Essay: Living Inside a Tree

Some years ago I had a job interview and owing to the fact that I thought the interviewers were self-important twits I decided to say anything I liked. "What's your next book going to be about?" "Well," said I, "It's about living inside a tree in Karstula, Finland where in fact, my grandfather also lives inside a tree. Did you know that the arctic birch and the ash share phonemic hexasyllables when the wind is right and the sun is the color of a copper kettle at midnight?" I was very happy for indeed I didn't get the job and I found my own dancefloor inside a yellow birch. The academic creative writing types (one of whom had on his web page that he's a "genius") looked at me as if I'd confessed to cat strangling.