Hello, humans. This is a blog post about the Tree Book Project we just finished doing in LA.
This is my book. I don’t remember the exact process we went through to make these, but I’ll do my best to summarize it.
First, we wrote a poem about a tree on campus, so that Ms. Gignoux could go through and choose sections she liked to turn into screen prints. We then used these screen prints to print words all across pre-painted boards, all in various colors so each turned out unique.
Next, we used various pieces of small plants (a leaf, flower, etc) to print on different sheets of paper, some blank and some dictionary. We did this by spreading akua ink onto a gelli pad, resting the plant pieces on the gelli pad, and then pressing a sheet of paper onto the gelli pad, using a brayer to really get the ink onto the paper.
After preparing materials for later in the project, we got large sheets of paper, painted blue on one side, and folded it vertically, then to the crease on both sides, folded it horizontally. We used some of the plant prints to collage the four rectangles formed by the creases (on the non-painted side), and then slitted the horizontal middle of those sections, and glued the non-painted, non-collaged corners together to form the spine of our books.
Then, with the boards we had previously patterned with our poems, we cut out covers and glued them on to our books.
After this we started collaging the inside of our books by cutting and gluing different parts of the plant prints we had already made, creating simple landscapes with “trees” on them, and hiding two or three envelopes within.
With this, our books were pretty much complete, so we got to work writing essays (we wrote some of them while working on the tree books, but I can’t remember exactly when): “Branches, Reaching Toward The Sky” and “Salute to My Roots”. We also wrote a poem called “When This is Over”.
This is my “Branches, Reaching Toward The Sky”:
Branches, Reaching Toward the Sky
My Wish Tree
By: Mary Elisabeth Tracy
My life list:
Looking to the future, I’ll eventually need to find a career. What that career will be, I honestly have no idea. I enjoy pretty much all of my subjects in school, so that doesn’t help. However, across the board, I’ve noticed that if there’s an opportunity to be funny I at least try to think something comedic (sometimes social anxiety gets the best of me) and I also really like art in all forms. So, this leads me to my first few goals/dreams.
First, I want to become a content creator. On which platform would I want to post content? Whichever one complimented the content I would make the most (though I would sooner give this dream/goal up than become a Tik Toker). This is because as I stated, I enjoy making people laugh, and content creation could be a great way to do this. I also just think it would be really cool to have a platform where I could talk about issues I believed were important.
Secondly, (and maybe this would play into content creation) I want to become an animator, or as the term would likely entail for me, create animations that I want to. This is because I think that the freedom there is in devising animations to make whatever I can possibly think up (this goes for other arts too), and the ability to tell a story through animation is amazing.
Next, I want to at some point try making music. Why? Because the way music can toy with human emotions is actually a bit intimidating, but also incredibly interesting and impressive, and, like animation, can be used to tell a story.
Lastly, I really want to write something, most likely a book because I’ve always loved how (good) books manage to transport the reader into a different world, and I’ve always wanted to strike this sense of awe and wonder in readers of my writing. This probably wouldn’t be a full-fledged career, but is still one thing I want to accomplish in life.
Moving on, this is admittedly my stupidest dream, but it is still something I very much hope to do someday: Spending mass amounts of money on doing something kind of pointless (of course if I acquired mass sums of currency, I would do something beneficial to society with my great wealth first, to make this acceptable). And, after much thought I have decided that after I die, I want my corpse to be (yeeted) launched into the sky at extreme speeds so that I can be remembered in a humorous light (“peaked after death” or “went out with bang” perhaps), and so that I can perhaps be remembered by a few more people than I would have if I had had a normal funeral.
As my sixth goal on this list, I want to do something that has never been done before. Whether that be the first person to swallow a watermelon whole without dying, or the first person to interact with other intelligent life forms from somewhere other than Earth, I don’t especially care. Now, would it be nice to do something a bit more impressive/monumental in human history, yes, but I’ll take what I can get. And the reason I want to do this is because out of over one hundred billion humans that have run around, doing the odd things that humans tend to do, I think it’s quite remarkable to be the first to do something out of all of them, and also because I would likely set my sights a bit higher than forcing a whole watermelon down my esophagus, I hope I could do something that was a bit more important towards advancements in human knowledge.
Now, this is probably the most bucket list-esk hope on my list, but I do hope to one day visit Yellowstone National Park. I want to do this simply because I did my 3rd grade project on Wyoming, specifically Yellowstone, and ever since I have been longing to go see the wildlife and natural beauty of the park in person.
On to some of my more serious hopes/goals and such. I hope that there will always be people that I love in my life (friends, family, and other loved ones), because the world is so big and confusing and harsh that I don’t even want to fathom how horrifying it would be to experience it alone, something I never want to do. But also, there are the wonderfully happy moments that make up for all the bad ones, though they are lonely with no one around, yet made (at least) ten times better when shared with loved ones.
Another one of my more important goals is to be happy. Ultimately, this is the goal I consider most important. I think some famous person said something along the lines of, “A life lived happily is a life lived well,” at some point in time, and I completely agree. What’s the point of living out a life if I don’t enjoy it? Really, I don’t know, which is why this goal is important to me. I also want to be happy because if I cannot figure out how to make myself happy, how can I expect myself to make others happy, something that I strive to do?
My last hope is to die unregretfully. I just think that dying knowing that there was more I wanted to do in life would be… disappointing, really. I mean, as far as anyone (alive) knows, death is, well, nothing. Not a colorless, soundless, feelingless place a dead person’s conscience is trapped, but actually nothing, the conscience just being erased, deleted, nonexistent. Which sounds scary, quite terrifying really, but I don’t want it to be; I hope my last moments alive are happy ones, moments in which I’m smiling, knowing the life I’d lived was a good one, and so I believe that if I’ve done everything I truly wanted to do, I can face death rather happily.
