A memoir in plants

A Q&A with Briana Loewinsohn, author of the graphic memoir Ephemera

A plant is a dangerous place to put a memory. It will grow, change, die. When I return to Washington state, the trees I remember planting as saplings are 50 feet tall. Irrefutable evidence I am old. And yet I also contain my younger self, right there, learning to carve out enough space in the rich soil for a fir’s roots, and also for my own life.

Maybe, then, a plant is an honest place for a memory. Slow change. You rarely observe a memory transform, but look away and then come back (months, days, decades) later and it will be different. Some grow and branch, shading, flowering. Others shrivel. A few keep their form and structure—healthy, but small. Memories are cell, not stone.

Which brings us to a remarkable book, a graphic memoir by Briana Loewinsohn, Ephemera, out from Fantagraphics this spring. This book is gorgeous and heartbreaking, a meditation on caretaking and processing the lessons a parent transmits, intentionally and otherwise. I interviewed Briana on Forum for her elegy for the East Bay’s shuttering cafes, and as we were leaving the studio, she told me about her “memoir in plants.” I was like: OAKLAND GARDEN CLUB MUST KNOW THIS WORK. (Also, see: her delightful Instagram.)

As the book opens, we meet our narrator, a woman wandering in a red-hued landscape. It’s a dream, perhaps. She lies down and is transported back to her childhood. We come to learn that her mother struggles to mother her, and the girl she was finds herself wandering in the garden of memory, trying to remember what to do with all the plants.

In the (edited) interview below, we talk about five plants that play a role in her book: blackberries, monstera, poppies, ferns, and camellias. I wanted her perspective on the morphology of the plants, as she learned it in her painstaking artistic practice. But I also loved the way the plants burrowed into our minds and helped us find points of connection. You know: Plants as plants, plants as portals.

Blackberries

Alexis: So blackberries. I know them intimately. I grew up with them in Washington State, battling them with weed whacker and lawnmower. It's one thing to draw a single flower, an individual plant. This is different. How you draw a tangle?

Briana: I grew up in West Berkeley, with some hippies, so no one cared for our backyard. Our whole backyard was either cement or just this crazy tangle of blackberries. They grew over what must've been an old brick smoker. The page where my sibling’s little feet are sticking up was actually one of the very first images of the book. That is one of my earliest memories. At some point when I was very little, my sibling was trying to climb something and fell in. And my memory is these little feet sticking up from an ocean of leaves. When I draw a tangle, I start from the foreground and then you can keep adding in layers as you as you go. I'll jump around to make it irregular and then you can keep adding little bits. But every vine connects to an actual vine. That's what is truly insane about the drawings.

Alexis: You know, I did that. I was like: I wonder if these connect up and I had that experience of being like, "Oh my god—she did it!"

Briana: I think it makes it feel more real and less like a piece of fabric or a pattern, if the vines do actually connect. I did want that feeling of being overwhelmed by the leaves.

Alexis: Swallowed up.

Briana: Yeah, swallowed up. And I liked keeping the leaves small and flat.

Alexis: It's fascinating how you show the color variation within the tangle.

Briana: The one with the feet sticking out, I did more big swaths of color and then would go in and color them to try and get that feeling more of water. The previous page was a little different. A blackberry leaf has a silvery back color.

Alexis: I hadn't actually noticed that when I looked before, but now that I'm thinking about my experience of blackberries, they do have total color variation on the back.

Briana: Yeah, magnolia leaves have the same thing, right? They're one color on one side and another on the other.

Alexis: On color, too—the colors here aren't unreal, that feels unfair, but they are not realistic.

Briana: I couldn't change hue, it was all in this one color, but I did have value to be able to change, so texture and value I could change.

Alexis: In this book, blackberries have an emotional valance, too.

Briana: Yeah, they often are so prickly, so invasive. Because they're invading my yard, I found out that they can grow from the front end. They start to grow roots out of the tip. If you have a little vine coming over and it touches dirt, it will start to grow roots out of the front of it. It's a monster.

