Irving, Apricot
WORK TITLE: The Gospel of Trees
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Irving, Apricot Anderson
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.apricotirving.com/
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STATE:
COUNTRY:
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2004096670 |
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2004096670 |
| HEADING: | Irving, Apricot Anderson |
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| 010 | __ |a no2004096670 |
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| 040 | __ |a OrPS |b eng |c OrPS |
| 100 | 1_ |a Irving, Apricot Anderson |
| 670 | __ |a Ayiti Cheri, 2004: |b t.p. (Apricot Anderson Irving) |
PERSONAL
Married; children: two boys.
ADDRESS
- Home - North Portland, OR.
- Agent - Jin Auh, The Wylie Agency. 250 W. 57 St., Ste. 2114, New York, NY 10107.
CAREER
Writer. Founder and director of the Boise Voices oral history project, Northeast Portland, OR. Served on the Advisory Committee of the Oregon Book Awards.
AWARDS:Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship.
WRITINGS
- The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2018
Contributor to the anthology Best Women’s Travel Writing. Contributor to periodicals, including Granta, This American Life, MORE magazine, and Oregon Humanities.
SIDELIGHTS
Apricot Irving is the founder and director or a noted oral history project called Boise Voices. The project.a collaboration between youth and elders in North Portland Oregon, chronicles various stories concerning a neighborhood undergoing gentrification. Irving has lived in Haiti, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom. A contributor to periodicals and an anthology, Irving is also the author of The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir. Her debut book focuses on the time she spent with her missionary parents in Haiti, where she lived from the age of six to fifteen.
Irving actually wrote a first draft of her memoir when she was around ten or eleven years old. She would later find the unfinished memoir in a box. In an interview with New York Times Online contributor John Williams, Irving noted: “Even then, I understood that the missionary compound was a place I could only untangle with words. By the time I was in my early 20s, a recovering missionary’s daughter, all the questions that I couldn’t answer about that experience — about privilege, inequity, failure, strength, sorrow, beauty — felt suffocating. I wrote this book in order to breathe, in order to find my way through a story I didn’t know how to tell.”
Irving went on in the New York Times Online article to note it took her fifteen years to write The Gospel of Trees. She initially set out to write about Indonesia but, while in a nonfiction writing program, her adviser said she already seemed to know what she had to say about Indonesia. The adviser suggested she write about something she did not understand as well. Irving asked her parents about Haiti, and they gave her material they had stored in boxes in their barns. Irving was particularly affected by her father’s journals. She told New York Times Online contributor Williams: “For the first time, I saw Haiti through his eyes. It was a perspective shift that changed how I remembered those hard years.”
The Gospel of Trees recounts the family’s struggles as they move from Oregon to Haiti in the early 1980s. In addition to her parents, there were Irving’s two younger sisters. The time spent in Haiti was trying for the entire family in that Haiti was experiencing an ongoing drought as well as many levels of social upheaval. Irving writes in depth about her agronomist father, who could be difficult to live with and was determined that Haiti could be an agrarian utopia. The ideals of Irving’s parents concerning improvements in Haiti also included a zealous religious outlook. Both of Irving’s parents experienced intense frustration in their attempts to bring back Haiti’s ecology. They even faced opposition from many of the island’s residents. “Throughout the book, Irving reveals a journalist’s seasoned eye for nuanced regional detail,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
Irving writes about her difficult relationship with her father and her how her experiences in Haiti affected her,. She was especially bothered by the observation that so much sorrow could exist in such a beautiful place. As an example Irving points to the drought, starvation, and military coups that caused suffering among the people. She also reveals that overcrowded hospitals often led doctors to make choices about which patients they would save. As a result, Irving started to question her Christian beliefs. The book’s final section examines the changes that occurred in Haiti after she visits the country ten years after she left. Irving also delves into the difficulties that journalist faced reporting on the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010. The memoir includes various episodes from Haitian history.
