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Livestreamed Event

LOCAL>> Sumana Roy – How I Became a Tree

Presented by Point Reyes Books at Streaming Arts

Nov 05 2021
LOCAL>> Sumana Roy – How I Became a Tree

Author discusses her meditation on our place in the natural world, through many disciplines

Sumana Roy and Jennifer Banks, editor at Yale University Press, join us to discuss Sumana’s book, How I Became a Tree.

This event is a part of our Thinking Like a Mountain book and subscription series.

“Sumana Roy has written—grown—a radiant and wondrous book, which roots and branches in complex, provocative ways, helping us recognize trees for the ‘strange strangers’ they are, companion-citizens with which we think and remember, yes, but also alien beings that draw love, hate, indifference, and even lust from us humans.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.

 

How I Became a Tree is an exquisite, lovingly crafted meditation on plants, trees, and our place in the natural world, in the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

“I was tired of speed. I wanted to live tree time.” So writes Sumana Roy at the start of How I Became a Tree, her captivating, adventurous, and self-reflective vision of what it means to be human in the natural world.

Drawn to trees’ wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with trees—from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood.

Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves.

Hailed upon its original publication in India as “a love song to plants and trees” and “an ode to all that is unnoticed, ill, neglected, and yet resilient,” How I Became a Tree blends literary history, theology, philosophy, botany, and more, and ultimately prompts readers to slow down and to imagine a reenchanted world in which humans live more like trees.

 

Sumana Roy is associate professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University in Haryana, India. She is the author of Missing: A Novel, Out of Syllabus: Poems, and My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories.

Jennifer Banks is a senior executive editor at Yale University Press.

ADMISSION INFO

Crowdcast, Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Additional time info:

7:00 pm

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