This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
The South Dakota Humanities Council has selected Trent Preszler's "Little and Often" as the 2024 South Dakota One Book. This week, the author tours the state.
The tour kicked off in the SDPB Sioux Falls studios on Tuesday night.
"Little and Often" details Preszler's childhood in rural South Dakota and how the death of his rodeo-champion father served as the catalyst for a monumental life change.
Preszler discusses his book, the writing process and his next project.
Learn more about his One Book Author Tour through South Dakota.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and then edited for clarity and accuracy.
Lori Walsh:
On behalf of SDPB, I welcome you all to this stop on Trent Preszler’s 2024 One Book South Dakota Author Tour, sponsored by the South Dakota Humanities Council.
Trent Preszler grew up primarily on a cattle ranch in western South Dakota, attending a one-room schoolhouse near the Standing Rock Reservation. He received a bachelor's degree from Iowa State University and was awarded a Rotary scholarship to the UK and a diploma from the Royal Botanic Garden. After a White House internship for President Bill Clinton, he earned a master's in agricultural economics and a Ph.D. in horticulture from Cornell University.
For 20 years Preszler was CEO of the Long Island winery, Bedell Cellars. In 2014, he established Preszler Woodshop, creating bespoke wooden canoes that are truly works of art — and they float. This inspired not only his memoir, “Little and Often,” but also a Newsday documentary about his life that won a 2017 New York Emmy Award for best lifestyle feature.
He's currently a professor of practice in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell, where he teaches five courses in Dyson's Grand Challenges program. His research and teaching are focused on sustainable business practices within the agriculture and forestry sectors, plus diversity and equity in the outdoor recreation economy.
We are so pleased to have Trent Preszler join us on his One Book South Dakota Tour. Welcome.
Trent Preszler:
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
Lori Walsh:
There is a huge interest in forestry in the state of South Dakota, so hopefully at the end of this conversation we can bring up your forthcoming book as well.
Trent Preszler:
Oh, I would love to talk about it.
Lori Walsh:
Let's start with “Little and Often” for people who are new to the book.
This is a time in your life when you are trying to bridge your upbringing — in faith, the farm crisis, your father's Vietnam service, your life in Yankton — and then moving to New York. And early on, it's evident that it's hard for you to find acceptance in either place.
Let's start there.
Trent Preszler:
Should we dive right in? Wow. Okay. Just rip the Band-Aid off.
I think for a large part of my life, I felt like I straddled two worlds, and maybe it's too simple to just say two worlds because it's all one country. But I think many people in South Dakota can relate to the rural life and growing up on a farm or a ranch.
And then coming out as gay ... and then moving to New York City and working for a movie mogul and having this sort of whiplash experience of my life — that constant tension and pulling back and forth. Who am I? Where do I belong? Where's my tribe?
And a big part of feeling, I guess worthy, in this world is feeling like you have a tribe of other people who get you and support you and want to lift you up. For better or for worse, you'd like to be a strong independent man on your own.
But I've always struggled with that. If I go there back to the country, am I too gay for the country? Or in New York City, am I the only person in this cocktail party talking about cattle ranching? No one cares!
And so, I would find myself lost in that world, at least emotionally. The book plops us right down there, I think. I hope.
Lori Walsh:
Yes. What is the experience like to be at a party or to be at work and bring up something casually that, to you or to this audience, might make perfect sense, but to the audience you're in front of, everybody does that double take to say: "Are you making that up? Your father with a bull whip and a rattlesnake ... you must be making that up!"
What were some of those moments like for you? How did they feel?
Trent Preszler:
Well, there's always the talk of flyover country, which is the cast-off notion I found on the East Coast where if you were from one of those places in the middle that people hadn't been to, it was almost like the butt of a joke: "I've never met anyone from there, but who has?” Well, actually a lot of people have.
And the paradox of that is, and I can say this now, having been a New Yorker for more than two decades, a lot of people who live there think, well, this is the center of the world. If you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. It's skyscrapers and Broadway and showtime!
But there's a closed-mindedness there that it is the center of everything, and then nothing else around it matters.
