Author Alison McGhee examines death and grief with a speculative twist in her upcoming middle grade novel Telephone of the Tree. Most of the trees on 10-year-old Ayla’s block were planted “to celebrate new babies.” Ayla and her best friend Kiri always reveled in their connections to their trees, spending time nestled within their branches. When Kiri suddenly goes missing, an old-fashioned telephone mysteriously appears in Ayla’s tree, which people throughout her community begin using to call deceased loved ones, including a husband’s late wife and a five-year-old’s pet gecko. McGhee spoke with PW about healing from loss, trees’ ability to communicate, and the long road to publication.
You write in your acknowledgments that you began formulating the idea for Telephone of the Tree in 2016. Why do you think it took you until now to finish writing it?
I listened to a story on This American Life many years ago [“Really Long Distance,” produced by Miki Meek]. It was about the wind phone in Japan, which is a payphone booth that a man named Itaru Sasaki erected in his garden after his cousin passed away. He would use the payphone to talk to him, even though it wasn’t connected to anything. A year later, in 2011, an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. And after that, people would come to Mr. Sasaki’s payphone and call their own loved ones who had been swept away or killed. The story haunted me. It haunts me still; it gives me goosebumps. It’s such a beautiful and moving story to me, because don’t we all just want to talk to our loved ones who are gone? I wanted to use it as the inspiration for a novel. I tried to write one for adults, but it didn’t work. And then I tried to write one for children in multiple ways and forms, but it just did not work. It was sort of lifeless on the page. So, I kept coming back to it and, finally, in great frustration, I said, “Just try one more time, Alison, and then abandon ship if nothing magic happens.”
I suddenly had this image of two children communicating to each other down the block from trees, and the story just took off. I feel like it wrote itself in a few months, but that was a few months and six or seven years of attempts.
What was the significance behind the river birch and white pine trees that were planted for Ayla and Kiri’s births?
I love trees. White pines and river birches are two of my very favorite trees. I grew up way out in the country surrounded by all kinds of trees, and they were always a refuge to me. I had a tree house in a big maple that none of my siblings could get into, so I would just hang out up there to have some space. In recent years, I’ve learned more about trees and how they communicate with each other. Many trees can communicate using underground networks of fungi. They also communicate through the air. If there’s an insect infestation, or pests that are invading one tree, it’ll send out signals of warning to other trees so they can mount defenses against invasion. Or if one tree isn’t getting enough water or food, other trees can funnel nutrients to it. I just thought that was the most beautiful thing about these beings that I already loved.
Realizing that these children were connected to their trees—and connected to every other tree on the block—and that they had all been planted in honor of the births of people who lived on the block, or in honor of their lives after they passed away, was a part of what helped me write Telephone of the Tree. It just seemed like this really beautiful meshing of the natural world and the children’s worlds.
What did you hope to convey by juxtaposing Ayla’s denial of Kiri’s disappearance alongside others’ acceptance of loved ones who were missing from their lives?
That was a balance that I held in my heart throughout the book. I have so much tender respect for children and their strength and their resilience, even when they don’t know they’re strong and resilient. I work as a volunteer crisis counselor on the National Suicide Hotline and the Crisis Text Line, and many of the people who text are children. They’re holding these emotions inside them that feel so completely overwhelming to them. I look on them with so much love because by the time you get to adulthood, you know that most of the time, you will survive these huge feelings. But children can’t imagine that yet.
Ayla is representative of that. Kiri is her best friend in the world, and Kiri is far, far away. But Ayla cannot yet admit [that] to herself, so she is attempting to hold her enormous grief at bay by thinking that Kiri will magically return. I think most readers will understand early on that Kiri is not going to physically return, and that Ayla is just struggling with all her might to come to terms, in her own time and in her own way, with this grief. What I love about her community is that all the adults around her give her space; they just recognize that she is going through something huge, and they are there for support and to listen. But they’re not trying to push her into anything that she’s not ready to grasp yet.
In a note to booksellers for Telephone of the Tree, you write that you “used to conjure in my mind the voices of the people I loved most.” Do you ever draw upon these voices to populate your own works?
I don’t know if I draw on them to create my work, but I draw on them to support me in my life.
I hear my grandmother’s voice, when I look at some of the things she gave me around my house. And I actually have a couple videos of my dad, who passed away last year. Sometimes when I just need to hear his giant bellow of a voice, I can conjure it in my head, no problem, but it’s nice to also play those videos. I had a friend—John—who died two years ago. In our last conversation two days before he died, he started to cry. He said, “Just keep writing, the way only you can write, and do that through your whole life. And don’t listen to anybody else.” He was dying, and he still had that gift to give to me. I think remembering the voices of those people who are so important to us is something that we can draw on throughout our lives.
In your 2018 interview with PW, you said that you “always impose an arbitrary framework” on your stories. What framework did you chose for Telephone of the Tree?
In my various attempts at this book, I imposed a different invisible framework each time until I finally came to this one, which is all about trees. After learning about how they communicate, it just seemed like this could be a way that we could communicate with the ones we love who have passed, since there’s not a visible way to do it.
So, I decided that the book would follow the natural path that trees take to communicate and that every single person in the book would be named after a tree, which involved me doing lots of digging about tree names around the world. Some names, like Ayla and Kiri, won’t feel familiar to native English speakers or North American readers for the most part. But everyone in the book is named after a tree and each of their trees was chosen to represent something about their personality.
As someone who’s written picture books and novels for all ages, how do you decide who the audience for each new idea will be?
I tend not to know the entire story before I begin a book. I’ll usually have an image in my mind that won’t leave me and then the feeling of how I want readers to feel when they finish the book.
It’s kind of like how I make quilts. I like standing in front of different colors of fabric and patterns and imagining the placement of one against another and how they might feel when they’re all together. That’s the same feeling I get when I’m writing a book. How will this image go with this imaginary person? It kind of gathers itself as I’m typing, without a ton of conscious thought. When I began writing this book, the initial versions I wrote felt a little flat, and I couldn’t make them sing. And then, finally, this one took off because these two children were the bearers of the story. They loved each other so much, and they were so loved on their block.
And so that’s the book that it turned out to be. I cannot say it couldn’t have succeeded as an adult novel—I just couldn’t make it work. I guess, for every novel I write, they all find their best audience.
What are you working on these days?
I have a new novel for children that comes out summer 2025. It’s sort of weird, sort of sad. It’s about this girl named Daisy Jackson, who has been through some things, and she has to take on the world. Beyond that, I’m also writing a comedy for adults.
Telephone of the Tree by Alison McGhee, illus. by Dan-ah Kim. Rocky Pond, $17.99 May 7 ISBN 978-0-593698-45-7
