antique and vintage film cameras and spent twelve years documenting the city's occult underground. My subjects were artists and ritualists and figures from outsider religions, people who practice belief at the margins of what mainstream culture is willing to take seriously. I was not interested in spectacle. I was interested in what a person's face does when they believe something that isolates them, and what the camera can hold of that belief without reducing it to evidence. The work followed the family discipline that had been in place since the nineteenth century: document what would otherwise disappear, and stay with the subject long enough for the camera to stop being a barrier.
In 2011, I returned to school. In 2013, the name Snipes was set aside, with the ancestors still in view and carried forward under a different signature. I completed a BA in English Literature and Writing at Marylhurst University in 2014. What followed was a year and a half in the M.Div. program before the realization arrived that the questions I was asking required a different degree. I transferred and completed an MA in Comparative Religion at Claremont School of Theology in 2018. The education mattered. But what matters more is what came after.
In 2022 and 2023, I worked as an archivist for the Center for Process Studies, one of the major institutions in process theology, home to the world's largest collection of Whiteheadian-Hartshornean scholarship, founded by John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin in 1973. From letters, conference records, photographs, and ephemera, I assembled and edited The Center for Process Studies: Conferences and Conversations, published in December 2022. It was an act of preservation in the family tradition. Making a record of the fact that something existed and mattered.
Then came nursing assistant work.
I say this plainly because it explains the novels more directly. The Valley Versus series is full of hospital workers, people who manage other people's bodies for a living and who stand daily at the threshold between the living and the dead. I did not write about that threshold from a distance. I worked in it. I changed sheets, turned patients, and cleaned what the body leaves behind when it has stopped being polite about its needs. The novels came out of that work, when the day job and my obsessions could no longer be kept in separate rooms, and I stopped trying to keep them there.
Select photographic work from the Portland years became Portland Witch House (2022). My photography also appears in The Essential Paul Laffoley, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.
Valley Versus Vision was published by Teasel House in June 2024. Valley Versus Vector followed in September 2025. The Burl, forthcoming in June 2026, turns to grief, the postpartum body, and the floodplain landscape of Brownsville and Philomath, Oregon. It asks what happens when the body continues to act on instructions the mind can no longer accept.