I grew up always wondering what's at the end of the road? How can I get out? I had this full circle moment last semester. I was teaching students at Cornell, and I had this amazing student from the Bronx. He was in my office saying how he grew up and he just couldn't wait to get out. I said, “You grew up in New York City!” And he said, “I just wanted to always get out and see what was at the end of the road.” And I was like, wow, okay. This is a shared experience I think among everyone, wherever we start from, somehow we have an aspirational tug. Where are we going to get to next?
Lori Walsh:
Tell me a little bit about growing up on the ranch, some of the cultural touchpoints that let you realize there was a world outside of South Dakota, outside of your family and faith tradition.
Trent Preszler:
Well, “The Muppets Take Manhattan.” I mean, for real, it's the first movie I saw. We went on my birthday, I think it was my 8th or 10th birthday, I don't remember.
Anyway, I had to take a nap because we had to drive to the movie theater and it was a thing, but there I was, and I'd never really seen images of New York City before. And there's Kermit the Frog and skyscrapers and wow! There's a whole world out there.
I don't know if we have those types of shared experiences so much anymore because media is so all consuming, and we're just bombarded with all kinds of shows and images and things to watch online. But at least back then, for me, that was a real crystallizing moment that Kermit and all of his little fuzzy friends wanted to move to New York, so I can, too.
Lori Walsh:
We drove to town (we lived in rural northwest Iowa) when I was small, and we'd drive to Sioux Falls and then we would do whatever we needed to do in Sioux Falls. And on the car ride back, we would sit in the back seat or the front seat or wherever we sat back then, I suppose, no seat belts. Anyway, we would name the fast-food restaurants that we drove by that we wanted call my dad's attention to. So we'd be like, oh, McDonald's, Burger King. And my dad was not stopping that car. There was no way we were going to get McDonald's.
But coming to town and seeing something that seems so comical right now — we were so excited about McDonald's, we were so excited. And when we would get the French fries we would lick the ketchup off each fry and dip it again in ketchup and lick it off again. We didn't want to ever finish those fries.
The distance you had to travel to get to something that other people took for granted leaves an impression on you, is what I'm trying to say. It certainly left an impression on you.
Trent Preszler:
Well, and the distance doesn't even have to be far. I mean, you went from northwest Iowa to Sioux Falls to have fast food and it affected you profoundly, and it's something you remember to this day.
And those distances, I think, sometimes feel farther emotionally than they might be physically. There's always an othering somehow of what other people have or what support they have in society or who they are and what you're not, at least as a child. I think that can be an easy comparison and an easy road to go down. I mean, thank God I grew up before the internet because I don't know (better or worse) where I would be.
Lori Walsh:
Tell me about your faith tradition. As a young person, what were you thinking about God? What were you thinking about the church of your childhood that you would end up interrogating more as an adult? What were some of the first impressions and memories that you have of spirituality?
Trent Preszler:
Well, church was a weekly routine, and the singing and the song part of it became profound for me.
There was one crystallizing moment when my sister was still alive. She was kind of coming in and out of coherence, I would say. And we went to church one Sunday and she suddenly belted out a line from a song. I think it was the Common Doxology.
And those are sounds and images that are hard to shake. I hear a Lutheran hymn and my head turns on a swivel.
But also I started to question early on: If God is supposedly so great, then how does he allow people like my sister to have these horrible disabilities, or how is there so much suffering in the world, or how can I be a little gay kid and be told: Actually, just kidding, this isn't for you and you have to now burn in hell?
And none of that fit. Those puzzle pieces didn't fit.
Even the "young earth theory" stuff. I remember we had to make a paper mâché Noah's ark in summer Bible camp. And the young scientist in me was like, well, okay, the ark, the flood, all right? Sure. I was told that the reason there are dinosaur fossils is because those were the ones that were too big to fit on the ark during the flood, so they died. Right? That's like a serious belief, a belief structure.
And I think any faith that you grew up in, especially as a child, you do see it as infallible. So I started to explore most of those things. I remember getting to college at Iowa State and first day of Biology 101, the professor starts talking about evolution. And it's the first time in my life that I've heard that evolution is legitimate, and it's based on science, and it is a thing, and that everything wasn't just created with the wave of a magic wand precisely 2024 years ago.
