On Trees, Home, and Mimicry

When I start writing these notes, it’s at the end of a long semester. The temperature has dropped; the trees in Lincoln are mostly bare now, though some still stubbornly cling to clumps of brown, shriveled leaves. On my walk through campus on the way to work each day, I’ve been watching the squirrels building their winter nests out of those leaves. It’s finals week, and campus is going through yet another shift. The English department building is suddenly quiet without the steady stream of students going to classes. In the library, students are hunched over books and laptops as they finish final papers and study for exams. It makes me think of my own undergraduate semesters—writing papers on Virginia Woolf or Milton, cramming for a Russian test, or anxiously memorizing the dental patterns of lemurs, gibbons, and Old World monkeys for a physical anthropology final.

*

As I jump back into these notes, there are about 1,000 miles between myself and Lincoln. It’s Christmas Eve; I’m at my childhood home in Pennsylvania, where the temperature has warmed, causing fog to fill the small valley where our house sits. Above us, the mountains are encased in fog. My dad keeps checking the webcams at the ski resorts there, hoping that it will clear so he can drive up to burn some energy for a few hours. But the camera images remain a white blur.

*

I don’t know the names for all the different trees and shrubs along the path on my way to school in Nebraska, but I know what they look like as the seasons change. How the one near my building bursts in the spring with tight clusters of white blossoms resembling cake frosting. Nearby, lilac bushes face each other on either side of the walkway; when they bloom in April, I pause to stuff my face in them each time I pass by.

There’s one tree on campus that is in its own category, and that is Roxy Paine’s 40-foot stainless steel tree sculpture, which is nestled among other natural trees beside Andrews Hall. I see it in passing moments now—on my way to get coffee, or to pick up a book from the library. But in my second year here, I had an office that looked out directly onto the tree.

In the summer, the tree’s trunk and limbs merge with the canopy; one must seek it out to know it's there. In winter, the sculpture is starkly radiant one day, glowing against Nebraska's bright-blue sky, and muted and hidden the next, blending in with the bare trees around it. In the fall, red leaves from a nearby tree throw their color against its metal trunk, mimicking firelight. The trunk is thick; the limbs are spidery and reaching. People pass by it every day never seeing it, but once they do, it’s difficult for one’s eyes to not be drawn to it.

The branches of Paine’s tree were constructed in his studio in upstate New York. I learned this after having stared at the tree through my office window for the better part of a year and a half. Paine’s studio and home are in Treadwell, NY—a hamlet in the town of Franklin in Delaware County, not far from Syracuse, where I lived before moving to Nebraska. Google Maps tells me that Treadwell is a one hour and 53 minute drive from Syracuse via I-81 S, which I drove regularly on my way to visit my parents in Pennsylvania.

*

After a semester ends, there is often a relief, for me, in looking up from my books and computer and remembering that, among other things, trees still exist. At the end of the fall semesters, I would usually come home to my parent’s house for the winter break. The house sits along a two-lane highway at the edge of the woods; I can walk into my back yard and climb up into those tree-lined hills, where I will never get lost. Or I can drive a few miles down the highway to the state park, where hiking trails I once worked on cut their way through hills, streams, and waterfalls.  Arriving here from a city, the air always feels crisp and clean. I can smell the pine in it clearly.

*

Paine’s work explores interactions between what is natural and what is artificial. Prior to the installation of the UNL tree (titled “Breach”), a news release said of Paine’s work:

[The trees] are placed in contexts where they are at once integral and apart, calling attention to how the surrounding landscapes—while apparently natural—are likewise human interventions. The Sheldon tree, unlike Paine's other trees, will appear scarred, perhaps damaged by lightning or high wind, and suggests the impact of history while retaining a pristine surface. Its placement is important to Paine, who seeks to engage viewers by presenting an unexpected form in association with the objects it mimics.

I have spent six years in the building beside this tree, as a graduate student in English. In my first years in the program, I found myself relating to the tree’s way of blending in, mimicking the trees around it. I thought of myself performing a similar kind of mimicry, having shifted from year-round farm labor to being immersed once more in academia.

Now I am nearing the end of my PhD program and find myself relating to the sculpture in a different way. Silver has gathered in streaks in my hair, matching the trunk and limbs. Like the tree, I’m feeling a little weathered, my branches a little broken. But still standing.

*

Outside the window of my childhood bedroom in Pennsylvania, I see another tree. It’s on our neighbor’s property; I don’t know what species it is, or if it’s alive or dead. But in the cold December rainlight, its limbs appear as silver as the limbs of Roxy Paine’s tree. This is the room where I wrote my first poems. It’s now my mom’s artist studio. There’s something beautiful in that, I think: the two of us, at different points in life, sitting inside this same room and making art.

*

Coming home always sends me into a reflective state, whether I want it to or not. I end up thinking a lot about identity and how it’s shaped by people and place. Many of my friends agree that going home makes them revert, in some way, to a previous version of themselves. With time and distance, I’ve shifted away from the person I was when I started writing poems in this room. But to revisit a place can also be to revisit a self, and when I enter this house, I feel some kind of swap taking place inside my body. Maybe this is also a kind of mimicry. I think it comes from a place of wanting to reassure my loved ones here that I haven’t changed so much that they can’t recognize me. It’s still me, this shadow-self whispers. And there can be delight in revisiting that past self. And it can also feel strange—like a kind of erasure.

