Lindsey french

During several weeks at an artist residency in Michigan, I was drawn to a tall oak that grew in the middle of the clearing. I passed most of each day with my back against the tree, drawing and considering both the surroundings and the oak tree itself. At this time, I was reminded of the main characters of Virginia Woolf’s biographical work, Orlando. The characters I reference here are not only the shape-shifting Orlando but the slow-growing oak tree, who, unlike Orlando, grows bigger and sturdier over the course of the novel. The Oak Tree is also the name of Orlando’s lifelong manuscript—sometimes poetry, sometimes prose, it embodies Orlando’s desirous creativity. In this body of work as editor, I reenact this scene, but reverse the gesture of this gift, offering instead the impossible gift of listening.

For the first instance in the project, I developed a framework for literary interaction between myself and Quercus velutina. I began by reading aloud the entirety of Orlando to the tree. During the nine hours of reading, the tree’s vibrational response was measured, establishing a key of translation between vibration and word. In the early morning following the reading, I again sat with the tree, this time just listening while I again recorded the tree’s vibrations. Using a custom script, I compared the new values with the translation key, and the resulting text formed the novel, seductiveness the which issued by the whole person. Four months later, this novel was read aloud to another younger oak tree during an exhibition, inspiring the next generation of literary trees and later adaptations for shorter poetic forms. — Lf