Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction

by Josh MacIvor-Andersen (Editor), Bill McKibben (Introduction), Renée E. D'Aoust

With an introduction by Bill McKibben, thirty authors use a vast range of styles to explore our human relationship to trees, which of course is multi-faceted, messy, beautiful and selfish and symbiotic. In this collection, we meet a boy who ate a tree to gain access to the Guiness Book of World Records, a tree-tethered sniper at a pot farm in California, a man who was killed by a fallen limb in Central Park, and lots of writers, both established and emerging, whose intimate connections to trees (and their losses) have found a collective home in the pulped pages of recycled forest.

Foreword / Josh MacIvor-Andersen --
Introduction / Bill McKibben --
Treeing / John Roscoe --
Trimming trees / Diane Payne --
The spar tree / Brian Doyle --
Prometheus (1964) / M.J. Gette --
The sugaring season / Annie Bellerose --
That winter / Sarah Bates --
Tree eater / Steven Church --
Study with crepe myrtle / Lia Purpura --
Stacked for firewood / Diana Hume George --
Saving trees / Jacqueline Doyle --
Hector in the redwoods / Mathew Gavin Frank --
Temple / Angela Pelster --
Quakies: Populus tremuloides / Amaris Feland Ketcham --
Etiology / Thomas Mira y Lopez --
The decadence of grapefruit / Toti O'Brien --
Fall / Zoë Ruiz --
The priest in the trees / Fred Bahnson --
What goes down / Kayann Short --
Tree rings: a time-line / T. Hugh Crawford --
The line of no trees / Reneé E. D'Aoust --
Pineward / Lori Brack --
The usefulness of trees / Mercedes Webb-Pullman --
What the willow said as it fell / Andrea Scarpino --
Tree of heaven / Matthew Grewe --
A tree of a crab-apple variety ; My birth / Jacklyn Janeksela --
Word-and-wood working / Wendy Call --
Home is a closed sky / Mackenzie Myers --
The scent of a Daphne / Karen K. Hugg --
Ten takes on the palm / Paul Lisicky --
Airing out / Stefan Olson --
Euclid's orchard (for Brendan Pass) / Theresa Kishkan --
Vertebrae to bark / Courtney Amber Kilian

Genres: Nonfiction, Environment

300 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2017

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trees are their own brilliance, and numerous entries in this anthology make that point far more eloquently than I've either the time or space here. For those pieces, this is an anthology well worth picking up, and it is a collection to which I am sure I will return repeatedly. For several of my favorite pieces, this serves as an introduction to new (to me) authors as well, which is an additional reward, and I'm excited in the future to track down some of those authors' other works.

[5 stars for occasional brilliance minus 1 star for those pieces which didn't feel like they were quite up to snuff here is 4 stars.]

[Bingustini · Rating 3 out of 5]

The collection of essays in Rooted exhibits the breadth of human beings' relationships with trees, from a source of wonder to a source of food. While this is good for representing diversity of experience, it can make for stories that feel only tangentially tied to one another as well as a few that are only tangentially tied to trees. There is for sure a sort of undercurrent of reverence for trees, but some works feel like paeans and others like excerpts from memoirs.

A number of the stories felt self-indulgent to me, but it's hard to be too critical of self-indulgence in creative nonfiction works that are so often autobiographical. To me, the most poetic works were the most dull as they seemed the most laudatory but also had the least to say in terms of trees themselves or the human-tree relationship. If there are any consistent themes in Rooted, the ability of trees to serve as unifiers is the greatest, especially linking people across time.

Angela Pelster's essay "Temple" is a great example of this (though admittedly I had already read it in her collection Limber). Theresa Kishkan's "Euclid Orchard (for Brendan Pass)" was also one of the book's strongest works and demonstrated well how trees (sometimes non-literal ones too) can tie people together, as did "The Scent of a Daphne" by Karen K. Hugg. "Tree Eater" by Steven Church was, at least to me, the most unique work in the book, and was very engaging despite being mostly speculation about a stranger.

While the nature of the book as a collection of works related solely by trees and genre makes a cohesive tone difficult, I also found that the book lacked a sense of warmth that I've discovered in other creative nonfiction. I think that jumps in style and tone were a bit too much for me, and the most engaging works were interrupted by a few that felt too much like responses to prompts asking the author to write about how beautiful trees are. If trees have emotional weight for you, there are definitely going to be more than a couple works in this collection that speak to you, but you will have to sift around a bit to find them.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books I set aside to read someday, and although it's from 2017 it's pretty much timeless. It's always a treat to give nature a chance to provide insight and healing, and I'm happy to see there's a second collection.

[Natalie Sickling · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few were very very good but a lot read like substack posts I probably wouldn't read