Empty Branches; Stars and Eels
Abstract
The creative piece “Empty Branches” is a hybrid piece that exhibits concrete poetry forms but reads as a piece of creative nonfiction. Its content contemplates family and genealogical knowledge as a body that, by way of trauma and the unreliability of memory, becomes estranged from itself. Some of the concrete forms represent parts of the body, stretches of river, the absence of text on a page when it’s covered by a blank adhesive note, and the movement of archival filing cabinets opening and closing. The narrator is interested in tracing their roots but finds some of the family tree’s branches are empty. What they seek most of all is an illusive easy comfort which may come from either knowing or not knowing where they come from. The shorter piece “Stars and Eels” also seeks knowledge of the past, imagining an ancestral connection to the tenant farmers of a Tudor monastery. Calling to such a particular time and place without electricity, the piece considers the fact that the nights would have seemed longer, and that the economic reliance on the monastery might have discouraged the village underclass from asking too many questions of the church’s political authority at home and abroad. The inspiration for both of these creative pieces is an interest in confronting white ancestry and being honest about the persistence of willful ignorance.
Empty Branches; Stars and Eels
The creative piece “Empty Branches” is a hybrid piece that exhibits concrete poetry forms but reads as a piece of creative nonfiction. Its content contemplates family and genealogical knowledge as a body that, by way of trauma and the unreliability of memory, becomes estranged from itself. Some of the concrete forms represent parts of the body, stretches of river, the absence of text on a page when it’s covered by a blank adhesive note, and the movement of archival filing cabinets opening and closing. The narrator is interested in tracing their roots but finds some of the family tree’s branches are empty. What they seek most of all is an illusive easy comfort which may come from either knowing or not knowing where they come from. The shorter piece “Stars and Eels” also seeks knowledge of the past, imagining an ancestral connection to the tenant farmers of a Tudor monastery. Calling to such a particular time and place without electricity, the piece considers the fact that the nights would have seemed longer, and that the economic reliance on the monastery might have discouraged the village underclass from asking too many questions of the church’s political authority at home and abroad. The inspiration for both of these creative pieces is an interest in confronting white ancestry and being honest about the persistence of willful ignorance.