Jenny! Here are some comments, and I emailed you your piece with a bunch more written all over it, MOB-style.
Oh my. How I enjoyed reading your writing again, as I sit here looking out over the Patagonian seas at the sunset. I felt as if we were back in DS’s classroom, snarfing our hippie goulash out of yogurt containers and gazing out at Ankeny while listening to DS orate. After reading this my writing and editing juices are definitely flowing again.
I really like your premise of combining the ecological concept of an ecotone with your personal reality of transition and having a ‘home in tension’ (one of my fave phrases of the piece). It’s original and daring and makes me think, which is precisely the purpose an essay should serve. I would love to see you develop the idea of an emotional/spiritual ecotone more, as you have barely brushed the surface, and as I think that is probably the most fascinating idea you present in the essay. You throw it in at the end, but I want you to throw it in at the beginning. (That should also help it feel less journal entry ish). Connected with that, I think a stronger sense of what you feel or felt when you are in the different ecosystems (eastside, Westside, middle), and a stronger sense of what they actually look like and function like (ecologically) would help. More definition of terms (aridity? That’s pretty broad, and relative, and doesn’t give me a visual picture) and description, too (I get the idea from this essay that the Westside is a homogeny of doug fir while the east is a homogeny of P-pine, and that’s obviously not true) would help round it out. And then more about what it means to feel at home somewhere or not to feel at home somewhere or to be completely torn between two places that you love equally.
Although I like the dichotomy of the two trees as synechdoche of the two places (whoa, I sound so pretentious), and I want it to work, I think it needs some polishing. Is this essay about trees, really? Right now I’m not very engaged with or interested in the trees as you present them. I don’t feel the same things you feel (well, in real life I do identify with your experience, but the essay doesn’t provoke those feelings). You might also try mentioning a few other plants common to both types of forests, besides trees. Sword fern, sagebrush….you know.
Actually, I think I’m more interested in how ecotones function than I am by either of these trees. Ecotones are so intriguing, and you only devote one paragraph to them. Might you go more in that direction? A thought--Because ecotones are places of such diversity and such fierce competition and uneasy coexistence (by the way, I would LOVE it if you got into the whys and wherefores of exactly how strange bedfellows can even live together in ecotones….it’s an ecologist’s wet dream), they are by definition places of rapid biological evolution, places where change occurs by the very nature of the place as a ‘home in tension.’ I hella, HELLA want you to explore this, ecologically and personally and metaphorically. It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ready for milking. See me getting all biologically eroticized by the very idea?
Serious props.
Emily
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