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| photo: Mei Cheng Wang | |
Tree Abraham, who was born in Ottawa and lives in Brooklyn, is a writer, art director, and book designer. Her writings experiment with collaged essay and mixed media visuals. She is the author of the creative nonfiction books Cyclettes and elseship (Soft Skull, January 28). elseship combines personal entries with illustrations, photos, and mind maps, all organized within eight ancient Greek categories of love to deconstruct the heteronormative canon to explore bittersweet, lonely, uncharted territories of the heart.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
elseship is a lyrical bricolage from my first experience falling in love (unrequited)--a companion for anyone yearning to queer relationships or grieve heartbreak.
On your nightstand now:
I am notorious for keeping a high stack of books on my nightstand that signal an urgent call to be read. I do my best to prioritize these over the other fresh piles in my apartment. This month: Spiral and Other Stories by Aidan Koch; The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World by Elizabeth Rush; Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector; It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken; and Parallel Botany by Leo Lionni.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I was obsessed with decoding the secrets woven through Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, all 13 books in the collection plus Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography. I am sure Daniel Handler influenced my writing style with his fixation on definitions and the hidden stories told in fictional ephemera. From a young age I already took note of the production of the hardcovers--the morose illustrations, the endpapers, deckle edges, and special finishes--which was a sign of a future career in book design.
Your top five authors:
Sheila Heti, Annie Dillard, Anne Carson, Leanne Shapton, and Rachel Cusk. I admire everything each has ever written.
Book you've faked reading:
I shamefully never get through the pop science books on my shelf from authors like Michael Pollan, Oliver Sacks, and Malcolm Gladwell. For me that content is more realistically consumed via podcast or documentary.
Book you're an evangelist for:
For the longest time, I constantly referenced Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. Her differentiation between sentimentality and empathy has had a permanent impact on my worldview. But in the last year, I have consumed a prolific amount of climate change content, and I would say Paul Kingsnorth's Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, which includes an essential proposition on how society must evolve its relationship to the natural world in order to survive. I have an almost religious adherence to the text.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The hardcover for Javier Mauro Cárdenas's Aphasia, designed by the genius Thomas Colligan. I prefer paperbacks, but I had to buy this edition. As a book designer, I have a strong personal preference for very flat covers with a lot of negative space and high-concept graphics. This is one of my all-time favorites and the jumbled little illustrated tiles in blue against white encapsulates the disorienting run-on prose.
Book that changed your life:
I read Maggie Nelson's Bluets, quickly followed by The Argonauts. The way she writes and thinks--I didn't know a book was allowed to be like that. I felt something of myself in her autotheory and began elseship that month. It was my first time writing anything literary, and I credit Nelson with inciting my authorship. In many ways, those two books seem like elseship's parents.
Favorite line from a book:
This is an impossible task, but a quote that echoed in me while writing elseship is from my favorite Virginia Woolf book The Waves: "What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life."
Five books you'll never part with:
- Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle--I want every book to be this book.
- Dictionary of Word Origins by Joseph T. Shipley--for the love of word etymologies.
- About a Mountain by John D'Agata--I devoured this book. The best snapshot of the absurdity of modern life.
- Weather by Jenny Offill--I read its fragments to remind myself of what I want my sentences to do.
- The Next Whole Earth Catalog--a quirky compendium of ideas and visuals that provides endless inspiration.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I just finished designing the cover for Anelise Chen's forthcoming memoir Clam Down. I became a fan of Chen's after reading her first book, So Many Olympic Exertions, and was eagerly awaiting her next. It was pure coincidence that I was asked to design the cover just as she was blurbing my book. As with all books I design, I skimmed the Word doc manuscript to brainstorm concepts but will wait for the physical copy to properly read it.
Describe the system you have for filing books on your shelves:
I try my best to section off my books by category (poetry, nature, memoir, writing guides, philosophy, journalism, art books...). I keep all books by an author together and group slightly by size and hue. Anything with a bright colored spine gets hidden at the bottom of the bookcase, which isn't too hard because most books I read seem to have desaturated neutrals. I have hopes to stamp an ex libris into all of them one day.