The Story Behind "Trees"
My short story "Trees" was inspired by a dark period in California history.
My short story “Trees” was published today, in a special issue of the New American Studies Journal on women and work in the nineteenth century titled Transatlantic Women at Work: Service in the Long Nineteenth Century. This is an abridged version of my story that won ScreenCraft’s 2023 Cinematic Short Story Competition and is one of the stories in my collection that won Launch Pad’s 6th Annual Prose Writing Competition.
From the issue’s introduction: “[S]ervice was required of women in the nineteenth century, but what it entailed varied widely according to class, ethnicity, and location. This special issue is meant to open a new field of research that must be expanded to include a diverse range of women’s experiences. A solicited short story by Leanne Phillips points the way by evoking the perspective of Native Californians compelled to serve in white settlers’ homes.”
Outside, the sun was low against Monterey Bay. The softening light turned the water into a shimmer and the trees into shadows. The Monterey pines are native to California’s Central Coast and to Mexico, too …. But the Monterey cypress is native only to the Central Coast of California …. These trees are strong and sturdy and evergreen—their leaves never die. They bear cones and the cones produce seeds and the seeds fly on the wind and reproduce wherever they might land. The Monterey cypress can live for three hundred years.
—from “Trees” by Leanne Phillips
I am honored and humbled to have contributed in some small way to this important research and discussion, and I am beyond thrilled that my story found a home in this special journal issue. When I wrote my story, I never imagined the home it would find or that it would have a place in something this significant.
Also, check publishing in an academic journal off my bucket list! I majored in English and minored in history, and I always dreamed of having my work published in an academic journal. But publishing in an academic journal is no piece of cake—footnotes, bibliography, peer review, and all that jazz. But I found a loophole, friends—no bibliography required if it’s a short story!
This story was inspired by a dark period in California’s history, post-Mexican-American War. White settlers treated the Californios, who’d lived in what is now Southern California for centuries, as if they were outsiders. In the absence of official law enforcement, they formed “vigilance committees”—basically groups of white vigilantes who not only enforced order but harassed, stole from, and even murdered Californios, often by lynching. A month after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, on Juneteenth, two Black men were found hanged in Southern California. Seeing the parallels between what is happening now and what happened in California 150 years ago inspired this story. These atrocities are not new—they have been going on since the beginning of time.