*

In the airport on my way back to Lincoln, yet another shift inside myself. Airports make me feel blank, anonymous. With an hour to spare in between flights, I spray perfume at a duty free store, buy a book of poetry at the bookstore (Lindsey Webb’s Plat). At boarding time, I wedge my hips into a too-small window seat and think about how good it will feel to hold my cat, who my neighbor says has been crying at the door when she comes home from work. Clouds and fog cover Lincoln—so thick that I don’t see the ground until we’re just about to land. When it appears, I’m relieved to see the long expanse of a dirt field, a straight dirt road cutting through it. Something unfurls inside my chest. This, too, is home.

Writing Notes: On Writing Practice

Some recent conversations with fellow writers have left me thinking about writing practices—mine, theirs, the overlaps and the in-betweens. I know writers who have created beautiful, devoted rituals around their writing; they wake every morning at 5:00 a.m. and spend those first dark hours of the day with a pen and notebook, or they sit down after breakfast with a fresh cup of coffee, a candle burning. And I know writers who don’t mean to write every day, but seemingly can’t help themselves, scribbling poems in the margins of books, jotting lines down on napkins or in the Notes app on their phone.

I’m not the type of writer who sits down at a desk at a certain time every day and tries to churn something out. I respect those kinds of writers—I see the benefit of the daily practice, making writing a habit, building the muscle memory of the image, the line, narrative. My writing comes in spurts and bursts; I go through long periods of drought in which no poems arrive. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown more comfortable in these periods of silence. I know that the poems, eventually, will come.

I’ve also stumbled upon other writers who have successfully busted the myth of “writer’s block” for me. I especially love this essay by Carl Phillips, which considers the role of silence for writers, and this part in particular:

I once asked Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet for whom there are typically many years between books of poems, how she handled the silence, what I still thought of at the time as writer’s block. “That’s not how I think of it,” she responded, and went on to explain to me how a snake, in order to attack, must first recoil to establish a position from which to attack. As I understand the analogy, the attack is the act of writing, and the period of recoil, of retraction, is many things: reflection, thinking, revision of thought, remembering. “You’re not blocked,” Ellen told me. “You’re waiting. You’re paying attention.” Which is also research. Also, a version of silence, the only sound the sound of a snake breathing, which must be, as sounds go, a soft, a small one.

I love this emphasis on paying attention, making those periods of silence meaningful. Earlier in the piece, Phillips writes “I think that’s all art is, a record of interior attention paid.” When I teach creative writing, it’s with this in mind. We spend the first weeks of the semester doing things like keeping audio journals, smelling perfumes, visiting the campus art museum. As we move toward the page, it’s with a sharpened understanding of what attention means, and how our senses inform our experience and memory.

I’m a collector at heart. I love the process of gathering things—books, photos, notebooks, ephemera, perfume. It occurs to me now that this practice of collecting is also a practice of attention. There’s a desire to keep these things close to me, to hold them in some way.

That practice of collecting spills over into my writing life. I’ve come to think of my own daily writing practice as cataloging—gathering material for the moment when the need to write hits me. I do this in a few ways, most of them having to do with a rotating set of notebooks. Here are the notebooks I currently keep:

Daily journal: a medium-sized journal, this is where I put thoughts, feelings, anxieties, what I did that day, little observations, things people said. I return to these journals if I’m trying to write about a particular memory or period of time, sometimes mining the pages for details.

Poem notes: a smaller notebook, one that might fit in a pocket, I think of this as my “on the go” book where I write line fragments, pieces of language that caught my attention, ideas for poems or essays, images that stand out to me, quotes from something I’m reading, notes from poetry readings or art galleries, etc.

Word journal: Another smaller journal, I use this to keep lists of words I come across while reading—words that are interesting, beautiful, strange, etc. This becomes a major generative tool for me when I sit down to write. I use it often when I’m stuck in the middle of writing a poem, at which point I’ll browse through the words, looking for something that leaps out at me, then challenge myself to include that word in the next line of the poem. It’s a small enough constraint that gets the creative gears turning again.

Poem journal: The largest of the journals, this is one I use to copy out poems which struck me, ones I want to spend more time with. I love the practice of slowly copying each word of the poem, savoring them as I go, thinking closely about the way the lines work together and how the poem moves. Here’s a page where I copied one of Michael Burkard’s “Untitled” poems—one which I’ve realized I copied at least twice into the same journal:

In addition to the written journals, I also keep an audio journal, which I’ll write about at length another time.

Finally, on the subject of writing practice, here are some books/essays I often return to:

• bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. In particular, the first essay in the collection (“Writing From the Darkness”) is a brilliant piece about diary-keeping as a tool for self-discovery and self-recovery. hooks writes: “However much the realm of diary-keeping has been a female experience that has often kept us closeted writers, away from the act of writing as authorship, it has most assuredly been a writing act that intimately connects the art of expressing one’s feeling on the written page with the construction of self and identity, with the effort to be fully self-actualized” (5).

• Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook.” This one seems obvious, but I can’t go without mentioning it. Here’s a favorite bit: “See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there”

• Ted Kooser, The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book. This is less a reflection on a writing practice and more an example of what one practice of journal-keeping might look like—in this case, a sequence of short observational prose pieces organized by month. In the preface, Kooser writes, “I know from years of experience that keeping a journal is like taking good care of one’s heart.”

• Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey. Oh, Mary Ruefle. How I adore the way you think. I love this bit from the title essay, which brings me back to Phillips’ thoughts on attention: “Recently I found myself filling out a grant application by writing: ‘I seek an extended period of time, free from all distractions, so that I might be free to be distracted.’ Distraction is distracting us from distraction. Perhaps we wish to be distracted by the slightest nuances of being, thinking, feeling, or seeing” (137).