Jahan Brian Ihsan
Literary fiction and essays on place, belief, and the body, set between the Willamette Valley and the American South.
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.
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 between life and death, his sense of self begins
to come apart.
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.
This is a novel about contagion, transformation, and what survives a rupture.
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 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 how historical trauma resurfaces in bodies that did not originally bear it. The past enters the present through memory, fixation, and a landscape marked by belief and grief.
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.
Among the subjects are visionary artist Paul Laffoley, author Tracy Twyman,
musician Rachael Kozak, and Diabolus Rex Church.
About jahan ihsan
Jahan Brian Ihsan is a novelist and photographer. His fiction draws on documenting the American occult underground, graduate work in comparative religion, and time spent working in hospitals at the threshold between the living and the dead.
Raised in Greenville, South Carolina, in a landscape that had never fully separated the present from the dead, his family's practice of documentary photography goes back to the 1890s, when Elbert Monroe Snipes ran a portrait studio in Anderson, South Carolina. That discipline, staying with the subject long enough for the camera to stop being a barrier and document what would otherwise disappear, runs through everything he makes.
Jahan Brian Ihsan holds a BA in English Literature and Writing from Marylhurst University and an MA in Comparative Religion from Claremont School of Theology. He served as archivist for the Center for Process Studies, including editing and publishing The Center for Process Studies: Conferences and Conversations (2022). His photography appears in Portland Witch House (2022) and The Essential Paul Laffoley (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Valley Versus Vision (Teasel House, 2024) and Valley Versus Vector (Teasel House, 2025) are the first two novels in the Valley Versus series. The Burl is forthcoming in June 2026.