What do you think?
Rate this book
Ghosts of Distant Trees
In Ghosts of Distant Trees, Erica Watson traces the layered ecologies of Denali National Park, Alaska—its vast and shifting landscape, seasonal labor rhythms, and the subtle politics of inhabitation. Through lyric and narrative essays, she explores how built environments like Denali’s single road shape encounters with land, gender, weather, and community. Turning from iconic vistas to gravel, orange peels, and garden beds, Watson asks what it might be like “to get to know a place without immediately thinking of what threatens it.” Haunted by fire and thaw, these essays resist elegy, offering instead a complex meditation on belonging, vulnerability, and the fragile intimacies that persist in a warming world. This is writing attuned to detail, disruption, and the ethics of attention.
192 pages, Paperback
Published November 11, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 16, 2025
A luminous collection of essays that maps memory and place with wit, precision, and a generous honesty about what it means to hold the past beside our evolving present.
Writing one great essay is hard; writing seventeen is rarer still. Erica Watson has done exactly that. This collection moves across migration, wilderness, colonialism, land, cold, small-town communities, and gender with an associative intelligence that makes you pause and reread lines just to live inside them a little longer.
Watson writes with a precision that never feels precious. Her essays are evocative and thoughtful, but also quietly funny—the kind of observational humor that sneaks up on you. She notices details that reveal whole lives: “People ask about your tomato plants in a way they don’t ask about your sex life.”
What strikes me most is her honesty about uncertainty. “Sometimes it takes me twenty years to finish a thought,” she writes, and the book understands that insight doesn’t arrive on schedule. Such 20-year thoughts include the wild places she writes about, the ways humans have tried to tame them, the ways they resist taming, the histories erased by violence, by climate change, by politics - and all of it done without shorthand or easy conclusions.
This is a book about paying attention—to the world and to yourself—about how a gravel pit can hold as much meaning as an inherited story, and about learning what is ours to carry and how to carry it with integrity.
Watson has given us something rare: a collection that trusts readers to think alongside her, to sit with questions instead of rushing toward answers.
Read it slowly. Let it work on you.
Writing one great essay is hard; writing seventeen is rarer still. Erica Watson has done exactly that. This collection moves across migration, wilderness, colonialism, land, cold, small-town communities, and gender with an associative intelligence that makes you pause and reread lines just to live inside them a little longer.
Watson writes with a precision that never feels precious. Her essays are evocative and thoughtful, but also quietly funny—the kind of observational humor that sneaks up on you. She notices details that reveal whole lives: “People ask about your tomato plants in a way they don’t ask about your sex life.”
What strikes me most is her honesty about uncertainty. “Sometimes it takes me twenty years to finish a thought,” she writes, and the book understands that insight doesn’t arrive on schedule. Such 20-year thoughts include the wild places she writes about, the ways humans have tried to tame them, the ways they resist taming, the histories erased by violence, by climate change, by politics - and all of it done without shorthand or easy conclusions.
This is a book about paying attention—to the world and to yourself—about how a gravel pit can hold as much meaning as an inherited story, and about learning what is ours to carry and how to carry it with integrity.
Watson has given us something rare: a collection that trusts readers to think alongside her, to sit with questions instead of rushing toward answers.
Read it slowly. Let it work on you.
October 17, 2025
This book is captivating and thought-provoking! Beautiful, lyrical prose, and an introspective mood. These essays will make you think deeply about your environment, and the living and non-living things within it. They will make you think about time, settler mentality, indigenous knowledge, climate grief, and the multivalence of stories. It's wonderful to spend time with Erica's voice and peer inside her consciousness. That's what the best essays do.
November 26, 2025
Gorgeous. I hadn’t read Watson’s writing until now and I’m so glad I did. Beautiful writing about the complicated splendor of Alaska, the sorrows of climate crisis, the shifts in our identity. Highly recommend.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews