Trevor Burrows#ReadingNotes thread for 2026!
Going to try my best to corral my reading notes in this thread this year, making it easier to mute/filter (if you desire).
So first sentences, running commentary, etc. will be posted as responses to this thread.
"Jude had been teaching Engineering Communication and Design online for so long that the temporary virtual classroom seemed permanent. Every year or two someone in the department brought up in-person classes, but he wasn't surprised when the state of emergency extended another year, and they continued to wait for a return to normal that never came."
-- #FirstSentences of Rebecca Campbell, *Arboreality*
(Started tonight. #ReadingNotes will go here.)
Dang, the first chapter/story of this book hit HARD.
If *Arboreality* has a thesis statement, or maybe a central proposition that the author is prodding at, this might be it:
"But we're always a collaboration, Benno had tried to tell him: there's nothing we don't touch, nothing that isn't changed by our feet on the soil and our hands reaching into the new, soft needles of Douglas fir in springtime. We have a heavy step, Benno said, not just the old settlers, but us too. The best we can do is hope that our footprints don't break anyone's heart."
p. 75-76
The character whose voice this is in, Kit, is having a moment where he is seeing the radical potential of the future, even as he mourns a past environment and world devastated by climate catastrophe, a world he was born too late to see or enjoy.
He and a woman have found a forest garden that was built by someone some time ago, in the ashes and the rubble of what was once a wealthy suburb, and they're astounded by all the plant life they are seeing.
The woman, Trish, says to Kit that one could live here, and Kit sees it:
"He saw that future, like the sun had opened a window in time as well as cloud cover. He saw the open grasses burnt back to make way for the winter-dormant roots of camas, and the deep-rooted Garry oak trees that thrived beneath the soil. [...] It was ... a collaboration between who we used to be, before settlement, and who we're going to become."
But there's a bit here that I want to come back to (which is the main reason I'm making this note), where the recent past of "concrete and glass and the pages of old Readers Digest magazines," and of "car exhaust and hula hoops and Kool-Aid stands..." is presented as artificial.
It is contrasted with the possibility of "something new, maybe with an actual future."
There's something tickling my feisty brain here and I want to think through it more: I'm hung up on that word "actual."
Towards the end of *Arboreality*, a crew of "Canadians" have arrived in the community that the novella centers upon, a community re-created through human negotiation and adaptation with climate catastrophe. They are taking oral histories from the community, but one of the main characters, Kit, can't find it in him to talk to them.
He's been working on a cathedral made out of trees -- which sounds super cool -- and he leaves the interviews to go outside. The following passage is him thinking.
1/n
"... then Kit walked up the hill toward the cathedral, his eyes fixed on its highest limbs, stretching toward one another, but not yet meeting in the roof he had imagined. He thought, This is all I have to say. These slender interlocking trunks, these branches and sheltering leaves, this vision of a human life that was part of all the teeming kingdoms below ground and in the sky above. A world full of birds and honeybees, so deeply rooted it might -- if they were brave and clever and lucky -- survive what would come next. If the Canadian girl wanted to know anything about the village and its history, she should look up the hill toward the cathedral, and record the sounds of wind in its branches, or see the dawn from its cloister. She should walk along the shore and let that be Kit's statement to all the historians that might come after."
p. 106
Making this note because I want to zoom in on that last part:
"She should walk along the shore and let that be Kit's statement to all the historians that might come after."
I am reminded of "John Brown's Birthplace" by Sasha Debevec-McKenney, which ends with this set of lines:
"My Granny was only 18 when she had my father and decided to leave
Virginia, but in a book they’d call that the Great Migration.
She was supposed to get off the train in New York City
but it scared her too much. It was too loud. So we grew up
in Connecticut instead. Sometimes history is as simple as that."
I think that disjuncture (?) between how we think about the present when we are in it, and how we think about how historians might think about the present we are in, is always really interesting...
Which means it is also interesting to project our understanding of the inadequacy of History with a capital H backwards to historical events, as D-M does in the poem.
I'm not entirely sure I know what I am talking about, but making a note here to come back to this. It's like History's version of the insider-outsider problem, in a way, but with time traveling (lol)?
Finished *Arboreality* last night/this morning.
In History, we often talk of the longue durée, which hints at the deeper structures and slower, centuries-spanning changes that shape history.
Campbell's story asks: as climate change overturns the human world, how will we adapt?
Its answer focuses on people who began living lives bigger than their life spans, thinking not just about what life might look like tomorrow, but one hundred years from now, or much longer. We might say they are people who began living the longue durée.
For instance, as floods and fires remake the world, an academic community saves their library's books by re-distributing them across many different houses and locations. Those saved books percolate across a local community, will eventually be held by hands that the booksavers could not have predicted. They will be read by readers who mine them for new ideas, new ways of living. In implementing those ideas, they change their own lives and the lives of those to come.
Three things I've been chewing on as I've read, and will chew on for a while:
1) How many of these individuals are *conscious* of their own long-term thinking? How many are conscious of that thinking being a shift from what came before? The awareness, the intentionality of some characters is not always obvious. Some of them may be just living the best way they can in the present, but in doing so, helping to create new ways of living for others.
2) Following #1, *Arboreality* is very much about community. Though the story spans tremendous changes over a century, its continuity comes out of relations within/across a small community, relations that connect across space but also across time, one generation to the next.
The linkages of the community make this new work of living the longue duree possible: links between community members facilitate the passing of books, the passing of hands-on knowledge, and the collective foundations that allow people to survive and do their best work. (No coincidence that the community is a very real, in-person community, mostly unmediated by the digital.)
In other words, this is not a story where a lone rogue scientist or some tech CEO develops the One Radical BioHack that saves the world. This is a story of people embedded in communities. Their work is, in many ways, collective work, even if some ideas are most driven by individuals.
3) I'm thinking about slow change and sudden change and the ways that we experience these things.
This is a book about climate catastrophe but much of that is expressed through the dissolution of pre-existing communities, the instability of depended-upon technologies, the disintegration of prior ways of life --- and the world that gets built upon all of that.
In our present moment, when dissolution and instability and disintegration are words that we reach for to describe our everyday, the book felt very immediate and real in a way that is hard to express.
But one thing I am left with is a sense of the impossibility of really knowing what we are living through now, coupled with the impossibility of knowing how our actions now will impact the future.
(I suppose this connects back to #1, the question of the characters' intentionality.)
I think I need to think more before I can say more here. My thoughts are too hazy. Also, it's early.
Anyhow, cool book dealing with much bigger ideas than a 112 p. novella should be able to convey.
A little... what's the word? Preachy isn't quite right. A little on-the-nose in a few spots, but reasonably so.
I'll carry it with me for a while, and might try to write something more formal soon.
Highly recommended.
🕯️Curious Magpie🕯️@NearerAndFarther she definitely doesn't pull her punches - her storytelling is quite wonderful, it's been a while since I read it and the stories stay with me. Enjoy!