We will gather with a large Ailanthus and a few babies in a weedy lot on the edge of the urban wild of Bussey Brook Meadow to participate in a collective somatic exercise with Ailanthus, exploring other ways of knowing and being with our more-than-human kin. Then we will process and reflect through drawing and writing with ink made from Ailanthus’ leaves. Finally we will reflect, translate and share our experiences through words and sounding.

Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. The author of six books to date, his writing has appeared in such venues as The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times. His most recent book, TREE, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. With a far-flung network of collaborators, he has created films, installations, and experiences from Boston to Berlin. For Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, he edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, a magazine exploring the urgency of tree-entangled science, history and storytelling for our time, and he lectures in comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.