by Liza Birnbaum | Contributing Editor
Towards the end of Elissa Favero’s chapbook Children of Rivers and Trees (Newfound Press, 2024), there’s a section dedicated to Xenophoridae, sea snails that have been around for the last eighty million years and that affix small pieces of their environment to their shells to avoid predators. Elissa writes that “[t]he xenophorid, in this way, wears a kind of looping timeline of its life, what the animal has encountered on the sea floor and brought near.” This description, with its vivid figurative language and emphasis on the act of gathering, is one of several powerful synecdochal passages in the chapbook. Children of Rivers and Trees uses the abecedarian form and a combination of family history, research, and poetic language to create its own “looping timeline”: of Elissa’s life, but also of her family history and the wider history (human and nonhuman) of places that her family has inhabited over several generations. Elissa, who is an art historian as well as a writer, brings rigorous reflection and a discerning gaze to all of this, and her work asks great questions about the beauty and dangers of taxonomic thinking, how we reshape stories by way of retelling them, and what it means to speak about migration and rootedness from the position of, to borrow a phrase from Louise Erdrich, the “unquiet settler.”
Elissa and I met several years back and have since become friends and teaching colleagues at Cornish College of the Arts. I know her to be an incredibly thoughtful person and writer, and someone to whom process—whether in revising work, planning classes, or hosting an excellent dinner party with a signature cocktail—is deeply important. So I was excited to ask her some questions about Children of Rivers and Trees and how it made its way from idea to (beautifully printed and designed) book form. We spent much of the month of October volleying back and forth in a Google document, planning a meetup to conduct a comparative taste test of six different plum jams, purchased from a local purveyor she loves, in the margins of our conversation. As I knew she would, Elissa brought a million great thoughts and citations to our correspondence, whose subjects ranged from public art to June Jordan, from the importance of friendship to that lovely image of the xenophorid, which, it turns out, is an especially resonant one for her too. As of this writing we haven’t tried the jams yet, but I am 100% sure the tasting will be great–because of Elissa’s attention to craft and subtlety, and also because it is a pleasure to pay attention to things–any things, all things–in her company, as Children of Rivers and Trees makes blazingly clear to its reader.
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Children of Rivers and Trees begins and—hopefully this isn’t a spoiler!—ends with two artists’ representations of Goethe’s Urpflanze: “the archetypal, primal, or ancestral plant.” You write that Goethe “believed [the Urpflanze] would contain, coiled within itself, all future plants . . . With successive generations, any number of possibilities could take form.” I loved the visuals of these potential-filled plants, and bookending the manuscript with the Urpflanze also struck me as a way of suggesting that a similar sense of myriad flowerings might happen in the pages within. And that was in fact my reading experience! You use a variety of structures to explore a wide range of ideas, facts, stories, and close noticings in here. How did the idea of the Urpflanze influence or shape the chapbook, and how did you think about bringing these many subjects and structures into conversation with one another?
Thank you for noticing that bookending, Liza!
Goethe’s Urpflanze was, indeed, the seed for the whole project. My friend Katie Fleming, a wonderful artist, designer, and natural history enthusiast, told me about it probably ten years ago now, and with it in mind I began an essay exploring my own family tree and successive generations. The idea to write about aspens was there early on as well with the memory of my dad, as I write about in the chapbook, telling me about the trees’ communal root systems.
The abecedarian structure was something that evolved a little later. In fact, when I began this project, I thought I was working on a modest piece! But then I saw local poet Shin Yu Pai’s beautiful public art project HEIRLOOM at Piper’s Orchard in Seattle’s Carkeek Park, and I decided on the alphabet as a kind of container that I could work with, a form to structure all the different subjects I was starting to draw in. And with that ABC structure, “Ancestral Plant” (Urpflanze) could be at the beginning, which I loved. It took me a long time (including, at the beginning, much of a four-week writing residency spent combing through nearly every single page of a large dictionary) to come up with my alphabet. As I revised and refined, the limitations of the form also became apparent and something I wanted to write into. To return to Goethe and his ideas of possibility, there was much more beyond what I was including by tracing my own family history. So I hope the end of the book leans toward that sense of expansion and possibility for the future without forgetting the past.
