Editor’s Notes

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand.

Robin & Leila

The Mother Tree

In about 1877, before the orchard was an orchard, someone planted an elm tree in the center of the far meadow. It was common practice for early American farmers, from colonial times on, to plant shade trees throughout their fields to provide respite for work horse teams and pastured animals. When my grandfather transformed our farm into an orchard in 1911, planting blocks of apple and pear trees, he left the elm and many of the other shade trees standing; they towered above the steady lines of fruit trees like guardians. When I was sixteen, the tree was about a hundred years old. For hours the tree held my attention as I tried to capture the mystery of it, to draw its likeness with a twig dipped in ink, following the lines of branch and trunk with my eyes. When the drawing was finished, I framed it within in an ivory-colored mat and gave it to my mother.  She hung it on a wall in an upstairs room. Years later, when she could no longer climb the stairs and moved her bedroom to the first floor, she hung the drawing there. When she died I took the drawing of the tree and hung it on the wall in my study.

I don’t remember why I set out to draw the old elm, or what I was thinking when I drew it. The drawing has a lonely feel which was probably how I felt at the time. The tree held my attention because of what was not known, could not be known, or understood, because of all the questions that circled without answers, not even formulated yet as questions, because there was a feeling, an affinity, a pull, the desire to look again and again, a tug at the heart, or a sudden rip of fear. The tree was a mystery.

In 1997, the scientist, Suzanne Simard, published her first article on tree communication in the journal Nature. The article, which caused an immediate sensation, identified the ways trees in a forest make use of vast underground fungal networks, called mycorrhizae, to trade nutrients.

Her discovery was quickly dubbed the “wood-wide web,” and set in motion years of subsequent research. Now, in a recent book titled Finding the Mother Tree, Dr. Simard details the ways in which these fungal networks do much more than serve as conduits to exchange carbon and photosynthates; they facilitate inter-tree communication. Yes, what used to be considered in the realm of fantasy has now been scientifically proven by researchers like Dr. Simard who spent years labeling trees with radioactive isotopes—trees demonstrate intelligence and tree behavior has cognitive qualities. The word intelligence comes from the Latin verb intellegere, meaning to perceive and comprehend. Yes, I used the right word–trees exhibit intelligence, they demonstrate perception, learning and memory. Trees communicate by sending chemical signals through a fungal network, and these signals, which are created by ions cascading across fungal membranes are not unlike the neurotransmitters that operate in a human brain. Trees relay messages back and forth that include defense signals to warn one another of potential danger. At times they shuttle allelochemicals or poisons through the network if an unwanted tree intruder enters the forest. Perhaps the most stunning of Simard’s discoveries is that elder trees in a forest, what Simard calls “Mother Trees,” are able to recognize tree neighbors that are genetically related, are kin, and they can send more or less resources to their kin, either favoring or disfavoring them.

When I finished reading Simard’s new book, I swiveled around in my chair to stare at my old drawing of the elm, the “mother tree” on our farm that I had drawn so many years earlier. What holds our attention is important even when we don’t understand why. And even if we may never fully understand.

It is May as I write this and here in New England the trees are leafing out again, green and luminous. We bring you our latest issue, curated around the theme of “hold.” When we sent out the call for this issue, as usual we meant for our call to be a spark and a launch rather than a directive. We had anticipated that we might receive some pieces on the theme of holding on, of perseverance during dark times, the months of living through this pandemic. To our surprise and delight, we received a powerful celebration of speculation, of the power of what holds our attention, whether it is the paranormal, a re-imagined memory of fear, or the mystery of a garden.

Welcome to issue #5: HOLD.

Leila Philip, May 20, 2021

Simard, S., Perry, D., Jones, M. et al. “Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field.” Nature 388, 579–582 (1997).

Simard, S. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Knopf, 2021. 

Editor’s Comments

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand. —Robin  &  Leila

Living temporarily in a tiny cabin adjacent to my home in Iowa, this would not be my first choice of a dwelling if not for my current circumstances. The two-room cabin, less spacious than many motel rooms, is appointed with floor-to-ceiling knotty pine paneling throughout and features a kitchen with no cabinets and a dorm fridge. A flimsy privacy screen provides the only barrier between the kitchen, toilet and bathtub. The cabin belongs to my neighbors who live in a stately Victorian-era home with Tiffany stained glass windows, the house once owned by the son of a 19th-century lumber baron. Now I find myself unable to enter my own home, stuck instead in the cabin that was once home to the carriage driver of the lumber baron’s son.  

