The Trees And I, The Rooted, Yet Restless Writer

Part One of: Vitamin N for the Writer

There is something truly remarkable that can happen in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul within the space of an hour or so in the early morning sitting beside a campfire has been coaxed back to life and before anyone else in the campsite is awake.

I had a mug of coffee slowly growing cooler in my hand, thin wisps of its heat rising slowly off of the dark black surface, and a couple of feet away a thicker grey ribbon of smoke climbing into the branches from the modest little campfire.

I was enjoying the opening of Peter Wohlleben’s The Power of Trees as I sat in our favorite camping site at Point Farms Provincial Park, on the bluffs above Lake Huron, in the middle of an ordinary work week—just basking in the simplicity and beauty of the morning air.

That was when the trees started talking to me.

Not literally, of course. I hadn’t had that much coffee.

But a good book has a way of making the world outside it suddenly legible, and a few chapters into Wohlleben I could no longer perceive the maples and beeches around me as mere scenery.

They had become colleagues. Slow, patient, long-lived colleagues who had been at this writing business—the business of growing something out of light and time and nutrients plucked from the very ground they stood upon—far longer than I have. And far more consistently than myself, despite having been draw to writing for more than forty years.

I’ve been calling myself a writer—or at least acknowledging that I’ve wanted to be a writer since the early 1980s. That was in what I like to refer to as my first typewriter era. (I’m currently enjoying my second childhood/second typewriter era)

A image from a Digital Treasure Chest I’d created for fans. This slide highlights a “school memories” book my mom had kept for me where she and I had noted milestones and tucked away memorabilia. This is where I first “officially” noted my ambition to be a writer (instead of a stunt man, a police officer, a firefighter).

And the longer I sat at the campsite, absorbing a combination of the book in my lap, the coffee in my hand, and the silent majesty of the early summer morn spread out in front of me, the more the comparison between the trees and I refused to let go of me.

The first thing you might notice about a tree, if you sit still enough to actually notice it, is that it is in no hurry. A tree measures its life in decades and centuries, not in launch weeks. It doesn’t panic about a slow spring. It does not refresh its dashboard to see how the season is trending.

It grows the amount it can grow given the light and water and soil it has been handed that year, and then it does it again the next year, and the year after that, and somewhere in the accumulation of all those unremarkable years it becomes the kind of thing people drive out to Lake Huron to sit beneath.

A writing life works the same way, though we rarely let it. We constantly look for the breakout. We want the season where everything finally happens.

But the careers I’ve long admired and tracked as a bookseller and digital publishing advocate weren’t those that were built in a single season. They were built in rings—one quiet, unremarkable, productive year laid down over the last, until the body of work had a circumference that could be measured.

The Rooted and the Restless: Image from National Forest Foundation article: Underground Networking: The Amazing Connection Beneath Your Feet

The part of the tree we praise is the visual part that we can see that rises into the sky in a beautiful and often majestic manner: the canopy, the height, even, at the end of the season the spectacular the autumn color.

But in his books and research Wohlleben spends a great deal of time underground, because that’s where the real work happens. Just like much of what happens in a writer’s life. Trees are not solitary individuals so much as nodes in a vast, mostly invisible network—sharing nutrients, sending warnings, supporting their own offspring and even the stumps of fallen neighbors through a web of roots and fungal threads beneath the forest floor.

Every writer has a root system like that, and almost none of it shows up in the books and stories. At least not visibly to those who happen upon the writing.

Underneath the visible title and the words strung so carefully together is everything that fed it: the decades of reading, the abandoned drafts, the day jobs, the conversations at conferences, the editors and booksellers and librarians and fellow writers who quietly and effectively passed nutrients your way when you were a sapling and didn’t know yet that you’d make it.

Readers see the trunk, the branches, the leaves. They rarely see the root ball it took to hold the entire thing upright.

It’s worth remembering that the next time someone calls a writer an “overnight success.”

Overnight, perhaps, in the same way an oak appears overnight—after forty years of continuing to extend those roots and a long, steady, slow growth of mostly unseen work.

Trees do speak, but some might never hear

Trees communicate constantly. Below ground through that fungal network; above ground in the chemistry of the air; and, on a morning like the one I was having, in the simple sound of wind moving through thousands of leaves in a neighborhood of dozens of trees at once.