I happened upon the work of Natasha Russell, whose Urpflanze 2 concludes the manuscript, when I was looking for a high-resolution image of the nineteenth-century Urpflanze print with which I begin it. It felt like such a windfall! Here was this contemporary Scottish artist (much of the family I discuss in the book came from Scotland) responding to Turpin’s historical print and updating it to show plants used to make medicines but also poisons. In terms of my themes, there’s a lot of medicine in this book, I hope, but there’s poison too, so Natasha’s print felt apt. As someone who studies and teaches visual arts histories, I often think in terms of images and really loved that this pairing would carry the manuscript from beginning to end.
Ah, there’s so much I want to ask about in this great answer! It’s really exciting to hear a bit about the history and evolution of the chapbook. I’m going to return to the idea of medicine and poison in a moment, but because we started with form, I’d love to hear just a little more about your work with the abecedarian structure. You mentioned just now that that “container” both helped you expand the project and that you ran up against its limits. But maybe those limits also inspired some new thinking? Will you say a little more about your process of working with this at least semi-fixed shape for the manuscript?
Yes! I have a picture from May 2017 of the alphabet I was working with then, written with pink chalk on a big blackboard. It’s interesting to look back and see what was there from early on in the project and also what changed. “Ancestral Plant” is there plus the four trees you find in the published chapbook: “Birch,” “Quaking Aspen,” “Willow,” and “Yew.” Those were there from the beginning, along with some letters or entries that offer the histories of my family emigrating from Scotland and Italy to Montana: “Endogamy,” “Family,” “Genealogy,” “Kindred,” “Uproot.” The content that changed most significantly as the project evolved is that I brought in more Indigenous histories and contemporary figures too. How could I write about natural histories and family histories in what’s now called south central Montana without giving the Apsáalooke their due? Some of my early readers helped me see this, for which I’m very grateful, and so I ended up bringing in, among other subjects, the contemporary Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose work I admire very much.
My final mentor in the MFA program I just completed, the wonderful poet Brian Teare, observed that I am a stacker, meaning I arrange and make piles of things whose meanings may be implicit to me but aren’t always articulated. I think this maybe comes from my art history background and thinking in terms of groups of images? I didn’t work on Children of Rivers and Trees with Brian, but looking back, I can definitely see this project as a stack of 26. So then a lot of the writing became thinking about how these 26 distinct sections touch. What do the transitions look like, and how do I develop certain themes and create patterns that hopefully accrue in meaning as you read?
In terms of form, the unit of the page was very important. I made a rule for myself that no individual entry was to be longer than a page in Microsoft Word. (And, indeed, in taking a class on chapbooks with Bill Carty a few years ago at the Hugo House and being in the company of many great poets, I felt encouraged to pare back and try to keep only what was most vital!) Because the final printed book is smaller than 8.5 x 11 inches, this looks different now, but Newfound’s consummate editor Crystal Odelle found a way to translate each entry beautifully into a one-, two-, or three-page spread, and I am thrilled with the way the printed chapbook looks.
Also, in terms of form and despite this being a prose chapbook, I thought a lot about concrete poetry and lineation. One source I drew from was John Gast’s 1872 painting and subsequent print American Progress, which depicts a robed, classical-looking figure leading agriculture, trains, and telegraph lines west. It’s propaganda for Manifest Destiny that omits the countless violences and losses enacted in the name of American expansion. The composition of Gast’s piece implies a map, and I wanted to work with the page as a kind of map to suggest, graphically, the theft of Crow lands and the ravenous taking carried out by white Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That’s a history my family and I are implicated in.
