Pleasing Tree

Nominated for the 2020 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction & Nominated for the 2020 Association for Mormon Letters Creative Nonfiction Award Brooke Larson’s essay collection Pleasing Tree explores the human relationship with the wilderness. Beginning with a Mormon-founded experiment in primitive survival, teenagers hike the Arizona desert while Larson shines light on the effects of prolonged exposure to the outdoors, to lands considered inhospitable to life. Recalling Biblical and religious sojourns, Larson maps her own travels from the desert to Salt Lake City to New York City to Jerusalem, observing the life that curls in a leaf, the bug that spews cinnamon-flavored goo, and the water that occasionally floods the desert. Her essays track the impact the often unnoticed has on the human psyche, discovering the awe upon the recognition that even the desert’s heart beats. This collection crawls with insects, communicative plants, and poetry. It pulses with blood and breath, excrement and the bodies of the living.