Alexis: I have really wonderful memories about battling them, in part because it was just me and my dad. We’d been in Mexico City, then Los Angeles. Then, at the age of ten, we moved to rural Washington. So, my memories of my father get richer and richer over time. We moved to this rural place and he was there all the time. One of the first things we took on was this corner of the front yard, where overgrown blackberries had just swallowed everything. From then on, we did a ton of that kind of yard work together. I think that was the first time I used a weed whacker.

Briana: I've never used a weed whacker.

Alexis: A lot of the garden/farm tools are magical to me. Leaf blowers, chainsaws, that stuff. You can't do something and then you can do it. Feels like a superpower. So… blackberries are a bright memory for me, even though they're so impossible to deal with and they never die and you can't kill them.

MONSTERA

Alexis: This is an incredible drawing. One thing I was thinking about this one: the little bits around the edges of the monstera leaf. Is that an emotional representation or plant disease?

Briana: That was... "I'm going to go rogue here." I try to really commit to realism. A snake plant in that greenhouse, I tried to be really accurate about a snake plant's patterning. I don't know if monstera ever have those little dots around the edges, but I really just wanted to give it a little more flair. The monstera, the shape is so incredible, but it's such a clean looking plant, and I wanted a weathered feel.

Alexis: What did you end up learning to draw the monstera? You must have studied the way the leaves umm … turn into pieces? There’s probably a technical botanical name for that, which I don’t know.

Briana: Readers, I have a giant monstera behind me, and the way that the monstera leaf grows is really fascinating because it comes out as a sphere, and then it slowly unfurls. And it is predetermined how many little holes or cuts are in it. [points to leaf] This is a young monstera leaf and it has no holes in it. [points to other leaf] The next one, you can see there's one little hole. And then the next time this one grows a leaf, it's going to have a couple more. Each leaf comes out completely pre-set with how many holes it's going to have. The older it gets, it starts to have holes within holes.

Alexis: No way. Do we know why?

Briana: I don't know. I'm just a admirer of plants.

Alexis: Honestly, it feels too metaphorical. You get older and you have more holes, even holes within holes.

Briana: When I notice a new leaf, we all get really excited there's going to be a new leaf because… [sound off-camera] Oh, okay. My son says only I get excited. But yeah, I do. How many holes is it going to have? How big is it going to be?!

POPPIES

Alexis: The poppies kind of broke my heart. You're bringing this offering to your mom, and she says, “This is just making it worse.” For me, that was the hardest moment in the whole book, because I can—as a parent— weirdly see why that would be. But my inner child was gutted by that.

Briana: Once you're a parent, you've seen both sides of it. Even if you're doing your best to not do that to your kids. In some moments, they're being so sweet, and you're like, “I just want to be alone.” Hopefully we are being kinder to our children.

I love icelandic poppies because they're so bold, but the petals are so fragile looking. They're so papery. It's the same thing with the blackberry flowers. You have this very invasive, prickly, aggressive, dominant plant, and then the flowers are so fragile looking, they look like they could float away. I really love incongruities like that.

FERNS

Alexis: Let’s talk about ferns. My excitement for them is not unlike your excitement about the monstera. You see the little fern fist forming, and you're like, ooooh, here it comes! But, then you have to wait a ... plant amount of time before you actually see how it’s going to look.

Briana: I think those are called the fiddlehead? Well, my thoughts on ferns. I wanted to put plants on the title page. And I asked my editor if he had a plant that he wanted represented and he said ferns. (His name is Eric Reynolds and he's also an artist, a cartoonist. He's from Washington.) I really went for it with those ones because that was a different shape of fern. And there were red edges. So I had to go in and color all of those. He really appreciated that.

Alexis: Do you know what I love about this? In the abstract, platonic form, a fern doesn't have a ton of variation to its little fern-y pieces, but in reality, any real fern does have all these weird little variations in its angles and arc and everything. I love that sometimes they reach out and touch each other. But other times, they say: “No, I'm staying away from that guy.”

