Q: What gave you the idea to include a tree as a central character in your novel, The Chorus Beneath Our Feet?
Several years ago the idea of what exists beneath the ground, beneath our feet, began to worry itself away in my brain. It all began with learning about the scores of indigenous children who died at the Residential Schools. Then I read more stories of mass graves being unearthed, such as hundreds of infant remains at a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland, and a mass grave recently discovered in Syria from Assad’s crackdown on protestors.
Then I started reading books about trees and their root systems, and the massive and complex worlds of fungi, and how without subterranean fungi, we wouldn’t exist. Nothing would. I thought about all the skeletons—human and animal and insect—trillions of them, that lay deep in the ground, along with the fungi and soil and clay, and insects and moss and the massive root systems of plants and trees. And how all of this connects us to our past, and the horrors that lay beneath us as we walk above it on our bipedal bodies, trying to survive in a fleeting, precarious world.
The more I learned about trees, and how they communicate, the more the central tree in the novel—which had been there from the beginning, from the first image I had of the story—clarified. What if what was beneath us could speak? Who or what could be that vessel, who or what could act as their voice?
I knew this particular story wouldn’t be complete unless the tree was able to speak to its own stories of the past, in an attempt to complete a cycle of sorts between the present of the novel and a difficult chapter of our human history.
The Chorus Beneath Our Feet by Melanie Schnell, published by Radiant Press.
More about The Chorus Beneath Our Feet:
A grief-stricken soldier accompanies his best friend's body home after eight years away, only to find his mute sister, Mary, missing and wanted for questioning by the police in the murder of an infant in the city's central park. As Mary's life hangs in the balance, Jes must follow the obscure clues she has left behind, the only means to find her and absolve her of wrongdoing. In his labyrinthine search, the mystery of the park's infamous Harron tree and its connection to his sister, and their community, is slowly revealed.
Author Melanie Schnell
About Melanie Schnell:
Melanie Schnell’s novel, While the Sun is Above Us, was shortlisted for The Fiction Award and Book of the Year award and won the Saskatchewan First Book Award and The City of Regina Award in 2013. The novel has been listed as part of the ELA A30 curriculum in both Public and Catholic schools across Saskatchewan. Melanie has published long and short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her fiction placed second in the City of Regina Awards in 2010 and 2017. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Regina. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.