The Story Behind the Story: The Story-Seeker and Her Rooted Friend

Forged Series Prequel: The Future of Nature Special Substack Event for Earth Day 2025

Apr 24, 2025

To learn more about the FORGED series, visit the Table of Contents.

The Future of Nature

If you missed the posts from The Future of Nature Earth Day 2025 event on Substack, here you go!

Or visit this the Top In Fiction Disruption post from Erica Drayton for the full list of stories, the writers, and their publication names.

Now, on to what inspired my submission!

green leafed tree during daytime — Photo by Geovanni Rodriguez on Unsplash

The Story Behind the Story

One of my favorite authors on Subtack is

Claudia Befu

. Her deeply thoughtful fiction is a future rich with complex characters and masterfully woven threads of interconnecting stories. Her words evoke stunning mental images, invite contemplation of the world around us, and even introspection about our everyday choices.

When I saw her note with an open invitation to a special Substack Event with

Julie Gabrielli

for Earth Day, I wanted to join. After participating in the wild “Substack Zone” collaboration last November, I was looking forward to joining another effort to gather with fellow Substackers around a common theme.

The Future of Nature writing prompt

Defined by Claudia, the special Substack event to honor Earth Day 2025 was presented as follows:

“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem.

The theme fits nicely with my recently released novel, Shattered, book one of the Forged series, so I was even more excited to see how I could take the prompt and translate it into a short story within my already created world.

The lead-up

Claudia and Julie organized a weekly gathering of those involved to brainstorm ideas, refine our pitches, and support one another in the writing process, including live events, written posts, and chat threads. The interactions were helpful to spitball ideas and to bolster our writing with input from science experts.

During these interactions, I began drafting my first version as a conversation between Contessa and her mother. I attempted to incorporate the metamorphosis process of fireflies, a recurring visual in the Forged series, into the draft, but something wasn’t working. The result felt too contrived, too forced.

Luckily, inspiration would strike from a source outside of the Substack event. On Saturday, April 5th, I attended a special “Tree Summit” in North Portland. Speakers from the Urban Forestry team gave an update on the Street Tree Inventory Project and its importance. We heard about the Vanport flood and efforts to catalog the trees that survived the 1948 flooding of the Columbia River. And, a highlight for me,

Amy Stewart

spoke about her latest book, The Tree Collectors, “a collection of stories about people who have been transformed by their obsessive passion for trees.”

Listening to the presentations, the questions asked, and the conversations around me gave me hope that our urban forest was being watched over with diligent care. Of course, we could all do better. More could be a part of the solution.

Sitting among the elders

I walked away from the Summit with a strong desire to be among trees, sensing that the “root” of my planned The Future of Nature story would reveal itself with a little coaxing. And what better way to sense a possible future with nature than to sit with nature!

The Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, is the simple and therapeutic act of spending time in a forest. The goal is to slow down and take in the forest through all the five senses, relieving stress and tension from modern living.

I’d been introduced to forest bathing during my yoga training. If you haven’t tried this (recently or before), go sit among the trees—your backyard might work in a pinch, but a park or path through the trees would be better. Turn off your phone. Walk or sit. Breathe. Be in the moment and observe. I knew, or at least hoped, sitting in nature would spur my ideas for the story.

Since I wanted my submission for the event to be tied to the world already created for the Forged series, I returned to Skyline Memorial Gardens, a location I had used in a backstory for Contessa. My goal was to open my headspace to all the possibilities for the story that could be tied to Shattered, book one of the Forged series.

The cemetery overlooks the Tualatin Valley and the Oregon Coast Range. Near the edge of Forest Park, the 55-acre cemetery contains multiple formal gardens, marble sculptures, and numerous clusters of old trees. I perched on a bench, silently observing.

An extended family nearby gathered at the gravesite of a loved one. Their banter was carefree, a celebration of coming together. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but I imagined that their Nana would have approved. She had always been the one to get the extended family together, and that hasn’t changed with her passing.
Birds fluttered overhead, regarded me from the branches shading my spot, and chirped to one another. A call and an answer.
The wind rustled through the tree limbs, creating a chorus among the leaves that served as a background soundtrack for the birds.
I wondered what others who were buried among the gravestones would have to say about this day. Our present conditions. Our path into the future. What insights from history could they share to help us see what we cannot see in this moment, waiting as we do for hindsight to give us the knowledge?
I examined the trees closest to me and wondered about their memories. If they could share, what would they see that I cannot? How would they interpret the development around them?

From Scribbles to Story

It’s been a while since I’ve handwritten words that come to me. My professional writing is done on a computer. My novel and Substack are all typed with my fingers. I send texts, not handwritten letters. Even my to-do list is digital. Only my grocery list and reminder post-its are handwritten.

That day, sitting on the bench among the buried, the flying, and the rooted, I had a notebook with me. I scribbled out a stream of consciousness as if I were a tree talking to younger trees, not unlike a grandparent telling “in my day” stories to the munchkins darting around their legs with energy all the adults wished they could bottle up for themselves.

How many versions?

Six unique versions, in total, were written before the short story was published.

Versions 1, 2, and 3, all prior to my forest bathing exercise, were focused on Contessa and the stages of metamorphosis of fireflies. All 2,900 words were scrapped. Maybe some will find their place into some bonus material for the series. Or they will remain in the dark recesses of my Google Drive.

Version 4 was the transcribed “stream of consciousness” from my day at Skyline Gardens. The older tree spoke to both a younger sapling and to itself about what it had experienced through the Great Changes, the fictional future of natural disasters and political chaos that ravage the world and set the stage for the Forged series world. Just shy of 900 words, the edited version still didn’t feel right for the writing prompt.

Final inspiration found

I was reading along with a new serial from

J. Curtis

, Isla, about twelve-year-old George Perez and the Yucatán coast. In chapter four, George is listening to his dad recount his travels to a mysterious island. J seemlessly incorporates George’s imagination. The lines between reality and George’s visceral experience of his father’s story blur, and the results are magical!

Using this story as a model, I started on Version 5 of my submission. I abandoned the fireflies and instead drew on Version 4, the Tree’s POV, to create what would eventually become “The Story-Seeker and Her Rooted Friend” short story.

For formatting, I looked at The Entire Sky, by

Joe Wilkins

and his unconventional use of no quotation marks for dialogue. I decided to use quotes for the truly spoken word and the emdash with italic font combination for the imagined (sensed?) words from the tree.

“Hello, my tall, rooted friend.” I wrapped my arms around the trunk of my favorite Black Cottonwood tree.
Strong and silent, the tree stood guard over the hillside. Gnarled with age. Ladened with wisdom. Rich with tales written like a tapestry upon the bark, woven through the roots, and etched with far-reaching branches.
— Hello, little wanderer. Welcome back.

Tying it all together

The purpose of the writing prompt was to inspire hope for a future, even one changed by a climate crisis. From one of Claudia’s comments on the event, she suggested that we “reflect on our relationship with nature, and dare to explore a different, less one-sided, more restorative one.“

I also wanted to show the hope for Contessa’s future, especially knowing what is about to happen to her idyllic life in the opening of Shattered. And the tree’s final line to her is one that she will need to remember in the pages of the novel.

I ran my fingers over the broken ends. Marveled at the healed wound. “You tried your best to save them.”
Ah, thank you. I sometimes forget you can see my past so clearly.
“I hope I’m strong enough to help others when they need me.”
You are strong enough already, gentle-listener. You are enough.