So these are journeys that I've been on and roads that I've traveled all through my adult life. And I wouldn't say that it gets any easier as you get older. I think if anything, part of me sometimes almost wishes that the world were still that simple. Like, oh, if there were just a perfect answer for everything, black and white, how comforting that would be.
Lori Walsh:
Speaking of infallible, your father is a larger-than-life champion rodeo cowboy, tough-as-nails Vietnam veteran. You unpack a box after his death that reveals part of his military story that you and your mother had no idea existed. Tell us about that moment for you.
Trent Preszler:
Well, we came home from his funeral. We were at the dining table in Yankton with mom and my aunt and uncle. And yeah, we opened basically a taped shoebox in the basement and found a Bronze Star from Vietnam and some other photos and just things that we hadn't known about or uncovered or talked about until then.
You think about living a life and then at the end of it, the things that are left. I think about this sometimes now when I look at my dirty garage and I'm like, if I die today, the lawnmower is over there and there's a wheel off the wagon and everything's a mess. But it really crystallized for me when dad died and we found the Bronze Star, and then my mom gave me some of his tools, and then he had this taxidermy duck that I took as well.
You're left holding those things and saying, well, this is it. These are the physical remembrances that I have. But he was a larger-than-life figure for me, and he became even larger once I realized that there was a decorated war hero part to his past.
I remembered asking my aunt at the time why he never talked about it. Why didn't we know he had a Bronze Star? And she said that she wondered if maybe it was just that he wasn't proud of what he did to earn it, which is to kill people, right? In war, you kill people. So he killed people probably in some heroic situation and got a Bronze Star. And that's the reality of war.
We'll never know. And we don't hear those stories. There's so much trauma to unpack already, but we can imagine them. And he was a good marksman.
Lori Walsh:
My father used to say, Lori, there are some questions you just don't ask people.
Trent Preszler:
Yeah, sure.
Lori Walsh:
I showed him by becoming the person who asks all the questions!
But that's how he would address questions. He would just say, there's some questions you don't ask. Not “I don't want to answer.” Not “none of your business.” You don't ask those questions.
Let's talk more about the legacy of the farm crisis, because your family will lose this lifestyle. Your father, who's incredibly, I don't know that I would use the word proud, but his identity is wrapped up in all these things that he does. Now he has to move to town in this crummy apartment that is just not a good fit for your family. This is bringing up something for you ...
Trent Preszler:
Yeah, I mean, I just got goosebumps because you think about our life, even though we were quite poor, our life was expansive. We had thousands, I think almost 10,000 acres of land. It was half desert, and there was scrubby grass that the cows would chew on and try to get some nutrients out of.
And then we moved to Yankton and lived in a small one-bedroom apartment. Dad worked at a factory as a welder, and it felt like the great shrinking of our life.
Suddenly instead of after school getting on a horse and riding until sunset, it would be walking home from school to this one-bedroom apartment and maybe stopping and watching the kids play tennis on the way home through a chain-link fence with weeds growing out of the cracks. Everything condensed, like popping a balloon.
I can never know, or I guess it's maybe the question I didn't ask and don't need to ask, but I don't really grasp how that affected my father. His whole life he was in the rodeo and riding horses and getting bucked off and doing dangerous things. It might've been a real domesticated turn of events.
Lori Walsh:
One minute he is taking you for a ride on a toboggan with your sister strapped to the back of a horse across the frozen landscape of South Dakota, and in the blink of an eye, he is helping you scrape paint off of a brick structure because you're a Rent-a-Kid.
Trent Preszler:
Right. So, I'm glad you picked up on that. The perfect imagery of the freedom of an expansiveness of our life was my father would attach this wooden toboggan to his horse and then his horse would pull us all around the prairie and hooves would be kicking clods of snow in our faces. Right? Probably an OSHA violation in these days, but we were just so free and so happy and squealing with delight.
So then in high school, I was a Rent-a-Kid, which I don't know if it's a program that still exists, but you can hire a kid to do a task, whether it's scraping paint off of a house or mowing or painting.
