The Woman Who Loved a Tree (Fiction + Interview)
- Emily Mitchell
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
The following excerpt from the story "The Woman Who Loved a Tree" appears in the collection The Church of Divine Electricity, published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2025.
One day in mid- October, a woman is running in the large park near her home. She is thirty- two years old. She has been married for two years. She loves to run, especially in fall when the air is cool and sharp and pungent with the changing leaves. The park she’s in is forested with trails going in all directions. The woman has a route she usually takes, but today it’s blocked by an enormous puddle left from rain the night before. She tries to go around it, but the slope above and below the trail is sheer and slippery. She decides to double back and take another path, one she’s never run before.
The other path is steep and narrow. Clearly not too many people use it. The woman climbs until she’s almost reached the crest. Then she stops, staring at something she sees off to one side of the path ahead. It is a tree, standing slightly above her by itself in the middle of a clearing. Its roots fan outward through the soil, and its branches spread against the sky. Its bark is gray, skin- smooth where not scarred. Its leaves are oval, jagged- edged, and they are just beginning to transform from deep green into brilliant gold.
The woman has never seen something so beautiful. Of course, the park is full of trees. But there is something about this one that’s different. She feels like she’s been waiting years to find it. She’s never been in this place until now, and yet she recognizes it, like something from her childhood or from a dream.
She isn’t sure how long she stands there. At last, she goes over and lays her hand upon the tree’s trunk. She closes her eyes. She feels agreen force, a luxurious energy, glittering and brilliant but also dense, reach out and begin to wrap itself around her. Its embrace is infinitely gentle and patient but also tenacious like nothing she has ever known. Once it surrounded her, she senses, it would never let her go . . .
She snaps her eyes open and moves away, afraid. The intensity of what she has imagined— because, obviously, she must have imagined it— frightens her. She turns and begins walking back the way she came. She does not look behind her. She ignores the yearning sadness that blooms inside her chest. She does not stop until she’s reached the bottom of the slope. She halts and covers her face with both hands.
She thinks: What’s wrong with me? I must have low blood sugar or dehydration or elevated hormone levels, allergies that are making me lightheaded or a fall cold coming on. Anyway, how crazy. How ridiculous. It’s just a tree. There are a thousand other trees just in this park. She shakes her head and giggles. She’s embarrassed for herself. She runs the rest of the way home and when her husband asks her how her run was, she says, “Oh, fine. The leaves are turning.” That is all....
....Over the following two weeks, the woman tries to avoid thinking about what she had experienced, there, alone, out in the middle of the woods. She fails. The sensations of that day keep returning: the sleekness of the tree’s outermost layer, the way light fractured in its branches. At night, more than once, she dreams of her body merging with its silk-gray surface and wakes up wet between her legs.
She decides she must go back and see it one more time. This will rid her of the lunatic idea that she has any connection to this specific tree. One afternoon, she retraces her route from two weeks earlier. She thinks perhaps she won’t recall the way. In fact, she recognizes the path easily, its fork, its steep incline. She starts to climb. She stops in her tracks several times to wonder what on earth she’s doing.
When she sees it, her response is instantaneous. She bursts into tears. The tree is in the full blaze of its autumn glory, every leaf turned to a color like butter mixed with sunlight. She goes over to it and sits down on the ground where its shed leaves make a bright mosaic. She puts her cheek against it and closes her eyes. The day is taut with cold, but the trunk feels warm against her face. Above her she can hear it stirring. She remains where she is for a long time. When she finally opens her eyes, she finds that in her hair and on her clothing is a scattering of yellow leaves.
Emily Mitchell is the author of three published works of fiction, most recently the story collection The Church of Divine Electricity (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). Her short stories have appeared in Harpers’, The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. She serves as fiction editor of New England Review and teaches at University of Maryland. Her second novel, Far Ocean, about 18th century botanist and explorer Jeanne Baret, won the 2025 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.