For months my wife Margie and I had been successful in keeping Covid at bay in our household, though our efforts were complicated by a change in my employment. At the end of February, I signed a contract for a new position in New York City, where I was born. At any other time, the thought of moving back to New York would have thrilled me, and it did for about two weeks. The plan was for me to move there and for us to make frequent visits back and forth. Margie and our daughters weren’t going to move as our eldest daughter was about to enter her senior year in high school and in normal times we love Iowa City and our home there. As New York became the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., the thought of moving there suddenly seemed like the worst life decision ever. New Yorkers who could afford to flee, fled. When my new dean and I spoke, he told me of the view of the morgue truck parked across the street from his office. He, an avowed Brooklynite, fled the city, too.

Before my move to Brooklyn, I quarantined in an old farmhouse in an upstate town with the quaint name of Cuddebackville. Owned by cousins of mine, the house was hardly ever occupied. The last time I had visited was thirty years earlier, but the house had barely changed, except the evidence of its long-neglect was visible everywhere. Still the house felt familiar and welcoming, to me at least, though Margie, who accompanied me on the drive, hated it. For me, my younger self roamed through the halls and I welcomed seeing him again. For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening. Our one foray to a nearby park was like parting a jeering mob. Every few feet along the mile-long dirt road that led to the park, signs were tacked on nearly every tree, informing us that we were being watched and that we had better not step off the path. The entrance sign to the park was pocked with bullet holes. As in many small towns, outsiders are looked on with suspicion in Cuddebackville, though I was protected by my whiteness and the last name of my cousins. They had owned the house since 1963, and I used their names as my password every time I encountered someone who required such a password, say, walking along the defunct railroad bed near the house. Margie, a woman of color, did not want to stick around such dwellings where passwords were needed, and which might not even work for her. And who could blame her? I, too, would never have spent a minute in the place had I not previously spent five months there in my early twenties.  

My new dwelling in Brooklyn was faculty housing, which my dean warned me I shouldn’t get too excited about. Faculty housing and student housing were one and the same, and the three bedrooms of my three-bedroom apartment were labeled “A,” “B” and “C,” replete with 70s modular furniture and bass thumping sophomores across the hall, my closest neighbors. Still, three bedrooms in New York seemed wildly spacious, and by the time I moved in, things were improving in Brooklyn. The streets were lively and the vast majority of people I encountered wore masks, unlike in Iowa, where all summer I had encountered maskless men and women with their game faces on, plowing through the aisles of grocery stores. Nor did I require any passwords to walk freely.  

Over the months, the epicenters of the pandemic flipped. During my time in Brooklyn, positivity rates kept declining to the point at which they were at 1%. At the same time, Iowa, which never had a mask order or any coordinated government effort to stop the pandemic, started spiking to the point at which the positivity rate was 50%. I wondered, along with the rest of the country, whether to risk traveling from one dwelling to another over Thanksgiving. It turned out I had little choice.  

Margie’s unit in Internal medicine at The University of Iowa Hospital had been converted entirely to a Covid unit, and she had just come on her shift as a nurse when, before she had a chance to fully protect herself, she had to save a patient whose clogged lungs were drowning him. A couple of days later I received a call from her. “Mahal,” she said, which means “Dear” in Tagalog, what we call one another, “I tested positive.”  

A utilitarian antique phone, nothing fancy, hangs in my new dwelling: a black box with a simple earpiece dangling from a hook, but no dial. The point of this phone was simply to be summoned. The dead rarely command, as it turns out, though I’m sure that on some occasions, in some figurative way, they do. I admit to once or twice having picked up the receiver, with the tiniest of wild expectations of hearing the drunken voice of the lumber baron’s son, or the voice of my long-dead mother, or the man who killed himself in this cabin a dozen years ago, commanding in the manner of the first words ever spoken on a phone, “Robin, come here; I want you.” Still, it’s the living whose voices we are most often called to heed. It’s why I’m here, for the time being at least.  