Lori Walsh:
This is where the title of the book comes from. So I've marked a passage for you if you would be willing to read it.
I'll let you set it up.
Trent Preszler:
I would be happy to. So I took this Rent-a-Kid job to make some money, and I was assigned to this barn. "Barn" is a generous term. It wasn't a barn. It was like this brick monstrosity in the middle of some abandoned lot. And I swear I still have the scars on my finger knuckles because the guy just gave me this brush, and I had to scrape the paint off this barn, and oh, I hated it. But I needed the money too, and I wanted to buy — Air Jordans or whatever it was that we were buying.
Lori Walsh:
A car.
Trent Preszler:
A car, yes.
Lori Walsh:
He said you had to earn it. Yes.
Trent Preszler (reading):
I brushed the paint off one brick, a tiny surface area, eight inches long and two inches wide. “See? At this rate, I'll be here forever.”
My father took the brush and scraped the next brick in the row, and then he stopped. “See this here brush, it don't know it's got to scrape the whole dang barn. It only knows this one brick.”
“That's my point, dad, there must be a million bricks.”
“Your stubborn head's getting in the way,” he said, taking off his square wire-framed glasses and wiping sweat off his face with one long swipe of his shirt sleeve. “Don't you remember anything we talked about back on the ranch? Tell me something that happened all at once there when the whole shebang blew up.”
“Oh, I forgot,” I said, hanging my head and fidgeting with the wire brush. “There's fire and tornadoes and lightning.”
“That's right. They swoop in real quick and they get out fast, and you don't want to be like that. No. And I reckon you remember something else that happened real slow."
"Like the trees."
"So how do you suppose that Ponderosa gets tall? It sure as heck didn't decide one day to just shoot up 10 feet. All it knew was getting a little bigger every summer.”
So we took turns brushing the paint off bricks, making our way across this seemingly endless broad side of the barn. My father coaxed me onward, admonishing me to move slowly and steady. "First this brick," he said. "Then that one."
It worked, kind of. After a few minutes of brushing, I felt a sense of spiraling dizziness from what I swore was heatstroke. I left my father's side and stepped around to the north side of the barn for some relief in the cooling shade. Then I went back to the broad side of the barn and found my father had not missed a beat. He was still kneeling there and had finished scraping the first row of bricks all the way across.
“You see that we did the whole row one brick at a time,” he said, squinting through the glare of a hundred-degree sunshine. “Little and often makes much.”
Lori Walsh:
This is a great metaphor of the book. Another great metaphor is the canoe. So for people who haven't read the book, your father will die. He will give you tools. There's the whole story in-and-of-itself regarding when you get them and how, and you'll get this idea in your head that you are going to — with zero woodworking experience and these tools, many of which are not up to the task of boat building, (and you are not up to the task of boat building) — build a canoe. And this becomes a very expansive metaphor as well.
What were you thinking?
Trent Preszler:
I was crazy. But you're right. That is the central metaphor of the book. And I wanted to create that experience because as distressing as it was scraping paint off brick all summer, it did teach me that if you just go back and do a little bit more every day, eventually through your bloodied knuckles, you'll finish.
And it just really stuck with me. It seared in my mind. And so when he died and I got back to New York I had his tools ... Look, his tools are not a big deal. People make big deals about these tools. It was just a rancher’s toolbox. It was wrenches and chisels and hammers that had never in their lives imagined they would be used to build a boat. These are things that are used as a farrier to work on horse hooves and to build and repair barbed wire fences, so clamps and all kinds of stuff.
But I was living on the ocean at the time, and it was this historic blizzard in February, and there was four feet of snow. The bay froze over in front of my house. I had this epiphany that I was going to use my dad's tools to build a boat so that when the water thawed I could explore the sea.
And so if the whole book is a metaphor, the tools are also because it wasn't as though I inherited some boat builder’s cabinet full of the perfect tools for the occasion. I had to make something out of nothing. And that lesson became clear pretty early on that just scraping the paint off the bricks, you weren't going to start and immediately finished.