I love Brian Teare’s classification of you as a “stacker”! It’s interesting to me to think about that term, which implies a kind of vertical accumulation, in dialogue with the idea you mention about using the page as a map. I see verticality at play in many spots, as in the entry “Genealogy,” which begins:
I love Brian Teare’s classification of you as a “stacker”! It’s interesting to me to think about that term, which implies a kind of vertical accumulation, in dialogue with the idea you mention about using the page as a map. I see verticality at play in many spots, as in the entry “Genealogy,” which begins:
A line of d
e
s
c
e
n
t
traced continuously from an ancestor.
But there’s also a great deal of care in terms of where text is placed on the horizontal plane in some sections of the manuscript. How things fell on that horizontal axis often seemed to me tied both to time–a sense of “before” and “after,” words that come up a lot in the chapbook–and to westward expansion and settlement in the US. So maybe this is my chance to link what you’ve just said about expanding the project to include more context about the Apsáalooke to what you mentioned earlier about how “there’s a lot of medicine in this book, I hope, but there’s poison too.” How did you think about the research and writing necessary to expand the frame of what started as a family story and to take on your own family’s role in the history of settler colonialism and Indigenous displacement? And–because I know this is tricky work, positionally, but I think you do it well!–how did you navigate through the potential difficulties of presenting both medicine and poison here?
Thank you for those thoughtful and generous observations about both the verticality and the horizontality of the different pages! In terms of the vertical, I was very much thinking about the graphic representation of family trees and the idea of showing generations, or time, from top to bottom (or bottom to top—tree diagrams can be arranged either way), as I do in the passage you quote from “Genealogy.”
Presenting both medicine and poison became, I think, a question of balance and connection as I expanded and revised the manuscript. The C in my alphabet was always, from the beginning, “Crow,” and I loved the way the chickadee from the story of Chief Plenty Coups (or Alaxchiiaahush, to use his Apsáalooke name) connects to my grandmother’s love of songbirds and her bird clock, which still hangs in Red Lodge. When I learned that Wendy Red Star had worked at the Montana state park where Alaxchiiaahush’s homestead was, deciding to include that detail felt like coming full circle. That last paragraph in the “Red Star” section was one that came late in my drafting process but feels so important to the project. Almost like a thesis. I had gathered or stacked up so much information, to return to Brian’s term, that I was finally able to see something of my methodology and also its limitations. “What can I tell of others’ stories? I am a forager—a scavenger in trespass—searching among the world’s beauties and brutalities . . .” This feels so important for me to state.
The natural world, meanwhile, offers so much medicine. It’s probably not right to choose, but “Xenophoridae” is my favorite section, I think. It’s the first time I address my grandmother directly, instead of writing about her, and I also get to bring in this amazing creature, a sea snail who is itself a gatherer or collector, a stacker even! The Latin name “xenophorid,” as I explain in this section, means “carrier of strangers.” How beautiful is that? What if we were all carriers of strangers? I didn’t come across it until after I’d submitted the final version of the manuscript to be printed, but I now have at my desk a poem by June Jordan called “These Poems.” The last two stanzas read:
I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around mewhoever you are
whoever I may become.
What a balm, these words of hers! What wisdom to revisit again and again.
Wow, thank you for this June Jordan poem! Seems like a perfect one to have on the desk always . . . an amazing way of thinking about reading and writing as relational, and so great in dialogue with the xenophorid.
You mentioned your grandmother a couple times just now. The project isn’t explicitly framed as a tribute to her life or to her after her death (which occurred during the writing of the project and figures into the structure of it in an intriguing nonlinear way), but she struck me as a central figure in the manuscript. How do you think about her as a presence in here?
Yes, I’m so glad to talk about her! In this book-length essay about immigration and displacement and my own movement from the East Coast to Seattle, Babe, my Nana, offers a kind of counterexample of rootedness, which was and is, of course, a privilege.