The Gospel of Trees “is most powerful when it is most personal, and when it grapples with the ethical uncertainties of aid work,” wrote Wall Street Journal Online contributor Elizabeth Winkler. Bridget Thoreson, writing in Booklist, commended Irving for her “insight and admirable even-handedness” in telling the story of her family and Haiti.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Irving, Apricot, The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2018, Bridget Thoreson, review of The Gospel of Trees, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2018, review of The Gospel of Trees.
Publishers Weekly, December 11, 2017, review of The Gospel of Trees, p. 159.
ONLINE
Apricot Irving website, https://www.apricotirving.com (June 7, 2018).
Granta Online, https://granta.com/ (June 7, 2018), brief contributor profile.
Medium, https://medium.com/ (February 26,2018), review of The Gospel of Trees.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com (March 18, 2018), John Williams, “Q. & A. Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: A Missionary’s Daughter in Haiti.
New Yorker Online, https://www.newyorker.com/ (March 19, 2018), review of The Gospel of Trees.
SFGate, https://www.sfgate.com/ (March 28, 2018), Maxine Marshall, “Weekend Booking: Apricot Irving’s memoir Delves into Missionary Life in Haiti.”
Shelf Awareness, http://shelf-awareness.com/ (April 6, 2018), review of The Gospel of Trees.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (March 2, 2018), Elizabeth Winkler, review of The Gospel of Trees.
- The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2018
- Apricot Irving - https://www.apricotirving.com/about/
FullSizeRender (10).jpg
Apricot Anderson Irving is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship and has served on the Advisory Committee of the Oregon Book Awards. Her work has appeared in Granta, This American Life, MORE Magazine, Oregon Humanities and the anthology Best Women’s Travel Writing.
She is the founder and director of the renowned oral history project, Boise Voices, a collaboration between youth and elders in North Portland to record the stories of a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification, but she has also dug trees in the rain, painted curbs, waited tables and lugged a microphone across three continents to record the stories of heroic, ordinary people.
The Gospel of Trees is her first book.
Photo credit: Tyler Merkel
- Granta - https://granta.com/contributor/apricot-irving/
Apricot Irving
Apricot Anderson Irving is currently based in the woods outside Portland, Oregon, but has lived in Haiti, Indonesia and the UK. Her missionary parents moved to Haiti when she was six years old; she left at the age of fifteen. She returned to Haiti in the spring of 2010 to cover the earthquake for the radio program This American Life. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. The Gospel of Trees, a memoir of her time in Haiti, is her first book.
Irving, Apricot: THE GOSPEL OF TREES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Irving, Apricot THE GOSPEL OF TREES Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 3, 6 ISBN: 978-1-4516-9045-3
A missionary's daughter recounts her childhood experiences in Haiti.
Debut author Irving, a past contributor to This American Life, was 6 years old when her family first moved from Oregon to Haiti in the early 1980s. Together with her parents and two younger sisters, they spent much of the next decade striving to improve the living conditions of a region experiencing unrelenting social upheaval and drought. The family was led by the fierce determination of their agronomist father. "My father's vision for utopia," writes the author, "was agrarian: trees on every hillside, vegetables in every garden, water in every dry streambed. Seeds were small, but they could change the world." As the narrative progresses, the focal point becomes the author's conflicting relationship with her father and how it related to his idealistic vision for the country and his family. Irving draws from their various journals, each offering a distinct slant on her experiences of that time and place. She reveals how her parents' moral and religious zeal intersected and at times clashed with the harsh realities they faced each day in an uncompromising setting. "If, like my father, you suffer from a savior complex," writes the author, "Haiti is a bleak assignment, but if you are able to enter it unguarded, shielded only by curiosity, you will find the sorrows entangled with a defiant joy." In the lengthy final section, Irving tracks some of the changes in the region from her vantage point as a young woman returning after a 10- year absence. Later, she would assess further hardships in the capacity of a journalist assigned to cover the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake. Throughout the book, Irving reveals a journalist's seasoned eye for nuanced regional detail, but her personal journey is surprisingly uninvolving and frequently bogged down by self-consciousness. A tighter edit, including a significant page-count reduction, may have resulted in a more authentically compelling story.