L&T: Your collection, The Church of Divine Electricity, opens with an epigraph from Robert Hayden’s poem “American Journal,” in which an extraterrestrial entity is at turns repulsed by and attracted to human behavior. Did you have this piece in mind from the get-go? How does Hayden set the thematic stage for these stories?
I've loved that poem for many years and I've always identified with its speaker, as I imagine Hayden did: an alien researcher looking at American culture from the bewildered perspective of the invisible stranger. As a Black writer whose Baha'i faith put him at odds with the artistic priorities even of many of his African American contemporaries, this feeling, for Hayden, obviously originated from very different sources than it does for me. But the alchemy of the poem, and of fiction in general, is that his alien can speak to and for me, a white woman from England, as well. My aspiration for this collection would be to do something Hayden's poem does, which is to let people step back and see contemporary reality from a distance. Narratives about aliens, like my story "In Which I Try to Save the World from Total Destruction through the Power of Art", which also appears in this collection, are always really about human society by reflection
L&T: Throughout the collection, you blend literary techniques with a sci-fi sub-genre some call “twenty minutes into the future.” We find ourselves in mirror worlds with automated mothers, techno-religions, reality shows cut from round-the-clock micro-surveillance drones. What doors does science fiction open for you? Did you struggle at any point to observe or subvert the expectations readers bring to this space?
Science fiction of the kind I write, which as you say is very near future and which takes place in almost recognizable worlds, allows me to exaggerate or emphasize some element of contemporary life and call attention to it in a heightened way. So, for example, in the opening story "Mothers", which features giant therapy robots that are only available to the very rich, I'm hoping readers will think about all the resources we (especially those of us who possess some measure of privilege) put into comforting and soothing ourselves, the whole "wellness" industry, and ask some questions about that. Why do we need so much comfort and solace? What is it about contemporary life which makes that necessary? Who gets to be comforted and cared for and who doesn't? Are there any people who actually don't deserve to feel better? Science fiction allows the reader's attention to be directed with a lot of intention to a specific problem or set of concerns. The sci-fi I like best, like the work of Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler, does that beautifully.
L&T: The story we’re featuring in this issue, “The Woman Who Loved a Tree,” is as much a work of sci-fi as it is a fairy tale (signaled in the title, archetypal naming i.e. woman, husband, psychiatrist). What relationship do you see between these traditions? In your mind, how does this story connect (or not!) with others in the collection?
Both the fantastic and the speculative deal in the uncanny, that sense of some other, hidden order of reality haunting the present, whether that's located in the future or concealed inside the present in some way. In "The Woman Who Loved a Tree" I hope the reader ends up asking what kind of world this story takes place in, one that's magical or one that's disenchanted and rational. Without giving too much away, the story deliberately leaves this question up to the reader. All the stories in the collection have some element in them that is outside our daily consensus reality, whether that element is magical or technological. They're different but to me they feel related and similar enough to be in a book together.
L&T: So there’s a real disorder—or paraphilia—defined by the American Psychological Association as dendrophilia, which involves sexual attraction to trees or plants. Did this condition enter your research orbit at any point? If not, what kinds of research inform the story?
I had no idea! I'm not surprised, though. Human sexuality is so complicated and various in its objects and forms. Without wishing to be naive, I've just never really understood why that variety is something anyone wants to police or control, always assuming no one is harmed by it. Why would you want human beings to be less complex and differentiated, or for our desires to come in a narrower range of possibilities? I do write stories that involve a lot of research, but this was not one of them. I live near DC myself, like the characters, so I know that local area pretty well. This was really a piece where I could just invent. I'd been reading about plant intelligence and the conversations happening around that in the natural sciences at the moment, but not as research for a specific story. The piece just evolved out of that.
L&T: Hopefully I’m not spoiling anything, but I want to highlight a passage that struck me, just past the published excerpt: “She wraps her legs around one of its large limbs and then she hardly has to move at all before she feels a stark, lustrous intelligence clambering up through her, discovering her, mapping her, feeding on her, dispersing her in grains of gold and ice” (132). This is one of a few places where the tree is an active, conscious agent. I recently learned there’s a larger philosophical debate over plant neurobiology, that slow-motion videos of root growth reveal sophisticated networking and problem solving. What considerations come to mind when characterizing a nonhuman entity that may or may not be sentient?
