The fern imagery began when I was walking all the time during pandemic, in New Jersey, where ferns are plentiful in the summer humidity and the paths through the woods are short but densely crowded in with a full-body sensory experience of green.
Four years later, dealing with the grief of a personal loss and writing about grief and hauntings with my kindred spirit Z Nicolazzo, I told Z that I couldn’t stop drawing ferns over and over. I couldn’t get their growth patterns and tangles and density and edges just right, but still they were soothing, repetitive. I was, at the time, also nursing a very healthy fern back to life after several months of seeming dead. I was elated with the daily peek of new coils pushing up from the ball of dead stalks, with watching the fuzzy spirals turn into long, airy, bright feathers. Z commented that I was finding joy in new life from a very ancient form of plant, and I added that I agreed–they were also always the ones to come back first after a fire from the roots and rich loam of dead trees.
I immediately thought of the Love Letters participants, of the ways that we have turned to our elders and our heritage wisdom, of how we come back and unfurl though we might seem dead (like the phoenixes in “Imagination“). We clean the air and are learning to breathe and speak freely. We are ancient and new at the same time. We create oases and life in institutions that constrict us. We grow and return in in-between, back-and-forth currents.
Like many images in this series, ferns encapsulate the resilience of the Love Letters participants in our relationship to educational institutions, in our efforts to build partnerships to improve our communities, and in our indirect but tenacious efforts to serve the students and families that go through free public schools every day.
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