I have a question for just the format of the book.
Are these pictures inside the book
or did you just include them for the presentation?
Yes, the pictures are inside the book.
They're in black and white.
The other question I had was, did you
have any say in the design of the broadside?
I talked with the designer who I've
known for a while, Crane Giamo.
And I told him what page I thought
might be a good page to work with.
A letterpress broadside is time-consuming.
And so I wanted to choose a page that had enough text so
that you could see a little bit what the poems are like but not
so much that it would be really cumbersome.
And after that, Crane made all of
the other artistic decisions.
And it's incredibly beautiful to me
because I think it helps me to see the poems in a new way
when I'm used to seeing them only in one way.
Exactly.
And how about the publicity card?
Did you have a say in that?
What do you think of the publicity card.
I think it is beautiful and it is
thanks to my colleagues, Hannah and Sarah Gzemski.
Oh, the Poetry Center.
The design was made I think by Jared Schickling of Delete
Press and it's based on an image of the eucalyptus
in Reid Park which is a very interesting eucalyptus.
So I had taken a couple photos of that eucalyptus
because it's very large.
And I was interested in the size.
A lot of the images that you saw here
were actually images of parts of trees
because they're super tall, that ponderosa pine.
It looks so tall, but we were really only seeing
the bottom half of that tree.
So Jared took that image, one of the images of the eucalyptus.
And one last question, how did you
go about choosing the trees?
Out of all the trees in Tucson, how did you go about choo--
what criteria did you use?
I felt very strange.
The whole project has felt very strange.
This idea of choosing a theme or a being
as being representative of something amongst other beings
is very strange.
And as you probably heard, I have
a lot of qualms about that, I had
a lot of quarrels with myself about that.
But I was looking at trees that had
different elevations, different communities of life in Tucson.
Different-- for example, a forest community, a desert
community, an indoors ecosystem, a place
where a tree was indigenous to another place, for example,
eucalyptus is primarily Indigenous to Australia,
but it grows very well in Reid Park.
And I thought about those different ecological
communities and wanted to represent them.
So that's what I did first.
And my research assistant, Eric Magrane, helped me with that.
And I also looked at different natural histories, for example.
And then I thought about what trees might commonly
be found there.
And there was one time when I was all
set to go down to talk with a sycamore
and we showed up to the place where
I was expecting that I'd see sycamore
and there were no sycamores there
because I'd made a mistake.
It was the right kind of community for a sycamore
and yet they were not present.
So one time I ended up working with a totally different tree
than I thought.
And thank you for your questions.
I just want to thank you both for your readings.
I just have a question for both of you.
I'm wondering what it felt like to write these books.
Because they both seem--
although they're so very different like anything--
they both seem like you.
They have a bit of art performance installation energy
about them, for me at least in the sense of going to a space
and creating a space with something you
find that's not really yourself and being aware of that.
So I'm curious--
I'm always interested in how something
feels when you make it-- when I'm
reading someone else's work.
Maybe emotion doesn't come into it but that's my question.
So my book is largely a collage piece.
There are long sections that I composed
through I guess meditating on a particular idea.
But it's largely collage work.
Even my own writing is collaged into other people's.
So it was like making a collage.
[LAUGHTER]
Thus, very physical.
Yeah.
Performance applies to my book.
And I would say that the experience
of going to places that really make me feel good
and interacting with and listening to and writing down
the sounds and movements of beings and species that I think
are really wonderful.
That felt great.
So the actual performative aspects of the project
were wonderful.
And then everything else felt really weird.
And I don't mean in the obvious way
that you would think of like, ooh,
she was talking to trees because she knew what trees are saying.
Now it's that from--
Because I think you saw it from what
I said where we're not with that subject
that I don't translate what trees are saying.
But that I transcribed what I perceived that I saw them doing
and what I heard in the environment.
But all the other stuff that I find
is implicated in research in any kind,
in interviews, in questioning.
Really, I just still feel uncomfortable.
And so I would say that, you know,
actually working on the writing felt really, really good.
And then everything else I will probably always question myself
about and not be able to make up my mind about.
Thank you for your question.
I have one question for each of you.
And they're there related questions.
Your projects are really creative and interesting.
And my questions really are about aspects, somewhat related
to the previous question.