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
A timely and often insightful perspective on modern-day Haiti woven into an overlong and banal family saga.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Irving, Apricot: THE GOSPEL OF TREES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522642865/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=38a6e555. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522642865
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A The Gospel of Trees
Publishers Weekly.
264.51 (Dec. 11, 2017): p159. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* A The Gospel of Trees
Apricot Irving. Simon & Schuster, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-1-4516-9045-3
In this lush, emotional debut memoir, Irving tells of her life as a missionary's daughter in Haiti. Irving was born in California, but in 1982, at age six, her parents moved her and her sister to Haiti.
Years of destructive colonization had left Haiti with severe deforestation, and her father began an ambitious mission to plant trees. Irving unflinchingly evaluates the consequences of well- meaning humanitarian work, which often included the perpetuation of oppressive colonial structures. She writes, "There is, in colonial literature, a recurring image: a foreign man, emboldened by his authority and by the lack of accountability, takes on a native mistress as a token of both his unquestioned power and his affection." Amid the poverty in Haiti, Irving finds a "more complicated world where sorrow and beauty lived under the same leaky roof." There, Irving wrestled with the prescriptions of her Christian beliefs, ultimately discovering a deeper faith in something else--that of beauty. "Beauty, it seemed, had been here all along: a wild summons, a name for God that did not stick in my throat." This is a beautiful memoir that shows how a family altered by its own ambitious philanthropy might ultimately find hope in their faith and love for each other, and for Haiti. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A The Gospel of Trees." Publishers Weekly, 11 Dec. 2017, p. 159. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521875972/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=cd82933b. Accessed 16 May 2018.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A521875972
4 of 5 5/15/18, 11:17 PM
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The Gospel of Trees
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
114.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2018): p21. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Gospel of Trees.
By Apricot Irving.
Mar. 2018.384p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781451690453). 266.
In the church newsletter, they looked like the perfect missionary family: Dad, Mom, and three daughters, dedicated to their agricultural and reforestation work in Haiti. But as Irving discloses in this searching memoir, the story beneath the surface was more complicated. Her father's enthusiasm for rejuvenating the devastated island nation's ecology ends in frustration at the many obstacles he faces trying to make his vision a reality, including acts of opposition from the residents. Her mother, isolated and dispirited, questions their mission, and while the region is a tropical paradise for seven-year-old Apricot, when she returns as a teenager, it feels different, even dangerous. For a family that lived in a trailer in California, missionary work comes with an unexpected whiff of privilege, as they hire servants and enjoy luxuries unavailable to many of the locals. With insight and admirable even-handedness, Irving shows the complex forces at play in both the story of Haiti's cycle of poverty and the more personal dynamics at play in her family as they struggle mightily to do God's work.--Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "The Gospel of Trees." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 21. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185500/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=7058d645. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525185500
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- The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/books/gospel-of-trees-apricot-irving-interview.html
Word count: 1162Q. & A.
Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: A Missionary’s Daughter in HaitiBy John Williams
March 18, 2018
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CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times“My father has never known how to be gentle with those who do not live up to his expectations,” Apricot Irving writes in her new memoir, “The Gospel of Trees.” Ms. Irving spent part of her childhood in Haiti, where her father, an agronomist, was a missionary. He believed strongly, often stubbornly, in the benefits of reforestation in the country. Against the backdrop of Haiti’s natural beauty, Ms. Irving witnessed political turmoil and lived through her family’s own strife. Below, she discusses how time in Indonesia helped her decide to tell this story, feeling like a “reluctant memoirist” and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
My very first draft, which I found in a box, unfinished, was written when I was 10 or 11. Even then, I understood that the missionary compound was a place I could only untangle with words. By the time I was in my early 20s, a recovering missionary’s daughter, all the questions that I couldn’t answer about that experience — about privilege, inequity, failure, strength, sorrow, beauty — felt suffocating. I wrote this book in order to breathe, in order to find my way through a story I didn’t know how to tell.
The books that I looked to for insights about the missionary experience didn’t resonate with what I had lived. There seemed to be two versions of the missionary narrative: the church newsletter version, full of glory stories, and the grim depiction of missionaries as agents of colonial exploitation. Both felt incomplete. I wanted a story that reflected the complexity and contradictions of a missionary childhood.