You also weren't going to start with one giant piece of wood and carve it down to build a canoe. You have to layer it on piece by piece. And as it painful as it is, and as bloody as your knuckles get eventually, if you just stick with it one piece at a time, you'll get there. That was my north star that guided me through the process.
Lori Walsh:
You're going to make every mistake that you can possibly make and go through Job level of suffering. I do want to talk to you about this concept of suffering because one of the things central to your conversations with your parents that frustrates you about their faith is their ability to embrace suffering. If the Lord wills it so it will be.
You are suffering so much that I couldn't help but think again and again, how much is enough suffering for you? Do you feel like you deserve this suffering? I kept asking myself these questions as you revealed as an author where you wanted me to go as a reader.
That concept of suffering came up for me again and again, and I found incredibly poignancy in that. What comes up for you when you think about the role of suffering in your life?
Trent Preszler:
Gosh. So there have been times when I have believed, and I may even believe it right now, that if something comes too easy, it maybe isn't worth it or maybe isn't worth as much.
Or maybe working hard for something and suffering is like the price you pay is the penance. Maybe there is some metaphor there with Job and all of his sufferings in the Bible. Yeah, it did always kind of frustrate me that, again, like I said before, if all of life had a simple answer when talking to mom and dad that they can just say, well, it's God's will, right? And I would get so angry.
How can that be because people don't like me for being gay, and do I have to suffer permanently? Am I in a permanent state of suffering because of other people — basically, a society that says that you're not okay?
Is suffering necessary to make great art? I don't think so.
You're the first person that's asked me this question in such a meaningful way. I have tried to put up flags with myself and with my husband too. I'll say, "If it seems like I'm suffering too much or putting myself in a position where I'm making things harder than they need to be, tap me on the shoulders," because I think it is instinctual a little bit.
They say your first love is ingrained in you from a very young age. And your first love can be anything. It can be a person, it can be a hobby, and it can also be a state of mind, like suffering. And it can become generational, I think, if you experience loss repeatedly. So I just try to stay mindful of that.
Lori Walsh:
Is the writing hard for you as well? We see, if we read the book, the pain, the physical pain you're going to go through. But I'm wondering about when you were writing the book, when you realized, oh, okay, this is something I'm going to put on paper.
What kind of writer are you? What is the craft like for you? Because I can infer some things based on how I see you build the canoe and then apply it to how I imagine you would be as a writer. But tell me a little bit about how that translates for you.
Trent Preszler:
Sure. Yeah. Writing is so hard. When I finished the canoe, I thought, well, that's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I'll never do anything harder than build a canoe with my dad's tools. And then I wrote a book and that became the hardest thing I've ever done.
Writing is like boat building in that you have to build it piece by piece. It's not a painting. Writing is sculpture. So you're layering on pieces of wood or those clay sculptors who push pieces of clay on with their thumbs to make an image of something. And then you come back two days later and you kind of want to tear it apart and add new things and move things around.
So as a writer, I have not yet found a magical way to be an author without some measure of suffering. I also remember, just like with the canoe, the experience of total elation when it's finally over and when you see the finished product and being able to use the canoe or to see the book in print.
And that's again, this sort of juicy morsel at the end of the journey where you're always trying to get back there to that feeling. For me, my writing practice, it's almost inverted from the canoe building. So I would use the canoe building almost as a stress release when I got home from work. (I still had a day job.)
It was physical work. You're sanding and sawing, and it was aggressive, and you would sweat, and it kind of felt cathartic physically in addition to the emotional baggage that comes along with the whole process.
But with writing, I actually have to do all my writing in the morning when I'm fresh and after, say, two in the afternoon after lunch, then I'm not good for new ideas. Then I'm just an editor. And then I can comb back through what I've already written and move things around or find different meanings. But sometimes I'll wake up and before I do anything else, I'll just go sit down and start writing.
Lori Walsh:
This is a weird question, but how do you use your hands when you write?
Trent Preszler:
Well, I've been told I have kind of fidgety hands, and sometimes I do these little things with my knuckles. And so when I'm writing sometimes, okay, I have my own office so I can shut the door. It gets weird. Writers have weird things.