There are many things I dream for the world, and many frustrations I have with it, or more so, humanity.
Firstly, humans discriminating against other humans for factors they cannot control (and shouldn’t have to). I swear, I have no idea how humans can possess the brain power to send spacecrafts to different planets, yet some people still cannot wrap their heads around treating other humans equally, even if they have different identities.
Secondly, the industrial food chain’s treatment of animals. The industrial food chain is bad for everyone involved in it, consumers, farmers, and animals, except for the corporations behind it. However, because the chain’s main goal is to produce food that consumers will purchase while spending as little as possible in the process of actually producing the food, I would say the animals fare the worst (I mean they are the ones who die in the immediate process). They get shoved onto cramped, unhygienic lots where they’re fed low-cost grains and such that causes them an array of issues because they are not built to eat the grains, and are fed an amount such that they grow at an unnaturally quick rate, also causing them health issues, until they are taken to be (at least somewhat humanely) killed behind closed doors so that their flesh can be served at McDonald’s (or some other fast food restaurant).
Thirdly, how humans treat the environment. For quite a bit of human history, we have treated the environment like it would always just fix itself, which (because nature’s awesome) it has. However, as we see in the current world, that’s no longer something we can really fall back on, with climate change and all, but even after seeing scientific evidence that the environment is struggling to repair itself faster than humans can destroy it, some still deny that we, as a species, to preserve a livable future, need to take action, which is, point blank, idiotic.
Fourthly, gender stereotypes. Just because someone has long hair doesn’t mean they’re a girl, and just because someone had short hair doesn’t make them a boy. It should be simple enough, but apparently not for some people.
Fifthly and finally, I want there to be mechanical wings so that I can fly like a bird. I decided that I might as well end this essay on a happier note than what I want to fix about humanity.
And this is my “Salute to My Roots”:
SALUTE TO MY ROOTS!
Mary Elisabeth Tracy
One of the people I owe the most to in this world is my mom. She is funny, intelligent, kind, and hard-working, all qualities that I strive to hold myself, making her an excellent role model for me. My mom came from a struggling household, and through hard work and determination, got into Harvard. Now, she has a good job and loving family, both greatly deserved. Another part of my mom that I greatly appreciate and look up to her for is how she’s always been there for me when I needed it, and supported me in the decisions I’ve made. Such as when I decided to stop playing chess competitively because of the pressure I continuously felt to get better and better, she let me choose what I wanted to do, and supported me in the decision I eventually made. She also helped me in parting with the (at least I would consider it to be) mental sport that I had been playing for 5+ years. And, after that, she supported me in becoming much more involved in the other sport I was doing, horseback riding. All in all, I cannot thank my mom enough for all she has done for me.
Another person I owe, so, so much to is my dad. Besides (along with my mom) giving me a good home to live in, a great school to go to, food, water, and extracurriculars that interest me, he has taught me to think for myself, in surprising ways! For one, both he and I are sarcastic and (admittedly) a little bit stubborn (like parent, like child), so we have gotten into a fair amount of debates (the most notorious being the impact of microbubbles). Some of these disputes have been more heated than others, but I would say that ultimately, they have made me more of a critical thinker, which I am extremely grateful for. I appreciate everything my dad has done for me.
Another person who has been a role model for me is Dr. Shebalin, my 5th grade advisor and science teacher. Since the year she taught me, I’ve thought of her as composed, considerate, and down-to-earth. One of the things I respected her most for was never yelling, because she didn’t need to. When a class was misbehaving, she expressed disappointment, not anger, and because we all respected her, it had more of an effect. Dr. Shebalin also taught me about some of the topics I see as important problems in the world, such as climate change, and the struggle of endangered species that could, in the none too far future, lead to their extinction. Needless to say, Dr. Shebalin has been one of my favorite and most influential teachers.
Of course, when thanking the people who have influenced me for the better, I cannot leave out my friends. While the bond between a parent and their child (in healthy parent-child relationships) is strong, there’s just a sort of intimacy it lacks compared to the bond between friends, because friends see each other as peers, as equals, instead of one being the provider, and the other being dependent on the provider (in healthy friendships). So, I’ve always just been able to be myself around my friends, not having to worry about getting lectured for an edgy joke. But, how I would say my friends have influenced my life for the better is by giving me the comfort of knowing that I can talk to them, and they’ll probably be able to understand what I’m feeling. Yes, my parents have been on this Earth about four times as long as my friends have, meaning they probably have more life experience, but times have changed quite a bit since they were my age. It’s about 30 years since they were in sixth grade, so one, their middle school experience was likely different than mine, and two, they probably don’t remember their middle school experience exactly as it was. Meanwhile, my friends are experiencing middle school at the exact same time as me, so they can usually relate more to the problems I talk to them about. Ultimately, I could not have picked better friends.
After finishing the essays and poem, we printed and cut out our “When This is Over” poem, and glued it into our books. We folded the essays and put them into two of our envelopes, and put a little picture of ourselves in the third.
And that’s how we made our books.
Throughout this whole process, we were assisted by Ms. Gignoux, who, herself, is an artist! She creates really cool textiles, as well as working with and teaching students at other schools, which is very awesome indeed.
Ms. Gignoux’s website – check it out!
Overall, my opinion on the tree book project is that it was fun because (in the words of my LA teacher) I like peeling dried glue off of my hands (smile). Actually – and this is going to be a very controversial opinion – I just don’t find the joy others seem to have in it. But no, I really liked doing the tree books. At the beginning, I was resigned to the fact there would be little to no creativity in the whole project, but I was pleasantly surprised, and am happy with the final product. So yes, it was a very fine experience.
BONUS – PHOTOSHOOT!
