The Language of Trees

How Trees Make Our World Robert Macfarlane writes “There is no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages.” In The Language of Trees, Katie Holten invites us to enter some of these forests. She created a Tree Alphabet to translate a compendium of well known, loved, lost and new writing. She takes readers on a journey from creation myths and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to Emerson’s language of fossil poetry, unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are how humans communicate and make sense of the world. The alphabet is how we organize information and knowledge; our networked world depends on it. Trees, the font, lets us renew our relationships with language, landscape, perception, time, memory and reading itself by slowing the reader down to decipher words in the woods. Katie Holten will be in conversation with writer and editor Marthine Satris to discuss our relationship with literature and landscape and the unexpected and imaginative language inspired by the beauty of the natural world. Katie Holten is an award-winning artist and environmental activist. Holten's work investigates the entangled relationships between humans and the natural world. At the root of her practice is a call for Rights of Nature and a commitment to fighting the climate and biodiversity emergency. Her collaborative research based work explores the inextricable relationship between organic systems and human-made systems. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Forest Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and The Guardian. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene. Katie Holten’s book The Language of Trees was published in 2023 and became an instant bestseller. Holten lives between New York City and Ireland. If she could be a tree, she would be an Oak. Marthine Satris is a writer and editor living in Oakland. She is the Associate Publisher at Heyday, the nonprofit press in Berkeley, where she edits books about California's history, culture, and natural world. Her own poetry and prose have been published in The Georgia Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Antiphony Journal, Santa Clara Review, Ballast Journal, and elsewhere. She is a frequent contributor to Oakland Review of Books.