It is one of the most companionable sounds there is. And here is the thing that struck me as I sat there with my coffee and my book: most people walk straight through that sound without registering it at all. The trees are speaking the entire time. The listening is optional, and most of us decline.

That is the writer’s lot too, isn’t it? You put the work out into the world—the careful, quite deliberate thing you made of so much you’ve absorbed, so much blood, sweat, and tears—and some people stop and feel the wind move through it, and some walk past without hearing a single word.

It isn’t that your work failed. It’s that not every reader is tuned to your particular frequency, and not every passerby came to the woods to listen. A horror story lands like a thunderclap for one reader and registers as nothing for another standing right beside them who prefers a historical romance tale.

I’ve made my peace with that, mostly. I mean, I’m proud of the things I write, but I recognize that my writing is not everyone’s cup of . . . er . . . coffee. The reader who doesn’t resonate isn’t a verdict on the work. And the reader who does—the one who stops, and tilts their head, and hears the leaves—that reader is worth more than the algorithm will ever tell you. Every genuine one of them is a small, warm, human counterweight to a machine that would rather sort us into categories.

Every tree counts, Wohlleben might say. So does every reader who actually hears you.

Image from Ontario Fall Colour Report

The necessity of the fall, the barren time, the winter

As I was thinking about the similarities between the long-term/marathon writer and the tree, I eventually came to a fascinating parallel I didn’t expect to find, and perhaps the one I most needed.

In the climate where I live—Ontario, where the deciduous forest takes the cold deathly seriously—the trees do something every autumn that looks, to the casual eye, like giving up. They drop everything. They pull the valuable material back into the trunk and roots, let the spent leaves go, and shut the visible operation down for months.

Wohlleben devotes real attention to what trees are actually doing in that dormant season—they are not dying, but instead they’re topping up, conserving, surviving on what they banked.

It is not the end of growth. It is the precondition for next year’s.

We writers can learn a lot from the trees. In last week’s episode of The Creative Penn Podcast (June 22, 2026 Episode: Creative Satisfaction, In Person Book Sales, and Author Mindset with Mark Leslie Lefebvre), Joanna Penn graciously and compassionately schooled me about pushing myself too hard without giving myself enough space, time, and rest after I admitted to suffering from shingles shortly after back-to-back writer conferences. It was a lesson I should have learned from our 2021 book The Relaxed Author.

Left and middle: Jo and me showing off The Relaxed Author. Top right: Jo and I walking on beach on Oregon coast. Bottom right on the left: St. Pete Beach, FL. Bottom right: In Toronto at Kobo’s head office.

A writer, after all, needs their own winters, those times when they might not be producing and extending, but conserving, patiently resting and waiting through a time of barren conditions.

I have also spent a great many years feeling guilty about my own writer winters. IE, those fallow stretches where the words won’t come, where the well is dry, where I am, by every metric on the dashboard, not producing.

And I have, in the past, treated them as failures of will. But I learned from listening to and paying attention to the trees. I learned that the maple over my head wasn’t ashamed of having dropped its leaves last fall. Because it understood something I keep having to relearn: you cannot pull green out of an empty trunk.

Sometimes the most productive thing a growing thing can do is stop visibly producing and quietly refill.

Because a break is not the opposite of the work. In a long enough life, it’s part of it.

Different strokes, and different soil for different writers

Not every tree needs or wants the same conditions. Some need full, blasting sun and will sulk in too much shade. Others—the understory species—would scorch in the open and do their best growing in the dappled light beneath taller neighbors.

You can’t expect me to resist making a nod to a classic magnificent Rush lyric

Put the wrong tree in the wrong spot and it survives, technically, but never thrives.

Writers are exactly this fussy about their conditions, and we should stop apologizing for it. Yes, like the trees often do, we can adapt. But we need what we need to nourish the way we write.

I have written well in the corner of a noisy coffee shop, fueled by the hum of strangers.

I have written well in complete solitude, in a silence so total it felt like a held breath.

I’ve written on a commuter train, scratching out sentences and paragraphs between stations.

