Books are the closest artifacts we have to encapsulating the human experience.
Why I Write: Q & A with author and designer Tree Abraham
TREE ABRAHAM is an Ottawa-born, Brooklyn-based writer, art director, and book designer. Her works experiment with collaged essays and mixed media visuals. She is the author of the creative nonfiction books, Cyclettes and elseship.
What is your writing practice like?
When I have an idea for a new book, which only happens every couple of years, I start a note on my phone. Every time I have a related encounter with that idea, I messily drop it into the note. This can be in the form of a link to an article, a photograph of a page in a book, a concept, a meandering reflection, or an event retold. After about a year, the note is very long and messy. I begin to sense I have enough content to start shaping it into a manuscript. I print out the note on paper, cut each separate thought into a strip, and lay them all out on the floor. I begin to sort like-things and contemplate a structure. I have also been doing this in my head along the way. And so soon through strikes or trickles, I know what I want the book to be. Then all the strips get pasted into separate documents on the computer which become like formal sections. Then over the course of another year, I slowly work within one section at a time, for maybe an hour a day but not every day. Some days I add more discoveries to different sections, or just polish a paragraph. Other times I make a little writing retreat for myself for a week where I go somewhere in nature and speak to no one and still probably only write for a few hours a day, but somehow things move faster. Everything is marginal and layering until I am through all the sections and feel ready to share the work with friends before beginning a new draft.
“So far in my writing life, every year consists of one project at the note stage and one at the section stage so I am both tracing my present life and a past one together.”
Why do you write?
I write to better see. Writing helps me pay attention to the connective tissue of life. I don’t have a sticky mind, so writing is a place to put all my curiosities and findings, and as they rearrange on the page, openings make room for mysteries and beauty which I might have never gotten the privilege to witness in “real life”.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
I have thought a lot about what would happen if one of my manuscripts never got published. I think it would be a problem. Mainly because my books end up being memoir-ish, each one covering a different life phase. The books answer the central question plaguing me at that time, and so while I believe no two are alike in form or intended audience, as I am writing I am aware of what I have written before and how there is a philosophical evolution from one question answered to the next that explains why I am omitting or including certain elements. I would never expect a reader to read all the books or notice a discontinuity if one did not exist, but as the artist I would become disoriented mid-work if parts of my oeuvre were homeless.
What does success look like to you?
Success in writing looks like being able to always find a publisher to make books out of my manuscripts for some readers to discover and maybe, love.
What can books teach us?
Books are the closest artifacts we have to encapsulating the human experience. We are storytellers and meaning makers. Books are our inner dialogues, our histories, our collective dreams.
“The safest place in the world is inside a book. There the reader finds kinship with the author, and there is nothing that provides greater fortitude than the reminder that we are not alone.”
Who are your favourite writers writing today?
Valeria Luiselli, Sheila Heti, Annie Dillard, Rachel Cusk, Anne Carson
What books are you currently loving?
A few standouts read this year: Jenn Shapland’s Thin Skin, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test, Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening
If you were a bookseller what 5 books would you hand-sell to readers and why?
Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping – I read the Gilead trilogy first, but in many ways this slimmer standalone distills all the best of Robinson’s writing. I don’t read a lot of fiction, but this book is one that I feel so many different kinds of readers can appreciate.
Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack and Honey – I always cite this as my favorite book. Everything from the assemblage to the poetic prose just left an immediate and enduring impression on me. This book is the mood I wish to always return to.
Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read – This is a perfect example of the unique potential of the book format. As a book designer Mendelsund uses an array of graphic imagery and expressive typography to explore the psychological journey taken by words in our minds.
Celeste Headlee’s Do Nothing – This is a practical and persuasive guide to reclaiming our time. I repeat its arguments constantly to friends and colleagues wondering how to reimagine what work-life balance really means.
David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth – This would be the first book of many that I would recommend every human reads to get serious about climate change. It is terrifying, but it is happening and I think we all need to be confronting its implications daily. This journalistic compilation of what the science can tell us about the future is an essential base for beginning to cope.
Thank you Tree. Her latest book, elseship, was published April 15, 2025 by Book*hug Press.
"Ambitious and touching, elseship is a tender autopsy of a broken heart." -Literary Review of Canada
When Tree Abraham falls in love with her housemate, who does not reciprocate the feeling, instead of breaking up, they keep going. This story begins where most end.
elseship deftly and compassionately recounts the year that followed a friendship confronted by unrequited love. Abraham details the beauty and mania of this experience, mapping thought pathways, confessing ugly truths, and treading the edges of eroding territory.
?In these pages, Abraham interweaves personal entries and research with illustrations, photos, and diagrams, all organized within the eight ancient Greek categories of love. Written with reverence and searching honesty, elseship deconstructs the heteronormative canon to explore the bittersweet, lonely, uncharted archipelago of the heart. This is a deeply specific yet universal story of modern love that will accompany and enlighten anyone who’s been in any kind of complicated “ship.”