At 23, I moved to Indonesia to teach at an international school. It was my first time spending lots of time with kids growing up between languages and cultures. They asked beautiful questions. So much about it was familiar, even though Haiti was in so many ways unlike Indonesia. There were echoes of my own childhood. I thought at first I would write about Indonesia. But I started a writing program in nonfiction, and my adviser said, “It sounds like you already understand what you have to say about that subject. What’s something you don’t understand?” That’s when I asked my parents about Haiti, and they dragged the boxes out of the barns, and it started.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
It has taken me 15 years to finish this book, which allows for many opportunities to be surprised. The first was discovering, in a box of musty newsletters that my father dragged out of the barn, that he had also given me his journals. For the first time, I saw Haiti through his eyes. It was a perspective shift that changed how I remembered those hard years. We fought so much when I was a teenager that I didn’t understand how much he loved Haiti.
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Apricot IrvingCreditTyler MerkelLater, when I returned for the first time with my parents and my husband in 2003, 12 years after we’d left the missionary compound, I was surprised by how much beauty and strength and dignity was still flourishing in Haiti, despite the odds stacked against it. The story we’d told in our missionary newsletters was consistent with the usual caricature of Haiti: desperately poor and in need of our help. That was not what I saw when I returned. In trying so hard to forget the pain and fear of those politically volatile adolescent years, I had also unwittingly forgotten the beauty and strength of Haiti.
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Subscribe to The TimesIn what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
I’m a reluctant memoirist, and in one early draft I wrote, quite confidently: “This is not my story.” I felt so safe behind those words. I was far more interested in interviewing the missionary dynasty that ran the hospital compound, and in telling the story of the rise and decline of the missionaries. I was at best an ancillary character. Over time, at the insistence of wise editors, I began to understand that the story needed to be grounded in my own subjectivity. I had to include my utter delight in Haiti as a six-year-old girl, swept away by its beauty and energy. And I had to include my years as a resentful teenage missionary’s daughter. I had to lay bare my grief and fears and longings alongside the research and the interviews. To make it sing, I had to let my voice be heard.
Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
The Scottish land artist Andy Goldsworthy, whose work is featured in the documentary “Rivers and Tides,” is an inspiration. His book “Ephemeral Works” is folded open in our living room, and my husband and I take walks in the woods with our 10- and 12-year-old boys, creating art out of moss and icicles and river rocks and leaves. Goldsworthy describes how he listens to the materials — the ice, the stones, the branches — as he creates, which is how I would describe the process of weaving together the interviews, transcribed cassette tapes, journal entries, historical research and memories that compose this memoir.
In another life, I would so much prefer to be a land artist. Sentences are so permanent and exacting. I admire the freedom of creating art that disintegrates, or grows, or shifts into another form; there is such wisdom in the act of letting go.
EDITORS’ PICKS
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Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide TollPersuade someone to read “The Gospel of Trees ” in 50 words or less.
It’s a memoir in many voices about a fractured family finding their way back to each other through words. It’s a meditation on beauty in a broken world, loss and privilege, love and failure, trees and why they matter. It bears witness to the defiant beauty of an undefeated country.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.
The Gospel of Trees
A Memoir
By Apricot Irving
373 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.
A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2018, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Missionary’s Daughter in Haiti. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe - The Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gospel-of-trees-review-mission-to-haiti-1521831567
Word count: 481‘The Gospel of Trees’ Review: Mission to Haiti
Is saving others worth the cost of bringing suffering to your own family? Should you keep trying even if you’re doomed to fail and your presence unwanted?
‘The Gospel of Trees’ Review: Mission to Haiti
Photo: Getty Images
By Elizabeth Winkler
March 23, 2018 2:59 p.m. ET
1 COMMENTSIn 1981, at the age of 6, Apricot Irving is uprooted to Haiti by her missionary parents. For this child of Southern California, the Caribbean island is enchanting: the green-throated lizards, the mango trees, the sea as warm as bathwater, the music. It is also terrifying, a place where the hospital is so overcrowded that doctors must choose which patients to save, where drought, starvation and military coups weave an endless tapestry of suffering. Nine years later she finds herself striving, with help from Creole songs and upside-down chickens, to convey this teeming, contradictory world to her parents’ church supporters back home. In “The Gospel of Trees,” Ms. Irving, who returned to Haiti in 2010 to cover the earthquake for the radio program “This American Life,” tries again to tell her story of the island.
