How did the idea develop to connect the way we prune apple trees with the way we talk about writing poems?

I was trained to be a modernist industrial agricultural leader. For nearly sixty years, I have watched the industry’s successes and failures from the inside, for many years in a culture of orchardists who discussed poetry, art and politics over coffee.

My arguments against inappropriately applied industrial practices is inspired by Thoreau’s Wild Apples, an essay about democracy, apples, industrial agriculture, slavery and war. The Tree Whisperer extends Thoreau’s arguments, especially those about the necessity of becoming indigenous to a place in order to save both democracy and the Earth.

In that regard, I was raised by the Smelqmix homeland. I learned to read it long before I learned to read books. Pruning apple trees was my first art form. When I took up poetry I carried right on and treated poems as trees. Eventually, this led to misunderstandings. By 2005, I was talking about changing the weight of a line to help a poem end well. Others were changing words in the conviction that poems are arguments. That they are bodies being read by bodies was not in their vocabulary. It was in mine.

As far as I know, only Norway’s modernist poet Olav Hauge and I came to poetry in this way. For us, each line is a twig, most words are buds, leaves or blossoms, and the poems are pruned so all of these will grow well and bow down to the ground with fruit in the end.

The actual writing of the book was sparked by a conversation with the poet Matt Radar. I mentioned that I just might have learned to write poetry by pruning trees. He said he thought so too, and urged me to write a book about it. Here we are.

Your book proceeds by way of short, discrete reflections—many just a few sentences long—that build upon each other. Could you talk a bit about that form and why you chose to shape the book this way?

They are trees in an orchard. You walk up to them. Before you cut a branch, you need to know what the tree will look like without it and how it will respond to the cut. If the trees are a thicket, it’s harder to see.

The shape of the book honours oral storytelling cultures. In contrast, one English professor told me a few years back that the purpose of scholarship is to put people into boxes. I want us all to get out! There is a moment when you step into a tree, experience it with your body, and know where to make a cut. There is the equally powerful moment when a book you envisioned is physically there, as you first saw it. This is not something done with the mind. The whole body does this work. The spaces let you breathe.

In terms of writing, the form’s ability to introduce a notion with one idea and then close it with another, allows material to enter discussions that would simply be cut if pushed to fit into an unbroken sequence. Each section branches out in the next. The process allows for physical and emotional experience to enter into social discussions. It allows contributions from the set-ups and reveals of drama and stand-up comedy. After careful preparation, hidden foundations are revealed, or suddenly cut away, to relief, revelation, surprise or laughter. But coffee breaks only last so long. Eventually the cup is drained, the cake is polished off and you head back out renewed into the wind and snow.

Besides, the form lightens the book. I’ve been practising these techniques for thirty years, since my first orchard culture book, Out of the Interior, and my portrait of the shared life of urban and rural Canada in Tom Thomson’s Shack. I have applied these principles while editing over a hundred books for writers in Canada and Europe. Orchards and editing tables have been my life in writing, not classrooms. I wanted to write a book that passes those skills on to ongoing discussions about reconciliation and environmental renewal.

Who should read this book? Is it for writers who eat apples? Fruit growers who read poetry? Students hoping to decolonialize the Creative Writing Industrial Complex?

People sitting down over coffee and talking about the things that matter most to them in the world. Plus pruning tips.

Writers who read people like Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Peter Wohlleben and Helen Humphreys for their love of their land and how they weave farming and land use into complex social discussions. It was Thoreau, after all, who said that industrial farming (in his time, powered by slaves) was the death of democracy. The social issues involved deserve the respect of being updated for a world still struggling with their legacies.

Readers hoping to explore a possible shared future between settler and Indigenous culture. Apple growing is ancient. Like it, English was originally an indigenous language. It remains able to engage with Indigenous cultural concerns. I take hope from that.

Any student of poetry exploring poetic work and play. Both poetry and pruning are the art of making light, not of removing branches. Both respond with growth. Many writers say that my eyes and hands have given them permission to be themselves—that I have shown them, through judicious pruning, how they can speak in their own way without being blocked by social expectations or misunderstandings.

Teachers. Every young person deserves to experience the world for themselves, and to be guided into independence from there. Teaching is the task of all adults in a community, usually by demonstration. A small group of farmers and poets took the time to pass down old traditions to me and gave me guidance while I practised them. That gift stretches back thousands of years, hand to hand. Here.