About “The Witness Tree” by Terry Persun
I record books that I read in the GoodReads app. Besides being a convenient place to keep track of books I’ve read or want to read, it provides a place to provide feedback to the reading community (and the author presumably).
I recently read “The Witness Tree” by Terry Persun. My review of it can be found here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8008611206
I maintain an occasional email relationship with Terry having met him briefly in a short career side road at an MFA nonprofit. Terry would seem to have engineered the perfect lifestyle living in a small Puget Sound community caring for farm animals and writing. I’m sure this idyllic view distorts the reality of managing a career, family, home/farm, myriad personal and professional relationships, and all the effort to make it look easy and financially feasible.
Nonetheless, I can’t help but try to hypothesize about how it might go down at times. In The Witness Tree, there is a main character, the third person narrator mostly but an active character at times as well, that happens to be a tree. What creative leap was required to make this personality be rooted to the ground and voiceless? Perhaps it went like this:
- Mr. Persun, sitting at the kitchen table, “I need to come up with a new kind of protagonist for my new book.”
- Mrs. Persun, preparing a meal at the kitchen counter, “What kind of protagonist have you used so far?”
- Mr. Persun: Men mostly. Sometimes women, lots of teenagers.
- Mrs. Persun: Are they always humans?
- Mr. Persun: Well, there was the short story about a rogue spaceman named Adam who landed his spaceship on the surface of Venus to find that the planet was populated with only six-breasted women. The male population had totally annihilated itself in silly wars and the population was in free fall due to the zero birth rate. He was made king of the planet and put to work as the genetic springboard of the next generation of Venetians. It was a great job until earth’s space agency arrived and repatriated him.
- Mrs Persun: [rolling her eyes] “I think you’ve exhausted your extraterrestrial erotica niche. What do you do when you have writers block in the middle of a story?”
- Mr. Persun: I go for a walk in the woods, sometimes I sit down next to a tree and look out over a field, waiting for inspiration. Maybe that’s what I’ll do now. Thanks for the idea.
I’ll see myself out now.
-jgp