The Gospel of TreesBy Apricot Irving
Simon & Schuster, 373 pages, $26Most stories of missionaries, Ms. Irving writes, fall into predetermined narratives: “hagiography or exposé; the Sunday school version or ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ” This memoir eschews all such categories. We watch the author’s idealistic parents fail time and again and yet still deliver redemptive slide shows to drum up funding for the mission, their determination to do good unwavering. (“In church circles . . . being a missionary was almost as good as being a movie star.”) Ms. Irving observes the dynamics of race and privilege—how a Haitian child surrenders his tricycle to a blan (white child), how the missionary culture, for all its altruism, breeds hierarchies, political complicity, and resentment.
Episodes from Haitian history are interspersed throughout—from Columbus’s fateful landing in 1492 to the slave trade and the deforestation that has impoverished the island. (“Each year more soil erodes from the barren hills,” she writes, “like flesh slipping from bones.”) But the book is most powerful when it is most personal, and when it grapples with the ethical uncertainties of aid work: Is saving others worth the cost of bringing suffering upon your own family? Should the Irvings keep trying, even if they’re doomed to fail? Even if their presence is unwanted? For Ms. Irving, the missionary task of bringing God’s light to poor Haiti comes to feel absurd. “God was already here,” she concludes. “Maybe our only job was to bear witness to the beauty—and the sorrow. Without denying either one.”
—Ms. Winkler, formerly of the Economist, is a writer for the Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column.
- The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/100-amazing-facts-about-the-negro-the-gospel-of-trees-a-long-way-from-home-and-the-boat-people
Word count: 135The Gospel of Trees, by Apricot Irving (Simon & Schuster). In this finely crafted memoir, Irving recalls growing up in Haiti during the nineteen-eighties as the daughter of Baptist missionaries. A series of tense, detailed vignettes capture the complexity of the time and place, and of the missionary’s role. Irving’s father, an agronomist, is convinced that reforestation is the key to lifting Haiti out of its poverty. But his “gospel” is no match for food shortages, AIDS, and the violence that follows the 1990 Presidential election. Irving moves seamlessly between the wide-eyed perspective of the child and the critical gaze of the adult, creating a tale as beautiful as it is discomfiting. The question that haunts her also haunts her book: “Should we have kept trying, even if we were doomed to fail?”
- SF Gate
https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Weekend-Booking-Apricot-Irving-s-memoir-delves-12783180.php
Word count: 200Weekend Booking: Apricot Irving’s memoir delves into missionary life in Haiti
By Maxine Marshall Updated 1:07 pm, Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Author Apricot Irving. Photo: Tyler Merkel Photo: Tyler Merkel
Photo: Tyler Merkel
Author Apricot Irving. Photo: Tyler MerkelWhen Apricot Irving was 6 years old, her missionary parents moved their family to Haiti. She left that country when she was 15, as her childhood paradise transformed under the weight of idealism. Irving returned to Haiti in 2010 to cover the aftermath of the devastating earthquake for the radio program “This American Life.”
Now Irving revisits Haiti once again in her first book, a memoir titled “The Gospel of Trees.” The work draws on interviews, family letters and journals to explore the personal and social legacies of missionary intervention. The tale of Irving’s father and his staunch commitment to his mission — and the anguish that follows various failures — is set against the background of Haiti’s tumultuous national history.
