Dunphy’s charming, lyrical ode to her special trees will appeal to readers who enjoy natural-history memoirs, books about trees, and reflections on women’s lives and relationships with people, history, current events, and the natural world.
~Sue O'Brien, Library Journal
In Divining, veteran writer Maureen Dunphy brings her carefully honed prose to this personal genre. In sixteen essays, she explores different species of trees that have touched her life, a mixture of botanical information and her personal remembrances. She captures the moment, the short-lived foliage, and the eternal, the deep roots reaching to an ancient past. These narratives––both profoundly personal and enormously universal––are a rich and joyous read.
~Aaron Stander, host, Michigan Writers on the Air, Interlochen Public Radio
Divining is a carefully constructed journey with one of Michigan's most talented writers. It does not pretend to include every tree, or every detail about the trees who appear in the book. Instead, it uses trees as anchors in deep waves of story. As she describes trees she has known from the Great Lakes to the central mountains and ocean coastlines, Maureen Dunphy connects a lifetime of memories to needles, leaves, seeds, bare branches, moist breath, bare roots, and remnant rings of ancient stumps. Each chapter folds over an origami-like idea centered on a species of tree but is really about the relationship between people and the trees they often forget to see. History, science, social systems, ceremonial requests, and the power of trees to heal are all part of the conversation. In her "memoir in trees," Dunphy urges readers to listen more carefully to the Standing Nation, but she also models listening to our own younger and older selves as we consider roots and branches.
~Margaret Noodin, author of What the Chickadee Knows (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and Weweni (Wayne State University Press, 2015)
This amazing memoir tracks one woman's connection with trees, with the natural world, with home and place. It is deeply personal and informative, intimate and well-researched, tender and science-based. Those contradictions make it both relatable and important in this time of climate crisis when the value of vigorous forests (and individual tree species) cannot be overlooked. Each chapter spirals around a central tree, from the maple to the crepe myrtle. Dunphy uses each species as both framework and also deep metaphor for life growth. As Dunphy explores how trees relate to her life, the light shifts from places where the trees thrive to threats from invasive fungus and nonnative insects to the hard-core realities of development. Threaded through all of her places are luminous moments of connection, her life history, and love of the trees.
~Anne-Marie Oomen, author of As Long as I Know You, winner of AWP's Sue William Silverman Award for Creative Nonfiction
I've read all of Maureen Dunphy's books with interest and consider her an important voice in Great Lakes literature. With Divining, A Memoir in Trees, she gives us an intimate, honest, and highly original view of the complexities of human life as seen through nature's lens.
~Jerry Dennis, author of Up North in Michigan and The Living Great Lakes
In Divining, Maureen Dunphy creates a voice that weaves poignant lyricism, the observational objectivity of a scientist, and the warmth of a welcoming conversation on the front porch. As we listen to her story, we once again want to climb that old maple in the backyard, only this time we will listen to the language of the leaves.
~Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press, 2013), co-recipient of the gold medal for poetry from Foreword Reviews
Engaging, intimate, and expansive, the essays of Divining envision a kindred spiritedness between Dunphy and members of the "Standing Nation." Whether discussing the Eastern Redcedar, Sweetgum, Ginkgo, or American Sycamore (the tree she loves the best), Dunphy conveys that cultivating relationships with trees "is one of the things that makes us truly human."
~Amy O'Loughline, Foreword Magazine