Robin Hemley
December 15, 2020

Editor’s Comments

Given the gravity of this moment, we will take a pause from our usual practice of individual speculations on issues relevant to the issue at hand and offer the following comments.
—Leila & Robin

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Speculative Nonfiction will be donating all submission fees collected from issue #3 to the NAACP and The Movement for Black Lives. For the remainder of 2020, we will waive the submission fee for any writer who makes a financial contribution to one of these organizations working for racial justice.  

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The theme of erasure seemed a logical choice after our issue on “What history teaches.” Still, we could never have known just how fitting it would seem given the global pandemic and uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd. When we were thinking of the notion of erasure, we were not thinking, exclusively, about the erasures of history, about empires and individuals, about colonial and racist power structures that attempt(ed) to erase or succeeded in erasing the lives of individuals and peoples. We were not thinking exclusively about the erasures caused by disease, by wars and famines. We were not thinking exclusively about the massive erasures of bio-diversity, happening in real time from environmental degradation and rapid climate change. We were not thinking exclusively about the tendency to see no evil when evil persists all around us, erasures of conscience. We were not thinking exclusively of the technique of erasure, employed by some of the writers in this volume, of taking an existing text and erasing words around it to create a new text.

As with all our themes, we envision them broadly, as thoughtful invitations and provocations to investigate, experiment, invent, and of course, speculate around our theme.  

In 1938, nine months before the start of World War Two, poet W.H. Auden wrote the poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” whose subject, in part, was the painting by Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, painted in 1555. In the painting, we see a mountainous landscape on what seems an ordinary sunny day. A farmer plows a field with his horse in the foreground, his head bent to the earth while another man farther away seems to be idly looking up in the sky. Farther still, a fisher is busily tending to his lines. A merchant ship heads out of the bay, its sails billowing on this apparently windy day. Between the fisherman and the ship, and easily overlooked, a pair of legs seem to scissor kick, caught a moment before the entire body is submerged. We know the story of Icarus and why he fell, but Brueghel has imagined (in a very Dutch context) the moment of his falling. Once we notice those legs, we know why that one man is scanning the skies, that something unusual in the sky has attracted his attention – one minute it was there, something falling rapidly, was it human? Where did it disappear? The man at the plow noticed nothing and the same for the fisherman, or if they did, if the fisherman heard the splash, he must have determined that it didn’t concern him. And what of the people safely aboard the merchant ship.  As Auden speculates, that “expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

The fact that we do not always directly see the suffering of others does not erase their suffering or our collective responsibility to respond. For hundreds of years, Black lives have been sacrificed to make this country “great.” The fact of Black people being murdered is not new, but the recent awakening of a majority of this country to that shameful fact is something novel. As artists, we often imagine the seemingly impossible. As artists, we are open to imagining the world differently. Sailing calmly on should no longer be an option. 

Robin Hemley
Leila Philip

June 25, 2020

Note: The editors wish to thank Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole for their permission to use images of their individual works and an excerpt from their beautiful collaborative project, Human Archipelago. For more on this project, see Madigan Haley’s essay “Writing Nearby Images, Seeing the Black” in Speculations on the Field.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

by Leila Philip

Speculative Book Reviews

Writers are sometimes advised to write the book they'd most like to read.  We invite you to write the book review of a book of speculative nonfiction you wish was out there, or a book that was never written but could have been, or a lost book of which there is scant evidence, or a book to be written in a hundred years. We invite you to consider the aesthetic qualities of this book and to use the opportunity of your review to push, adhere to, or reconsider the boundaries of speculation in nonfiction, as you see them. We see these reviews as furthering the conversation this journal seeks to encourage. We invite you to have fun. The limit is the limit of your speculation. Traditional reviews of nonfiction books that utilize speculation are also welcome.

We hope to publish several each issue.  Typically, we imagine these reviews to be no longer than 1000 words.  We'll be accepting reviews starting with our next submission period.