Irving is scheduled to discuss “The Gospel of Trees” with Bay Area author Kristin Kaye at at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 29, at the Corte Madera Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
- Medium
https://medium.com/@katherinekwong/book-review-the-gospel-of-trees-2df784fd94c1
Word count: 638Book Review: The Gospel of Trees
Peeling back layers of complexity in the rich vein of memoir, Apricot Irving takes us through her childhood into her family’s well-intentioned move to Haiti. There to support reforestation and spread the Christian gospel opens up a life process of understanding helping and hurting, love and loss, charisma and complexity. From the paradisiacal slopes of the Limbé Valley to the structural halls of Le Hospital Bon Samaritan, Irving gives us the lenses of history, of memory and of grace to view her own life’s reflection on a broken, yet beautiful time.
In the spirit of Emily Dickinson, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant” Irving details the missionary life in a way that is both sheltered and exposed to the extremes of depravity and goodness, destruction and care that life in a developing world holds. It is not all idyllic as family struggles (which Irving is searingly honest about) struggle to find equilibrium like the vulnerable topsoil on the hills around them. Fractures of faith and the intangibility of hope underscore Irving’s constant: clinging to beauty and bearing witness to what she experienced.
Most maxims you’ve connected to a missionary experience like: history is written by the winners, posture of benevolence, time healing all wounds, being the generous ones, are turned on their heads by the candor of Irving’s lived experience. One of the elements that sets Irving’s book apart from missionary memoirs that tell events in either peril or provision; is her uneasy relationship with Haiti’s post-colonial state. By framing the book with a narrative account of Columbus’ arrival in the new world Irving is able to show us what kinds of specific misconceptions her family faced: paternalism, whiteness equaling riches and the burden of generosity as missionaries. Some may consider these invasive topics in a “missionary story” but Irving’s proposition is that they were always there: it just took a different angle to see them.
The emotional core of the memoir is Irving’s relationship with her father. It’s not romanticized or overshared even though Irving’s shorter chapter style and clear, decisive end sentences can deliver repeated emotional punches.
The father-daughter relationship does serve the wider narrative as a microcosm of the challenges her family faces in Haiti: an insular missionary compound, uneasy interactions with local Haitians and family harmony. Most parent-child dynamics in memoirs remind all of us in ways, however small, what kind of imprint our parents have made on our lives .
Irving reflects with grace and vulnerability through that process.
Her questions echo around many who may have found their experience of religion or even the divine at odds with what they see in the world. How does one hope when the line of sick and needy stretched down the street from the hospital? What does one think of God when nature seems to be the clearest evidence of the divine? How do you love a place when it causes you such fierce joy and pain? While the Gospel of Trees points to the resilient nature of beauty as one answer-in-process, the real consolation of the memoir is that Irving has told her own story so specifically that in some way, it will resonate universally with anyone who has ever tried to plant any kind of seed and helped it grow.
pc:Apricot IrvingThe Gospel of Trees published by Simon & Schuster (March 6, 2018) is available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Indie Bound
ChristianityMemoirHistoryTreesHope
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- Shelf-Awareness
http://shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=703#m12339
Word count: 281The Gospel of Trees
by Apricot IrvingApricot Irving's parents were farmers in California when they decided to be missionaries and move with their three young daughters to the north of Haiti. Over nine years, her father planted trees to combat deforestation. As he committed himself to the country and his own goals of saving it, he grew more distant from his family--eventually violent--and more resentful of their privilege and status as outsiders. While they had been poor for California and lived in a cabin without an indoor toilet, in Haiti they were treated as foreign dignitaries, a startling shift. They were also demoralized by the failures of their humanitarian projects, and the knowledge that even if they succeeded, their actions would never be enough to help everyone.
Set against a history of colonialism and political unrest, Irving presents a nuanced look at her childhood and the place where she spent it, both of which are too complex for her to describe easily. "The missionaries I grew up with were neither marauders nor saints; Haiti was neither savage nor noble," she writes. "The truth was far more complicated." She paints these contradictions thoughtfully, and while she both loved and hated living there when she was young, it formed who she is as an adult. With evocative prose and electrifying scenes, The Gospel of Trees shows how a woman reconciles the pain and beauty of the religion, family and country she was exposed to as a girl. --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer, bookseller and publicist
Discover: A considered and compelling memoir about girlhood as a missionary's daughter in Haiti.
Simon & Schuster, $26, hardcover, 384p., 978145169045