Patrick Lane is on a roll. His memoir There Is A Season was nominated for scads of literary awards including the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize, the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Go Leaving Strange, his collection of new poetry, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and is also on the long list for the 2005 ReLit Awards. With summer coming on it feels as if he — and his Vancouver Island garden — are entering their finest season.

The May issue of The Walrus includes a new piece by Lane, “The Forest’s Edge”, which reads like a quiet coda to his Season. If you need an excuse to buy this Walrus (which you don’t, of course) then this is it. Or if you need a Lane hit fast, then scoot over to www.oldgrowthfree.com, where they’ve got a PDF version of the article available for download.

At the core of the piece is the dilemma faced by all writers who care about trees and forests: the publishing business (and despite the temptingly romantic view of publishing as a gentleman’s profession, it is a business) consumes an enormous amount of wood fibre: one of the many euphemisms for trees. Books (and magazines and newspapers) eat trees. And writers — logorrheic creatures all of them — are the ones who stimulate this appetite: they are the amuses bouche of our meal-metaphor.

At texts&pretexts we are rigorously forest-friendly:¹ all of us frequent used book stores in preference to new (the official t&p used book store is the legendary MacLeod’s Books); our in-house production line is entirely digital; and we constantly nag (both of) our subscribers to conserve paper whenever possible.

So if you are one of the many who have been moved to print out our aphorism in order to affix it to your bulletin board or fridge, please remember to follow the example of Canadian publishing industry trend-setters and use old-growth-friendly paper. The Ents will thank you.

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¹ The forest pictured above is the result of plugging the texts&pretexts URL into this nifty Java applet which transforms a website into a tree or trees. To quote from their site:

tree accesses the source code of a web domain through it’s url and transforms the syntactic structure of the web site into a tree structure represented by an image. this image illustrates a tree with trunk, branches and ramifications. first each tree is initialized, than all html links are detected, chronologically saved and finally displayed.

the first tree corresponds to the domain; according to the syntax of the web site each further tree that builds up represents a sub page including all existing elements. the color of these trees reflects the color values of the domain and its sub pages.