I'll read aloud to myself, and I'll have one hand on the mouse, and the other one is gesturing. Almost like I'm reading an audiobook or in a play. I have to ... if I get too in the weeds on the page, then I end up re-editing the same sentence 52 times. And I know I'm wasting time and I'm driving myself nuts. But as soon as I read it out loud like an audiobook, I can kind of feel like, does this sound like a book? Oh, yeah, that sounds like a book. Great.
Lori Walsh:
Does this look like a canoe? Yeah. Does this sound like a book? Yeah.
See, that's a gift for the reader because there's so much in this book about your father's hands, the shape of them on the hammer, the feel of your hands on the hammer, how you use your hands, building the boat and as you're talking about building the boat.
As you're sitting here with us, you're using your hands. It's like you have tools in them. I think is a delightful thing to share with us.
Trent Preszler:
I always said that I never knew I had my dad's hands until I saw him in the casket, and his hands were folded across his midsection. And I just thought, wow, our hands are identical.
It never crossed my mind until that moment. And then I thought, well, and my mom always said, your dad could build anything. At the time when she said it, I don't know if she realized what a challenge it was to me. It was almost like, oh, yeah, yeah, he can build anything.
Well, I can too. But by the end, it wasn't defiant. It was more like, yeah, I can too.
Lori Walsh:
I feel like in many ways we're being really kind to your dad right now, but he inflicted a lot of cruelty onto you that I want to hold space for as well. And you express and process that in the book, but you can't undo it. The things that were said, the things that weren't said. This is a glorious meditation on masculinity as well as many other things.
As you think about masculinity that you embody versus what your father embodied, what do you claim for your own?
Trent Preszler:
Wow. I think at a certain point in my life maybe I had normalized the sort of cold stoicism and the not communicating love directly and being hit, but I also made it part of the whole cowboy shtick, I think as a way of rationalizing, well, this is how macho men are.
And I've been meditating a lot more on masculinity lately for my next book because it's a subject I wish I had plumbed the depths of more. Although it is a giant meditation on that, I could have, I think, exposed that a little bit more and put a finer point on it.
In many ways. I live a completely different life. I'm married to a man. We say I love you. Let's start with that. So that's a little different.
And I think that for me, part of being a man is not giving up maybe, and that might just be not giving up on myself but giving up on some other things ... like the hope that maybe someday dad will come back to life and say, I love you, and everything will be peachy keen. That's never going to happen. I also try quite a bit now to not let things go unsaid, to turn that on its head a little bit.
I don't know if I'm getting at the core of your question. Yeah, that makes me squirm a little.
Lori Walsh:
You're so generous. You're so generous to go there with me. We can back off anytime and talk about other things if you want.
But there's a moment where, and this happens a lot throughout the book, as the canoe takes shape, it becomes evident to you that the magnitude of it is representative of the magnitude of your grief.
You don't want anybody else to see it.
Trent Preszler:
Yes. So ashamed.
Lori Walsh:
So ashamed of this because you're afraid it's not good enough because it's literally falling apart as you build it. But also you're afraid that somebody will recognize that and say, oh, you are in a lot of pain, Trent.
Trent Preszler:
That much pain! That they might see it and think you're in 20-foot-long-boat amount of pain. That's a lot.
Yeah. People would come to the door, and I wouldn't let them in. The house was a mess. I was a mess. And it was the size and shape of my grief that is for certain. Is it still? I don't know. It floated.
Lori Walsh:
There are also so many men in this book who arrive in different ways to show you love, even if you never meet them. The person who writes the manual on how to build a boat becomes an absent father. The friends who come into your house and say you need the right clothes. I'm going to take you to a tailor, and we're going to sew you what feels like a costume at first and then becomes part of your skin in so many ways.
Tell me a little bit about the importance of other people who patiently showed up for you.
Trent Preszler:
So many great people. The hardest part about writing a book is deciding what to include and what not. So there's a lot of people who did wonderful things for me and have been great friends and family members who were not in the book, but I did choose to highlight a few key people who had helped me see that I was worthy of love and worthy of having this kind of transformation, of doing this big thing of building this canoe.
