Pen and Trowel
Pen and Trowel brings together some of the main strands in Gerard’s and my lives: my “pen” (literal and metaphorical), and his love for plants and gardening. Aware that many writers are gardeners, and that many gardeners write enthusiastically and evocatively about their work with plants and garden design, we conceived a book that would contain a few of the most outstanding examples. I read widely: Gerard lent me a box full of books on the subject and I explored well beyond that. I read first to get the large picture and develop criteria for assessing the material, and then I went back to look for quotable passages – because our book would consist mainly of the writer-artists’ own words.
As always when preparing a text for one of Gerard’s handmade books, I first wrote a long version to organize the material in my own mind – in this case the long version came to nearly 7,000 words – and then I extracted the 1,500 words that Gerard would be able to set by hand. For the pruning we had clear guidelines: the passages had to be by good writers as well as good gardeners, and our final selection would include English, American, and Canadian writers, men and women.
The result is a 24-page handmade book with 32 wood engravings, in a numbered edition of 35 copies. (See also https://www.gerardbrenderabrandis.ca/books).
For me, this project was yet one more opportunity to immerse myself in a subject that, until then, had not been very familiar. During my writing life I’ve immersed myself in many widely different subjects, always learning much more than I would use in the final text but needing the large picture to give me a wide and detailed array of information so that I could make well-informed choices about what to include in the final text.
All that reading was infused with delving into the subject and ruminating on some of its subtleties. I wrote: “For writers who are also gardeners, soil and setting are simply a different kind of page. Pruning is editing. Having created gardens, they delight in writing about both process and results; their literary insights enrich their observations on gardening. The gardening informs their writing, and their writers’ sensibility influences the gardens they design: as they plan -- and dig and weed -- I imagine that in their heads they are choosing words and shaping narratives. All draw inspiration and healing from the process.”
And I, in creating the text, became a metaphorical gardener. “While reading the writer-gardeners’ books, I used my pen as trowel to ‘transplant’ their words.”
The result is, among other things, an exploration of the endlessly fascinating subject of creativity.