So Renee, let me ask you the conceit of discovering Joseph
Smith's pages that he lost--
and I gather that he found them in the desert
and that they were on charts.
And I'm wondering when you had that idea of what they
would be like and as you were entering
into that imaginatively--
you have a lot of pages, what was the scale in your mind?
Were they clay?
Were they in English?
How did you imagine--
as a Mormon, how did you imagine what this document actually
was like?
I don't remember.
I think I imagined it was like what Smith himself found.
You can Google and see it's called the Kinderhook plates.
He found lots of different things that they weren't--
well, who knows what they were?
Well, [INAUDIBLE].
I imagined they were what Smith himself found which
were Kinderhook plates and then he also
found some Egyptian papyri.
And the dog found them too.
Yes.
You'll see why my question for Wendy is related.
Wendy, as you were interviewing your subjects,
I'm interested in that--
all your subjects are trees, but they're also
all different species.
And I wonder whether you--
I don't know enough about the individual species
that you chose.
I'm curious if any of them, if they
were gendered or dimorphic.
And if you observed any gender differences between them.
And also I don't know that ethnicity exactly applies.
But if you think of them as being different species
within the family of trees, did you hear accents
that you think were specific to a species?
- No.
I didn't think about the gender of the trees
and I didn't think about their relationship to other species.
I think the ways in which gender and ethnicity maybe come
into the project is that the interviews themselves maybe
remind us--
and this is the part that is so weird for me--
they might remind us of other ways in which people, as well
as animals, are objectified.
Or there is that aspect of intrusiveness in questioning
which I mentioned when I asked you all, how do you know--
when someone asks you a question,
how do you make up your mind whether or not they want
to hear your answer or if it's even a question and we could
all add to our own knowledge and experience of questions that
are posed for the purpose of making the listener,
making the responder--
I'll say-- feel uncomfortable or reminding them
of something about themselves or implying something about them
or trying to label them?
And so I think that asking those questions maybe asking
all the questions that I asked of the trees
was really useful to me because it
did make me think about how and why people
question each other and the--
even as we reach out to each other in curiosity
and to make connections with each other by questioning,
that we also do sometimes make others
uncomfortable through questions and that they
are a vehicle for that.
So there is a way in which your question about gender
and ethnicity is something that I really
think about in relation to the project but, no.
Not in my actual experience of trees or of those trees.
Thank you for that question.
We'll have time for two more questions here.
Hi.
This question is for Wendy.
It's a technical question.
The punctuation, are you using that as motion transcription?
Yeah, mostly.
Almost always the punctuation commas, semicolons, dashes,
slashes, the colons, periods are almost always used
as motions of some kind.
And so when I wrote in my notebook,
there was maybe a lot more variability
because I was trying to draw a picture of what I was seeing.
And then when I transcribed those into a computer,
they lost I think a lot of that variability
because they turned into punctuation marks.
Yeah, so these are more pictures that
boiled down versus instructions for behaving
as the tree behaved?
Yeah, it is as if I were observing something
moving and trying to write down in my notebook
or draw my notebook, kind of a combination between those two
what that movement looked like to me
and then trying to reproduce that using
mainly typographical symbols.
And like I said, I think of them as being
oriented horizontally in space and vertically in time.
So some of the ways in which those punctuation marks are
separated might indicate a physical space between things
that were happening.
And then some of the up and down might indicate
things that happen in sequence.
Thank you for your question.
Yeah.
That was my question too.
I'm curious about the parentheses,
though, in terms of what does that represent?
And since I always say thank you for your question,
I'm going to say thank you, Arthur, for your question
first, because you guys just had to hear
me say that over and over as we answered your questions.
Thank you.
Yeah, I can answer that one.
That, when I saw those parentheses, that
was how I was mainly trying to write down what it looks
like when wind goes through, say the branches of a tree,
and it's moving maybe this way, say, and so the parentheses
are going like this.
And I actually saw that just yesterday
when we had that big rain that a lot of us
experienced where there was a lot of wind.
I bet you saw this too, where the trees outside your house
or whatever you were are just bending
in one particular direction.
And then within that bend that they have,
there's all these tiny little movements that are like this.
So that's what those parentheses were.
Well, thank you both very, very much.
Let's have one more round of applause for Wendy.
[APPLAUSE]