I’ve written on airplanes where I could barely squeeze the laptop between myself and the oblivious a-hole in front of me enjoying a full recline.

And, yes—going back far enough—I’ve also written in the back row of a classroom, while pretending to listen to what’s being taught as if I was taking vigorous notes.

Some of those conditions are full sun for me. Some are shade. The trick isn’t to write the way someone else writes. It’s to figure out which kind of tree you are and then go find that light.

And it isn’t only where but with what. I have grown stories and books, over the years, in a remarkable variety of soil. I started by hand, and also kept track of my submissions and rejections in notebooks I still have, which is how I can tell you the exact date in my first short story acceptance arrived in the mail that was later published in 1992 as well as my 1993 first short horror story acceptance and later contributor copy arrived in the mail.

Images from my writing tracking journal showing rejections and acceptances I’d tracked (and highlighting the submission, acceptance, and publication of that first horror story published: “Phantom Mitch.”

I also wrote my second, third, and final drafts on a manual typewriter, with its fascinating violence of striking those keys with all my might and producing a loud satisfying sound of the words appearing on the page.

Then I upgraded to one of those hybrid typewriter–word processors.

Then a Vic-20, then a Commodore 64, then an Amiga—a whole parade of beige boxes, each one obsolete almost before I’d learned its quirks—and eventually the procession of computers and laptops that carried me here, to a campsite, where I decided that instead of filling my usual early morning with writing, I’d rest and enjoy absorbing the messages from both the living trees before me and the one dead one in my lap but which still lived and breathed in a different way with those inked words on its pages.

The tools might have changed completely but the growing thing didn’t.

A tree planted beside a fence doesn’t stop being a tree; it adapts, grows around the obstacle, incorporates the new condition, and keeps reaching for the light. That’s what a writing life across forty years of changing technology actually is—not a series of restarts, but one continuous organism adapting its growth to whatever soil it’s been handed, while the sap underneath runs the whole time.

Reading the rings of a writer’s life

If you cut a tree across you can read its entire biography. The wide rings are the fat years—where there was good light, enough rain, not much stress.

The narrow ones are the droughts, the hard winters, the seasons it spent just surviving.

A scar marks the year of an injury it grew around.

The whole life is right there in cross-section, legible to experts who know how to count and how to read them.

I think you can read an author the same way, if you take their work in order. Line up the bibliography from first to most recent and the rings are all there.

You might see the lean years where almost nothing came. Also the fat years where the books, the stories, the projects appeared two or more at a time.

You may notice the place where the voice suddenly deepens—that was the year something happened in the writer’s life, even if you’ll never know what.

You could catch a glimpse of the genre they tried once and abandoned.

Or perhaps the scar they wrote their way around.

A body of work is a cross-section. The reader who goes through it chronologically isn’t just reading the books. They’re counting the rings of a writer’s life.

I find that idea steadying. It means none of it is wasted—not the narrow years, not the dormant ones. They’re all in the record. They all count toward the circumference.

I highly recommend these books by Richard Louv that cover the concepts of “Nature-Deficit Disorder”, Vitamin N, and more.

The Unspoken Value of Vitamin N

I was at Point Farms for two days in the middle of a work week. But it was hardly a remote wilderness expedition. I took meetings off my phone and tethered to the provincial park office’s free Wi-Fi, which means I never fully unplugged at all—exactly the sort of half-measure that, by the strict standards of nature writing, shouldn’t count for much.

And yet it counted for everything.

Richard Louv (whose writing I admire the same way I’ve long loved Thoreau) has spent several books arguing that human beings carry a kind of deficit when we lose contact with the natural world, and that the cure is something he calls, with a wink, Vitamin N.

Two days of woodsmoke and lake wind and a book about trees turned out to be a far larger dose than the dosage suggested. I came back to my desk loosened, refilled, with the sap of my writing blood moving again. The dormant season, it turns out, had just needed somewhere to end.

There was one more teacher waiting for me at that campfire, though. A small one, striped, with cheeks built for ambition and a relationship to the muse that I’m still reflecting upon.

But he gets his own chapter. Because Nature keeps on giving to this writer.

To be continued in Part Two: Confessions of a Rodent Writer and the Reappearing Peanuts