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I can only speculate as to the title of this book, but I can assure you it is spectacular.[1] Specere, from the Latin, means to look and this book looks in ways that surprise, disrupt and disarm even the most begrudging of readers. The experience is like hang gliding, which I have never done, but sometimes speculate about doing. Last month when hiking up a cliff above the Oregon coast, I looked out and saw two flying things almost intersecting no more than fifteen feet out from the edge of the cliff; a bald eagle and a woman in a harness strapped like a cocoon beneath a wide green sail. She was hang gliding as easy as you please with her rippling canopy holding her in the wind. Below were jagged teeth of rock, the deadly surf roiling in, but she made graceful swoops so close to the mountain’s edge that If I had held a long pole, I could have touched her. The eagle, whose wingspan was dizzyingly wide, almost as long as the hang glider, was hunting. I could seen the keen pointed head as it lifted and fell, then the great wings also turning as easy as you please in the currents of wind. Below the waves crashed and swelled, crashed and swelled. The person I was hiking with remarked that on land you can only see 10 miles out into open ocean even on the clearest day due to the curving of the earth. He was an experienced sailor. But where we stood, almost at the crest of the cliff, he figured we were looking out a good fifty miles. Nothing but silver sheen, as if all the energy of the world was swirling in a snow globe to which someone had given a grand shake.

That feeling of being at the edge of the world, above a crashing ocean, watching a human sailing by, held by invisible rhythms of wind while a bald eagle turns in widening gyres -- that is how I would describe the experience of reading this book.

Stylistically, this book is indebted to Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who believed six impossible things before breakfast[2]. We can speculate all day about what Lewis Carroll meant by this (and of course the hookah pipe), but this aesthetic applied to literature is wonderful to consider. My book takes a White Queen approach to language, with imaginings that leap so high they take flight.  While it is not comfortable to even speculate about the White Queen, grown obese with her own authority, flying anywhere, take her approach into language and the results are marvelous. The language in this book is made up of sentences that again and again do impossible things before breakfast. Yes!

In terms of literary genres, this book relies quite surprisingly upon the dynamics of a drab and little remarked upon genre, the parable. Specifically it makes use of the tale of the Blind Men and An Elephant, drawing upon our expectations only to turn them quite wonderfully upside down. By the time we finish we know we are in a version of Alice’s wonderland where no means yes and yes means no, and size is a matter of timing and perspective. In the classic tale of the Blind Men and An Elephant, a group of blind men encounter an elephant for the first time and attempt to describe what they see.[3] The first one, touching only the ears, says an elephant is a waving fan. The second one, touching only the trunk, (tickled as a matter of fact during his encounter by the elephant conducting his own investigation) says it is a snake. The third one, grasping only the bristly tail says it is a rope, while the fourth, feeling the hard legs announces it must be a pillar. The fifth, who feels the tusk, says the thing called an elephant is hard and smooth like a spear.  The conventional lesson of this tale is about our human tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited experience.  Because we can only take in the world through our own circumscribed lens, we cannot see the whole picture.

This book asks us to reconsider this tale in light of speculation. How wonderfully inventive and unhindered each blind man is in his perception, how deeply and completely he trusts the idiosyncratic way he views the elephant. And finally, how definitively he creates an entirely new being through his individual act of speculation. Through the power of his speculations, an ordinary elephant (of course there is no such thing as an ordinary elephant, but never mind) becomes a fan, a snake, a pillar, a rope, a spear. There is no limit to the fabulous here and each version of speculation works because it is grounded in the real. No lazy slouches in this story, the men touch and feel with precision the little bit of elephant they have to work with. Their failure is not in their flawed perceptions, but in the limitations of their access. They work hard at observing through their hands, poking that elephant with their pinky finger, the lightest touch, only to come away stating that they have encountered a watermelon. These men engage the elephant with senses open and deduce through their senses, mostly touch, but also sound, smell and taste, the grit of empirical fact. Then, the moment of wonder, each runs those perceptions through the whirligig of his imagination.  Voila, a rope, a fan, a rock a snake, a spear where before there was only elephant.        

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[1] Hands off. I am working on this book. I speculate as to when it will be finished.

[2] "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."      – Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

[3]  The parable of the Blind Men and An Elephant originated in the ancient Indian Subcontinent. In contemporary physics it is considered an apt analogy for wave-particle duality.

Editor's Comments

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand.
—Robin & Leila

One day in 1972, a strange steel object appeared in the city center of Cardiff, Wales. Cranes had lifted it onto the city street the night before. Black, resembling a large hammer, or the dark mine shaft of a tunnel, the sculpture was impressive, sleek as a wet seal. It was a masterful work of modern sculpture and as such, completely foreign to most residents living in Cardiff at that time.

