Floyd RobertThis year, individuals of all stripes are getting the chance to connect with trees thanks to a new writing initiative on campus.
The CANOPY project is a series of tree-centered writing and discussion workshops developed by Margaret Christakos, the University of Alberta writer-in-residence. The project has explored trees and their presence as living things in the environment and as objects in literature and there will be a call for new writers in January.
Participants in the workshop have the opportunity to learn more about the trees located on the U of A campus, as well as in the Edmonton river valley.
“(Trees are) a subject that can produce a lot of art, but they’re also producing lots of other forms of discourse,” Christakos said. “If we can pull those disciplines together… we can end up with a more interesting conversation.”
One of the project’s biggest focuses is place-centered writing, where writers produce works based on specific environments. In CANOPY, participants select a specific tree or grove of trees on campus and develop a relationship with them over time. They then produce writing, including poetry, personal narratives, and stories, based on that relationship. In the spring, each participant will do a reading at their respective sites, sharing their relationship and knowledge of a specific tree with the group.
Alongside writing exercises, Christakos collaborated with Jordan Sykes and Andy Fitzsimmons, two graduate students from the Department of Forestry, who provided a tour of the various species of trees on campus. The students explained specific details about each species and how they were cultivated and brought to campus.
“It was a group of mostly writers who were having this conversation… in a scientific and technical way,” Christakos said. “But it was just setting bells off for all of us in terms of how to know a tree.”
Christakos provides small writing prompts at each meeting that focus on personal associations and memories around trees.
“What I found is when I ask people, ‘Do you have a story about a tree?’ Literally everyone does,” Christakos said. “It seems like a general topic, but as soon as I ask people individually, almost everyone has a specific memory.”
Christakos is a Toronto-based poet whose first poetry collection, Not Egypt, was published in 1989. As of today, she has published nine poetry collections, a novel, and a memoir. Her writing explores the intersections between sexuality and identity, as well as themes of gender and motherhood.
Christakos was inspired to create a tree-based project by several experiences she had while first settling in Edmonton. These included her appreciation of Edmonton’s trees in the river valley and elsewhere, as well as a creative writing course taught by Christine Stewart, in the Department of English, and Reuben Quinn, a Cree elder, called “A Poetics of Treaty 6.” The course explored linguistic differences between Western and Indigenous relationships to place and treaty.
For CANOPY’s next event, happening this week on Wednesday, December 6th in 3-95 Humanities from 4 to 6 pm, Christakos, in collaboration with English and Film Studies Undergraduate Network (EFSUN), will be hosting a free literary reading on themes of trees, memory, loss and intersectional feminism. The reading will be held in commemoration of the shooting of female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montreal on Dec 6th, 1989.
CANOPY meetings will continue into the winter semester, and new calls for participation will be posted in January.
While she is only at the U of A until May, she said that she has been encouraged to continue growing and entrenching the project on campus.
“I love the idea of what we can create together,” she said. “I can bring some facilitation and animation to it, but I can also just become part of a community.”