Well, at that point in the story we don't know whether this is really a non-human form of intelligence or just a projection on the part of the protagonist, who is imagining that this tree is sentient. I think, like the alien visitor in the story I mentioned previously, the non-human sentience is really an implicit comparison with humanity, in this case not a particularly flattering one. The tree is definitely supposed to be superior to the humans: grander, more majestic, benignant, operating on a whole different scale of reality.
L&T: On a related note, one of many things I admire about “The Woman Who Loved a Tree” is your control over point of view. Young writers are often taught to steer clear of what Janet Burroway calls filter words (he watches the pelican swallow a fish VS the pelican swallows a fish) but here that move seems necessary, leaving open two possibilities: a) that the fantastical elements of the story represent external factual reality and/or b) that the fantastical elements of the story exist entirely in the woman’s head. At what point in the drafting process did you settle on a filtered point of view?
For me, the distance that puts the protagonist's consciousness between the reader and the events of the story always felt necessary because I was writing toward uncertainty about what is real and objective within the world of the story and what is all in the protagonist's head. Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the fantastic, by which he means uncertainty about whether the story is taking place in a magical world or in a disenchanted world which the characters and/or reader merely imagine is magical, was on my mind in a big way when I wrote this. I knew I wanted to sustain that question for the reader for as long as possible. So that filter was necessary from the start.
L&T: At a recent reading, you talked about your early love of sci-fi, coming back to the genre later in life. What sci-fi writers and texts most influence this collection? Are there other writers who blend the "literary" with genre in ways you admire?
For just straight sci-fi, I always come back to J. G. Ballard, whose fiction makes me feel like my brain is on fire in the best way. He understood how bizarre and ominous the future was going to be better and sooner than anyone, I think. Among literary authors, I love to distraction Ishiguro's science fiction. Never Let Me Go is a book I've reread many times. Other favorites in this genre include Philip K. Dick, of course, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, the Strugatsky brothers, Samuel Delany. Among contemporary writers, Ted Chiang, Charlie Jane Anders, Sofia Samatar and George Saunders are all absolutely astounding.
L&T: In this collection—and elsewhere in your work—you cover wide geographic terrain, from California to New York, Arizona to Wales, even the suburbs of Washington DC, where “The Woman Who Loved a Tree” is set. I’m thinking, too, of the story States from your last collection, a satirical guidebook to the U.S. How does place influence your work? Do you need to visit a location before it shows up in your fiction?
I've had quite a peripatetic life which means I don't have a deeply known locality or region that feels like home. I live in the DMV and I've lived here longer than anywhere at this point but I don't have the kind of profound connection to DC as a city that allows writers like Edward P. Jones or Susan Richards Shreve to represent it in the intimately detailed and brilliant way they do. For a long time, this felt like a nearly insurmountable problem. But then I figured out that lots of people are like me in this regard, that the experience of not being from anywhere might itself be interesting and worthy of investigation. Speculative fiction is in part a solution to the problem of authority for me. No one is going to worry that much whether I've got the local culture of the DC suburbs exactly right if the story is about an affair with a magical tree-lover, if you see what I mean.
L&T: You’ve already published three books: The Last Summer of the World, Viral, and The Church of Divine Electricity. Where do you see your next project taking you? Will you continue to work with short forms and sci fi or is there another direction you’re interested in?
I'm working right now on a couple of projects, including another collection of short fiction which will be all historical fiction. I have a complete draft of a novel that is speculative but needs some very serious revision before it will work. I have another historical novel I'm just at the earliest stages of researching. And then my next novel, Far Ocean, which is about 18th century botanist and explorer Jeanne Baret, will be out next March from the wonderful Black Lawrence Press!
