Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian • Print + E-book

Summary

Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian weaves natural and family histories of Scotland and south central Montana with Indigenous histories, languages of science and of women, memories of Catholic childhoods, fragments of poetry, and songs of lament and of praise. Proceeding through the alphabet and experimenting with forms that call to mind displacement and settlement, plant growth, taxonomies, and genealogies, writer Elissa Favero reckons with her family’s immigrations West and the burdens and gifts of inheritance as she seeks a place she can call home.

Details

• Selected for the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize
• Saddle-stitched, risograph cover, 80 pages, 5″ x 7.25″, FSC-certified paper
• Purchase allows three PDF downloads
• Order print only
• Order e-book only

Praise

“Children of River and Trees is a celebratory meditation on nature and history. Each essay is a wisdom seed that fosters a gorgeous entanglement, a breathtaking vision of rootedness and flight. Favero is a conjurer. This collection is magic!”
        —Debra Magpie Earling

“Elissa Favero’s Children of Rivers and Trees: An Abecedarian is, at heart, about the amplitude and absences of what we can know—about place, history, and ancestry. ‘There’s the order we impose and the wild mystery that pulses beneath,’ Favero points out. And true, with thematic depth and formal intricacy, Favero negotiates between those senses of order and mystery, uncovering the palimpsestic, sometimes problematic layers encompassed by a single self. The result is a work that fuses the past and the present, intimacy and breadth, lyricism and ethics.”
        —Rick Barot

Author

Elissa Favero teaches visual arts histories at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and has worked as an educator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and at the Seattle Art Museum. She earned a B.A. in art history and environmental studies from Williams College and an M.A. in art and architectural history from the University of Washington. Elissa’s writing centers art and landscape, and her art criticism, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Temporary Art Review, The Rumpus, Terrain.org, and River Teeth Journal’s Beautiful Things series. She is currently completing her M.F.A. in creative writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Artwork

Cover by Nora Kelly.