Besides her gregariousness and abiding fondness for birds, one of the things I loved most about my grandmother was her sense of style—her love of pink and spangly things, as we call them in my family. She was very much a child of the Depression and a collector of knickknacks and lover of sweets, too. That she had candy in every room in her house (even the bathrooms!) thrilled me to no end as a child. Incorporating details into the manuscript like her green shag carpet or even her gaudy pink coffin felt, to me, like bringing in representative pieces of her and also, I hope, add a bit of levity—sparkle, if you will—to a manuscript that’s quite searching and serious. I wish now, of course, I could put the book in her hands or read to her from it.
My father, one of the other central figures in the book, is a wonderful storyteller: slow, deeply engaged and engaging, and with a quiet sense of humor, especially about his own foibles. Though it wasn’t an explicit intention of mine at the start, I think, in some way, I wanted to carry on that family tradition of storytelling sited in a place I love but have never lived, but also do it in my own way, less through narrative and more through association, observation, and research.
It’s cool to me to think about these two very important people (VIPs!) in the book as you write about them above, in part because the traits you just lovingly described make each of them very different people to write towards/in affinity with. Some of what you’ve said has touched on this, but I want to hear more about what felt most important or meaningful about capturing family history—the genealogy, storytelling, and patterns of migration you trace—in a project for an audience wider than those you’re writing about. Maybe another way of asking this is that, at the very start of this conversation, you mention that the Urpflanze inspired you to start an essay about your family and its lineage. What spurred the urge to write about that then, and how are you thinking about that subject matter now that the project’s going out into the world?
I started working on the abecedarian in the month before Donald Trump was elected in 2016, so American politics and anti-immigrant discourse were very much in the background. Related pieces I read as I continued writing, like Jenny Liou’s brilliant 2020 essay “Am I an invasive species?” for High Country News that examines how the language we use for plants and animals has been hatefully deployed against Chinese-Americans and other Asian immigrants, helped me think about the intersections of genealogy and natural history in new ways.
Outside of the specific details, my family history is, in a lot of ways, typical, I think, of the immigration stories of many white Americans featuring, as it does, both ethnic pride and assimilation. We all come from somewhere(s) and have family lineages we can, if we’re fortunate, seek out and trace. And that work can be so valuable. But now with the chapbook coming out, eight years after I first began, I think I feel more and more invested in what’s to come and in what we can make together. Poet Roger Reeves has a recent collection of essays (poets, to my mind, often make the best essayists!) called Dark Days: Fugitive Essays that includes this incredible line: “. . . language is always imagining us in the future.” I hope that the chapbook angles toward that imagining.
I know, for example, that living with housemates these last many years has helped me reimagine my ideas of family. In another essay from this collection, Reeves writes, “Friendship is the most radical alliance one can make because it is one of the few things not organized and administered by the government—unlike marriage and family. Friendship requires no permits, licenses, or contracts. It is improvisational, contingent, errant, and opaque, and sits outside of large-scale legal apparatuses.” I guess I’m back again to the notion that we might all, no matter what our backgrounds, no matter who our biological families, act as carriers of strangers, worshiping the others around us and working to cultivate new senses of self, connectedness, joy, and responsibility.
That answer leads so well into something else I wanted to ask about, maybe related to the interconnectedness you were just describing. You’ve brought so many great quotes and references into this conversation, and because I’m lucky enough to count you as a friend, I know you to be deeply interested in this kind of intertextuality and in literary community. How did interlocutors or inspiring artists—whether those encountered in person or via reading—help shape your process of writing and revising this?
Yes to intertextuality and to literary community! Before I am a writer, I am foremost a reader, and there were so many books and essays and poems that became, to use your excellent language, interlocutors and inspiring presences along the way. To name a few we have not yet discussed, both Robin Wall Kimmerer’s much-loved Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants and Lia Purpura’s recent essays for Emergence Magazine, “Imagining Burial” and “The Creatures of the World Have Not Been Chastened,” were texts I prized for how they draw on different ways of knowing and for their beautiful language. A back matter section of the chapbook, “Headwaters & Seeds,” is my attempt to gather all the writings, both explicitly referenced in the main text and not, from which this project grew.