The next day, people gathered on the street to look. Some came down after seeing it on the television news, others were just passing by. Without identifying the sculpture as art, Garth Evans wandered with a tape recorder collecting the responses of people on the street. Evans used the tape once as part of a sculpture that was shown in an open air exhibition in Holland Park in 1973, then the tape was put in storage where it remained for the next forty years.  

“What is it? “

“What is it?” The voices in the scratchy pitted tape begin to ask. “What’s it for?” “Does it have a purpose?” “Is it made of steel?” Soon, they are all weighing in.

“There’s not much beauty in it. I can’t see no beauty in it at all.”

“What I want to know is…”

“Pictures, that’s what it needs—scenes of Cardiff…”

“Looks like a lamp post to me.”

“It’s just black.”

“Nothing to take my eye.”

“Big dirty girder.”

Meanwhile, voices of children spill like water. They have climbed up and are running along its long straight back. While the adults become more and more upset about their failure to find something familiar in the sculpture, the children love it for that same reason. “What’s it for?” one elfish voice pipes up. “I dunno… I want a hundred more!”

What history teaches. I have been thinking intensively about the implied question of these 3 words for the past five years; first as I set out to transform this archival tape into a theatrical script, then as I worked with two different directors to stage this script as a play, first in New York City in 2017, then in Cardiff, Wales this past fall. Initially I had thought of the project as a fantastic literary challenge—just how far could I use the archival tape as a site for speculation, pushing it toward drama as a theatrical script while honoring the real? But once I began working on the project, I realized that the stories behind it were huge, involving not just a 3-ton steel sculpture, the public’s rejection of it, and an artists’ quest to gain information about the impact of his public work. Every voice on the tape in one way or another told the story of the coal mining history of south Wales, which even today—though mainly hidden from sight, the mines closed years ago—reverberates in Cardiff as a deep sadness and complicated source of pride. 

From those first lines on, the tape completely engrossed me. I felt like I was listening to a Beckett play, absurd and dark and funny, yet deeply sad. Not all of the voices were that of stark rejection, but they swelled into a communal stance of outrage; as if a Greek chorus were in the wings, shrieking don’t wake me up, don’t wake me up.

In keeping with the constraints of verbatim theater, I selected and re-arranged the order of voices on the tape. At times I had voices repeat and overlap, at other times I pulled out words and repeated them for effect, but I did not change any of the actual words people spoke or add new ones. The fun was in selecting and pacing the voices so that they spoke to one another and created a sense of thematic movement. At its heart the tape is about fear and about how quickly fear leads us to “other” what we do not understand. And there was anger, that secret claw.

The challenge was setting the story in motion. I found the answer to this in a photograph of the sculpture with 5 children playing on it. By speculating into that photograph, I imagined one of the children in the photograph looking back at the sculpture forty years later, remembering the day they climbed on it. To push the connection between public art and cultural commentary in the Cardiff production, we added a video montage which featured news footage, music and photographs from the 70’s.

I was nervous about how the play would be received in Cardiff, the literal home of the tape. Would it seem authentic, or be perceived as condescending or worse yet, somehow forced? But something interesting happened. The play had done well in New York City, but in Wales, audiences were deeply enthusiastic. They identified directly and in some way already claimed the story. This was their history, complicated as it was; it was their public sculpture, their rejection of it, their city.

The play was timed to run the same week the historic sculpture was due to arrive back in Cardiff. After being lost to the world (quite literally, but that is another story, how exactly do you lose a 3-ton sculpture?) for over forty years, after a stupendous inter-continental effort involving the artist, the Cardiff community, a crowd-funding campaign, and the heroic efforts of the Art Director of Chapter, an influential community art center in Cardiff, the sculpture was restored and transported back to Cardiff. What had once been an object of controversy, of communal rejection, had gone through the metaphysics of time. History’s alchemy had transformed the sculpture from a great dark beast of otherness to an icon of home, the repository of shared memories and heritage.

On this note, I introduce our new issue, What History Teaches, which offers twelve works varied and spectacular, each one opening up new questions, even as they answer them through content, style, and form. What history teaches or doesn’t teach, or tries to teach, or ignores, or subverts completely. Perhaps Jorge Luis Borges said it best:

Centuries and centuries and only in the present do things happen. 

Leila Philip
October 15, 2019

Image Copyright: Garth Evans, 1972