I love these two essays so much, and I'm honored to have been given the opportunity to choose them for this year's Witness Literary Awards! They will appear in the Spring 2025 print issue of Witness. This is what I wrote about the winning entry:
“There’s a sense of nostalgia in the essay 'When You Write about Trees' that invites us to look closely at our own lives and the losses that come with the passage of time. With sentences that stretch and expand to accommodate the shifting nature of wonder, affection, and grief, our narrator takes us along with her as she and her two young children form a lifelong bond with two oak trees in their New England town. As a reader, I was taken by the essay’s measured and contemplative voice, which pulls us into the author’s deepening sense of loss as she watches one tree grow, and other tree age. I love how the lives of these trees aren’t made to reflect the author’s personal struggles, and how she instead recognizes the mysteries that these trees hold, allowing their quiet flourishing to run parallel to the everyday dramas of the human world. There’s a lot of wonder that this essay quietly holds, which resounds beyond the page. It’s a beautiful piece.”
“There’s a sense of nostalgia in the essay 'When You Write about Trees' that invites us to look closely at our own lives and the losses that come with the passage of time. With sentences that stretch and expand to accommodate the shifting nature of wonder, affection, and grief, our narrator takes us along with her as she and her two young children form a lifelong bond with two oak trees in their New England town. As a reader, I was taken by the essay’s measured and contemplative voice, which pulls us into the author’s deepening sense of loss as she watches one tree grow, and other tree age. I love how the lives of these trees aren’t made to reflect the author’s personal struggles, and how she instead recognizes the mysteries that these trees hold, allowing their quiet flourishing to run parallel to the everyday dramas of the human world. There’s a lot of wonder that this essay quietly holds, which resounds beyond the page. It’s a beautiful piece.”
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