I also think, just to backtrack one tick, that I might've also been slightly ashamed of people not just seeing that it was the size and shape of my grief, but also that I could do it.
Like, oh, wow, I have this power within me. Was I ready to accept that and harness that and do something bigger than myself? I hadn't quite yet grasped that. Seeing now the evolution of my life, what this canoe has spawned in my life is so extraordinary.
I'm sure my dad could never have imagined it in a thousand years — from the Emmys to the book to the book tour. It's sort of mind blowing. And I think back to those times when I was afraid of letting people see it. I think I might've been also afraid of its potential to liberate me from the pain and the suffering. Not to say it never existed or will not continue to exist somehow, but ...
Lori Walsh:
Which brings us to your next book.
Trent Preszler:
Oh, yes.
Lori Walsh:
Tell us about “Evergreen” conceptually so people can be grounded in what it is. And then I kind of want to make the connection between this book about a wooden canoe to a book about trees.
Trent Preszler:
So I have a book coming out. It's with a different publisher, with Hachette Publishing Group with Algonquin Books. It'll be out in about a year. It's called “Evergreen: The Trees that Built America.”
It's really a full-scale economic history of the world, but especially the United States as seen through the lens of evergreen trees — of pine spruce, fur, cedar— in ways that I think and I hope will blow people's minds. And that they will find themselves shaking their heads that they had no idea.
I think I picked up where I left off a little bit with “Little and Often” because I was able to, I think in a little bit more full-throated voice, take the gloves off in “Evergreen.”
I start out with the perfect image of Thanksgiving, having food and decorating the Christmas tree and then the snow falling. It's Christmas and everyone has an image of a Christmas tree. But they have also, throughout history been cudgels for enslaved people. They've been a tool for the genocide of Indigenous people. We have cut down every single old growth tree on this entire continent and displaced and marginalized all the people who used to care for them.
And we keep going back to the well. We keep hoping that the trees will give for us, and they're finally kind of sputtering out. And so we're replacing them with plastic and fiberglass and things that are evergreen and that last forever that are now clogging our landfills and literally being infiltrated into our bodies. They're finding microplastics in our blood and breast milk and hair.
So it is really kind of a broad sweeping story of this country's evolution through the eyes of not just the trees, but the people who suffered to exploit them.
We ended up in a society where we don't just buy plastic Christmas trees, but we also buy spray-painted Christmas trees that are pink and purple and blue because God forbid we have something real and wild in our life.
Everything has to be kind of zhuzhed up and fake and artificial. I also have a chapter in this book — which I hope will be one of the things I talk about a lot on my book tour — a couple chapters about masculinity and gay lumberjacks.
In the late 1800s, it wasn't just illegal to be gay, you were actively persecuted.
Your neighbors and your family members and people at your church had full permission to spy on you. Your landlords could report you to the police. Your name would be in the newspapers the next day if they suspected any kind of homosexual behavior. And so gay people were really marginalized, not in the sense we think of today, but in a really visceral and violent way. You were forbidden from holding a job in the state government, the federal government.
So forests became kind of a Queer space (capital-Q Queer). They've always been like a weird space and dark and kind of hidden, but they became a safe place. The forestry sector, the logging companies, hired lots and lots of queer men to be lumberjacks because we were invisible and expendable.
They needed guys who weren't married to travel around the country working in the most dangerous jobs in the world, cutting down 200-foot-tall trees, risking their lives. And the death rate among loggers was shocking. If you worked in the forest for 20 years, you had about a 50 or 60% chance of being killed.
So what better workforce than the men who already felt totally invisible in society? So anyway, I go there a little bit more in “Evergreen,” and I think maybe some of the themes of masculinity that I started in “Little and Often” in wrestling with these images of my father, now I wrestle with them on a basis of historical fact in this country and whose backs this country has been built on and why. So I'm very excited for “Evergreen.”
Lori Walsh:
As are we. You are generous. The book is brilliant. I cannot wait for “Evergreen.” I hope you'll come back. We care deeply about our Black Hills National Forest, so it's very relevant to us as a book and we need it. Thank you for giving us that.
Trent Preszler:
Thanks for having me, Lori. It's a pleasure.