Briana: That's what I like about drawing plants in general. Even though all the elements look like cookie cutter pieces, they are unique. Each little fern finger might crossover or it might separate or maybe it got bitten off by some little bug, so it's missing. And I think that's what makes them so endlessly engaging.

CAMELLIAS

Briana: She always used to complain that camellias were always at houses that she lived at, and she felt she couldn't escape them. But she really liked them. I have this tattoo that's for my parents. It’s a camellia for my mom and a live oak branch for my dad because he really loved trees and he really loved Berkeley. I don't know if my mom had a favorite flower. I feel crazy not knowing that. Why wouldn't I have asked her that? Or why would she never talk about that? She loved flowers in general. But she was not a gardener. So, in the book, that's all a metaphor.

I like camellias for her because I think that life was hard for her. So I liked having the plant that wouldn't leave her alone as a representation of her. And they grow so heartily here. She was a very strong person in a lot of ways, but was just so at odds with the world in so many other ways. And there’s another thing. In some cultures, camellias are called lovers flowers, because the way camellias fall off of a tree is different from other flowers. They fall complete. The whole flower comes off together, not petal by petal. I didn't put that in the book because I was worried it would give too much of a romantic twinge to what I was trying to say about my mom. But I liked that notion for myself.

Alexis: I’m surprised your mom wasn’t a gardener. I assumed she was from the book.

Briana: Well, I wanted to do this book about my mom and I really like plants, so I decided to fuse those things. I didn't want it to be an autobiography. I did want it to be more of a memoir—I'm telling a story and this is how it felt and this is how I'm choosing to tell it. So I made it about plants: She had all these skills. I knew she had them. She was in Alcoholics Anonymous for most of my life and was a sponsor to a million people. My whole childhood was me sitting at her feet while she was on the phone dispensing this incredible life advice. She could save these people from the depths of their lowest point and help them and say all these things, but then she could turn around and be this monster. How she could do both of those things was so fascinating to me. I don't understand how it couldn't translate to me and my sibling. She had this love and kindness in this one sense, why couldn’t she have it in this other sense?

Alexis: It's fascinating to think about why someone would feel completely competent to deal with people in their darkest moment. But the innocents are the hard ones to deal with. They’re at the other end of that spectrum They've done nothing wrong.

Briana: Yeah. You're a little kid. You're just trying to do everything right and be the best. But these other people are getting all the goods.

Alexis: In a weird way, your mom is doing the right thing. Like, the people who need the most, they're getting the most from her, you know? Last word on camellias… Was there anything about their structure that you found interesting or was it more about the nature of their flower and your mother’s relationship with them.

Briana: I think I started with it because I think they irritated my mom. I always associate them with her, even though I don't know that she loved them. And she was difficult. So it makes sense to have a difficult relationship with them. But I do think that their tree structure is very lovely and effortless. The way that they grow is very pretty. It's not gnarled and craggy, like an oak, which is my other favorite tree. They are very graceful and the flowers themselves can be very geometric. And their leaves are super hardy, not papery at all. They're just, “Yah! We're a leaf.”

Alexis: If a leaf can be chonky, they're chonky.

~ FIN ~

Cuttings

• A beautiful plant poem by Cecilia Vicuña, “Chance Encounter.” It begins:

  “The idea of coming upon the unexpected
  as something carefully arranged
  by a prior hand that linked
  all its forms aesthetically
  to explain a disordered garden
  at the height of its disorder,
  a gesture not yet carried out, gently stirring
  with no way of knowing what will become of it.”

  (via In the Clear Stream of All Of It)

• Lisa Hamilton has a book coming out later this month, The Hungry Season, that looks pretty spectacular, centered on a Laotian woman’s trajectory to the San Joaquin Valley: “At the root of her success is a simple act: growing Hmong rice, just as her ancestors did, and selling it to those who hunger for the Laos of their memories.”

• Sounds like a hybrid potato is coming, says this research in Cell.

• Hmmm, this French ecovillage… I can’t help but feel a pang of something: “They want to reimagine community life entirely, building new democratic models, childcare systems and a spiritual orientation that aligns people with each other and nature.” Sounds good, non?