“I first time I came back here I came to see the elms. I grew up in Lincolnwood on the North Shore and the elm was the dominate street tree of the Northwest Chicago area, and after the blight they were all gone. It happened over a long period of time. I was born in 1957 and we still had elms on Avers Avenue in the 1960s, so when it came time to write this book, I wanted to recreate some of the personal connection with trees the book depends upon. And I couldn’t find an elm. The signature tree of my childhood! People loved the elm because it made this enormous vase of a shape. Tell a child to draw a tree and they draw an elm. Put them on opposite sides of a street and they create a beautiful canyon. But to recreate that magic you have to touch one and smell it and run your hand along its bark. You have to have all the involuntary memories that come out of the physical reality of the tree. What is that Wordsworth quote? That poetry takes it origins from ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’? Unless you live in a city that made a concerted effort to save elms — New York did in Central Park, Chicago did here — you can’t really stand under an elm anymore. There aren’t many places to see them now. So I would come here and take notes. Because the act of writing is an act of empathy. You are trying to inhabit a state of mind powerful enough and sustained enough that you are not standing outside of things. You stop describing and start participating in a mental state — but you need to find that mental state in the first place.”