The Green Heart of the Tree: Essays and Notes on a Time in Africa

Woudstra's literary essays, rooted in personal experience and travel, are long and loving looks into the mysterious heart of Africa. Her writings explore topics as diverse as volcanic eruptions and wild trees, African art and ritual, life in Rwanda, and turtle eggs in warm sand. "Like Annie Dillard, Annette Woudstra is a poet of observation. She carefully works experience and reflection to create sentences and scenes of exceptional clarity and grace." -Greg Hollingshead "An extremely engaging and intelligent collection...these essays are above all distinguished by a deep and serene vitality." ---Elisabeth Harvor "Quiet and wise, the essays of Annette Schouten Woudstra live, as she says, 'close to the bone.' The writing is both lyrical and gritty, her gaze unflinching and tender. Woudstra writes with integrity and complexity about those things which divide us and those that pull us together." -Shawna Lemay