An Ignorance of Trees: A Memoir in Essays

by Jim Daniels

Genres: Essays

180 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2025

About the author

James Raymond Daniels (born 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American poet and writer. Like his father and many of his friends, Daniels worked for the Ford Motor Company before college. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Alma College in 1978 and a master’s degree from Bowling Green State University in 1980. In his writing, he addresses the issues of blue collar work, adolescence, and determining the role of a poet. The factories proved a setting for many of his poems, which describe the hardships factory workers face.

Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English. The majority of Daniels' papers can be found within the Special Collections department of Michigan State University's main library.

Daniels' literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. He won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Reviews

[John Jeffire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare's famous lines about holding a mirror up to nature are perhaps best heeded by memoirists, whose success is often measured by how much the audience identifies with the events and people they describe. In this sense, the successful memoirist lets us see our own lives in the tales recounted, and in this kinship we remember and relive parts of our own past. Having grown up in working class metro Detroit, I experienced this reading Jim Daniels' "An Ignorance of Trees," a memoir shaped through a series of connected personal essays. The title is derived from one of the pieces in the collection in which the author revisits his old neighborhood, recalling that he could name every sort of car he glimpsed but very few types of trees; part of this was the terrain itself, the fact that the neighborhood was packed with row houses made for the auto workers that powered the factories and little room was left for much else but concrete and an occasional tree with limited life expectancy. Trees were more suited to the vast woods "Up North," and not the concrete vistas of an industrial landscape, and were thus met with detached indifference. Daniels reflects, "Why were we drawn to the random destruction of all things natural, even while benefiting from the escape they offered? Was it the intoxicating lure of power? The power of the primitive? The power to prove we were as hard as those streets we walked on, as the metal cars we drove?" (42). There are familiar sights in this work: the father who labors long hours in the factory and returns home late and exhausted; the neighbor kids filling their lives with sandlot ball games and, later, turfing the lawns of perceived enemies; the family members we have a duty to love but cannot understand, often not until they are gone. There are gems of wisdom, too, that invite us to reflect or construct mental memoirs of our own. Ultimately, as Daniels writes, "You can wait forever for a happy ending. Or, redefine waiting. How we distract ourselves while waiting is what we end up calling life" (69). 

[Marie Zhuikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful memoir about Daniels' hard-scrabble childhood in Detroit and how it impacted his life when he broke through the blue-collar barrier to become an English professor. This is the first of his many books that I've read., and his his first work of nonfiction. The rest are poetry and fiction. Daniels' experience with poetry shines through in the text, making this memoir rise above others. (Lines like "Our conversations were like clacking stones together to create some primitive rhythm.") I was especially moved by his essays about childhood: swing sets, lack of nature, pet dogs. (My older brother almost killed me once, pushing me too high on our swing set when it tipped.) My favorite was "The Abridged Book of Water," about the three pools in his neighborhood and Daniels' experiences with the owners of the pools and his need for the water itself.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his subtitle, Jim Daniels describes this lovely book as “a memoir in essays”—which is to say, I think, that he offers it not so much as a narrative of his life as a collection of moments, snapshots of experience. The very best of these pieces are those that hold most tightly to that snapshot mode, that center on a particular object or image: a swing set, the above-ground pools of a working-class neighborhood, a painting of woman in a bar. But what is striking throughout is how the author is rarely placed front and center, but is instead a sensitive and shrewd observer of the events and people around him.