Toward the final stages of working on the chapbook, I was very fortunate to have the detailed feedback and support of my MFA classmates and my first-year mentor Wendy Call as well as the generous encouragement of poet and program director Rick Barot. Before that, teaching at an arts college for the last ten years and being in the presence of curious, creative colleagues and students helped me to begin thinking of myself as an artist, which, I can see now, was really important for this project. Before I came to Cornish College of the Arts, I called myself an art historian or maybe a critic, but not a writer. One person in particular I’ll name as integral to that shift is visual artist and writer Ruth Marie Tomlinson, my colleague at Cornish before she retired in 2020. Ruthie has been there for me through the many stages of this project: from inviting me to co-organize a writing retreat centered on place and facilitated by writer Debra Magpie Earling at Ruthie’s studio and residency space in Two Dot, Montana, when I was early on in my drafting process to, years later, spearheading the Seattle writing group that offered me my final round of substantive edits on the manuscript. Ruthie is a model for me in how to build a life around the sustaining joys of detailed observation, inquiry, and friendship, all, as it happens, thematic throughlines for Children of Rivers and Trees, I think.
“[H]ow to build a life around the sustaining joys of detailed observation, inquiry, and friendship”—what better set of questions? Such a great answer, too! As you know, I’m also a member of the Ruthie fan club.
The last thing I wanted to ask you about is the title, and the idea of rivers and trees as guiding images for the chapbook. Both come up a lot within the manuscript as real parts of the landscapes you describe and as figurative representations. What about this pair of nonhuman but animate presences makes them so central to the project?
Thank you for a lovely last question, Liza! Both, I’ll start by saying, are essential parts of my experience of Red Lodge and south central Montana. When Rock Creek, which eventually joins the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River, is running fast in the spring and early summer, you can hear it from quite a distance. (And actually the town experienced a catastrophic flood a few years ago when rain and heavy snowmelt caused Rock Creek to run high and fast and cut a new path.) The creek water also has a particular smell. I’ve written before about noticing a similar scent here in Seattle near the lowlands around the Center for Urban Horticulture, just east of the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, and how it creates a kind of desire line for me, transporting me, imaginatively, to the banks of Rock Creek and to the stories my dad tells about his own childhood time along the crick, as he calls it. Aspens, meanwhile, reveal the contours of the land and the way water drains along the gullies at the base of the Beartooth Mountains. They also put on a magical display with their golden autumn foliage.
Besides being defining elements of the physical place this manuscript centers, rivers and trees also represent, to my mind, contrasting ideas. Trees grow tall, while rivers mostly descend, making their ways along and across the lowest parts of the land. Once established, trees grow in place, whereas rivers are constantly moving, running, flowing. I’m thinking here of some of the manuscript’s larger themes of rootedness but also migration and its ugly counterpart, forced relocation. Both rivers and trees seem to me, in short, wise and adaptive in different ways. And both are animate presences—I love the way you phrased that—who, very often, persist much longer than the individual humans and animals who make their homes among them.
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Elissa Favero has worked as an educator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and at the Seattle Art Museum and currently teaches visual arts histories at Cornish College of the Arts. Her essays often center visual art and natural and built environments, and her art criticism, book reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Temporary Art Review, The Rumpus, Terrain.org, Ecotone, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things series. Elissa is a 2024 graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program and the winner of the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize. Her chapbook Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian was published by Newfound this fall. She will celebrate the chapbook’s release with a reading at Seattle’s Third Place Books Ravenna on Wednesday, October 30 at 7 pm.
Liza Birnbaum’s writing has appeared in Web Conjunctions, jubilat, Tammy, Open Letters Monthly, and other publications. She’s been awarded residencies by Rockland Woods, Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture, and Fishtrap. Liza lives in Seattle, where she is the 2024-25 Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Writing at Cornish College of the Arts. She’s at work on a novel and a book-length essay about Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends.