by Ariel Gordon,
photos by Emily Christie
From November 4-7, I brought my public poetry project TreeTalk to Falcon Trails Resort, hanging poems from two trembling aspens and two birches.
This was part of the FTR’s amazing Artists in the Cabin program and I was lucky enough to have Wild Writing in the Boreal participants join me in writing to the trees.
I’ll admit that I was a bit nervous at doing a project that involves sitting under trees for hours at a time and writing in November. I was trying not to think of how cold November can get, how my fingers would smart with cold, writing and then hanging poems from a tree. Would I be forced to find a tree next to one of the cabins, just so I could have some kind of shelter?
These kinds of concerns were nothing new for this project.
The first time I TreeTalk-ed was at the Tallest Poppy as part of a Synonym Art Consultation residency. It was a heatwaved weekend in July—30 C both days—and I spent two full days sitting on the sidewalk patio writing to the boulevard elm, enticing restaurant patrons and passersby to write alongside me. I felt like a melted candle by the end of the weekend, but I was so proud of the 234 poems / secrets / one-liners / meditations / haikus that were written and hung from the tree.
That year, Winnipeg’s street trees were host to three infestations—cankerworms, elm spanworms, and forest tent caterpillars—and I liked to think we were adding a new layer of leaves to the tree.
Other iterations of TreeTalk have been similarly blasted: in 2019, I was TreeTalk-ing with a linden on the university quad in Morris, MN as part of a literary festival when Snowmaggedon hit Winnipeg hard. That early snowstorm, where wet heavy snow filled trees that still had the majority of their leaves, caused the death/destruction of 30,000 public trees. Trapped in Minnesota, the highways closed, I could only watch from a distance and console my teenage daughter, left alone for the first time.
In 2018, I was TreeTalk-ing with a cottonwood at the Winnipeg Folk Festival as part of their Prairie Outdoor Exhibition. The first night of the festival, there was an extreme storm warning with high winds—which is a problem if your project is paper-based. By the end of my four hours under the tree, I was windblown and freaked out. After regrouping overnight, I came back the next three days, watching thousands and thousands of people stream by the tree.
The weather the week before my residency was unseasonably warm, but you never know when winter will descend. So I packed a bag of mittens and hats and a couple of different jackets. But the weather continued to be gloriously unseasonable, the temperature hitting the teens each of the afternoons I worked with the trees. There were new mushrooms and wildflowers on the trails and newly-emerged insects floated by…
I am so grateful to Falcon Trails Resort for hosting me, to Wild Writers in the Boreal facilitators Lauren Carter and Donna Besel for including me in their program. I am grateful to the trees.
A selection of poems from TreeTalk: Falcon Trails:
First day, first tree: you are an old trembling aspen near the High Lake Trail, besides a culvert, kitty corner to the solar panels. You are nearly dead—if you were a mouth, you’d be riddled with cavities. If you were a house, all your windows would be smashed. Woodpeckers and time.
A weekend cyclist emerges from a tree-covered hill, drops like a hawk from the sky, ten feet behind me. The sun on us all.
Birch, nothing else in the woods is white. You are white & off-white, grey, cream, copper, black. The palest of palettes.
Every time I feel hopeless, I spot a baby balsam fir.
I know how to kill a tree, but how do you kill a poem? Neglect, indifference. What does heartrot look like in a poem?
The other birch was a handful of fingers, a pianist’s hand. You are crossed legs, an afternoon of sitting. A posture. You are the slightest bit slumped, stretch-marked.
The day dims. The green moss in the trembling aspen’s furrows five o’clock shadow.
You are a poetry mobile, a coat-rack, a gleaming candelabra. I could read you all day.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer. She is the author of two collections of urban-nature poetry, both of which won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn), a collection of essays that combines science writing and the personal essay, was published in 2019. It received an honourable mention for the 2020 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize for Environmental Humanities and Creative Writing and was shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award at the Manitoba Book Awards. Her most recent book is TreeTalk (At Bay Press, 2020), a public poetry project where Ariel hangs poems in trees and asks passersby to add their thoughts, ideas, and secrets. It is the first book in the TreeTalk series and was nominated for three Manitoba Book Awards.
