There is something that happens when you are writing a book. The world invades that book, and the book invades the world, and there is a sense in which a writer lives in a world that is not the same as the world of her friends and family. The book I am writing is a kind of translucent sheet that is draped over the world I share with my husband, family, and friends.
I just turned in my new book, The Spirits, to W.W. Norton. It is Christmas story, a Christmas Carol, about redemption and renewal and joy and family and tragedy. It will be published Fall of 2026.
My new book is also about one woman’s love of trees, especially the native trees of Michigan. The book is about white pines, sycamores, hickories, paw paws, and especially great oaks. This book is about family, and how the family is a crucible in which alchemical reactions occur. Also, this book is … ahem … about the unfathomable crime of patricide.
This year I have been very much involved with trees. Yes, I have planted trees, some swamp oaks and red buds, as well as a lot of shrubs. But mostly around here, trees have been coming down, and mostly Christopher and I have been cutting them down.
Here is a tree we did not yet cut down. Or rather, here is one branch of that great oak tree where it dropped through the donkey barn, crushing the end of it. The donkeys were inside, and they were traumatized. Even now, a month later, after Chris has repaired their barn, they are hesitant to go inside.
We took down other trees more deliberately and (maybe) frivolously. Two dozen 70-80-foot-tall Norway maples, which were preventing anything else from growing beneath or around them. This was not psychologically easy, taking down healthy trees, nor was it physically easy, hooking them to ropes, chains, trucks, tractors, etc. But we couldn’t pay to have them taken down because we were saving our pennies to take out the big tree, whose branch fell on the barn before we had our pennies lined up. It is always easy to put off big expenses
Norway maples turn a forest into a monoculture of Norway maples, and we wanted our native trees to have a chance. Taking down two dozen of them cleared only a small area.
As for the great oak, the tallest one on this property, it is now damaged severely. The branch falling caused a thick layer of bark and cambium to tear away all the way to the ground, making it urgent that we remove it. We engaged someone to fell the tree for us, but that person changed his mind, said the unwieldy tree at 126 ft. tall was too dangerous for his crew to fell in one fell-swoop, and even with careful planning might very well take out the donkey barn completely. So we will pay the big money to have the tree removed piece by piece, starting at the tiptop.
This reconsideration also delayed by several weeks the tree’s demise. Now I don’t sleep well because I am listening for more of that tree to fall on the barn. If I hear any noise, real or in a dream, I bolt upright in bed, put on my bathrobe, jacket and boots and hike out to look in the dark. When I see the strange S-shaped oak towering above everything else, still creaking and rustling, I am reassured and go back to bed.
Several large branches of the tree are hanging over the barn, and the whole tree is canted slightly toward the barn, though its weight is leaning in two other directions because of the curve of the trunk. (Another person who considered dropping the tree for us wanted to drop it 180 degrees in the opposite direction of the first guy’s plan—this did not inspire confidence.)
And there’s another big oak, maybe 100 foot tall, over our oil tank (containing about 750 gallons of furnace oil to get us through the winter.) Also, it is one of many trees that lean way over the house. If it fell, it would take out not only the oil tank but much of the house. It will be the next to go, at great expense.
I love trees. I plant trees. I kill trees. And I write books, which also results in killing trees, and will keep on killing them until the hemp producers really get cracking on reducing the cost of renewable paper.
I won’t go so far as to cut down all the tree to eliminate all chances of them crushing the house. A man I talked to recently told me a story about a tree falling on his house during a storm, and his wife refused to come back home until every tree that was close enough to hit the house was removed. He paid $40,000 in tree removal expenses. We won’t do that—we will continue living in the woods.
So our life is characterized by contradictions.
And I’m very much caught up in the politics of the day, in particular, in the video made by six legislators that remind everyone (soldiers and civilians) that folks do not have to obey illegal orders given by a commander, that loyalty is to the constitution, not to a leader. Those making the video feel it’s important to remind people at this time when illegal orders might be given, while the detractors say, to the contrary, that this video is unnecessary and seditious, because it encourages military members to disobey orders. (They feel it just caused trouble bringing the issue up at all.)
This is against a backdrop of our president having remarked about how he admired things about Nazi Germany, and in particular, how he (Trump) needed more generals like Hitler’s generals, people who had sworn allegiance to a leader and would follow any order. I guess that’s one of the reasons I skew toward encouraging soldiers to think for themselves when in doubt.
We all can see how the military works most efficiently when nobody questions orders—what chaos would ensue if everybody was questioning every order! Many of us can also admit that a military of our citizen soldiers working most efficiently may not be the ultimate goal. Of course I understand the other point of view as well; but if I were a tree, I know which direction I’d fall. Democracy complicates the way our military works, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.
As a writer, my interest is always in the unsolvable problem, the intractable contradiction that we must endure. And here it is again. I love trees, I kill trees. I want the military to work efficiently, and I want each person in that military to abide an individual conscience. My new novel explores how the nuclear family can be stifling and create despair and how the family is also beautiful, how it is the great hope for society. As a writer, I live in the gray area, where nothing is clear-cut or completely safe. As a member of a family and of a democracy, as a creature of the Michigan woods, I wouldn’t want to live any other way
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