The Promise of the Fiddlehead Fern

What one of the oldest plant groups wants to tell you about a life sustained

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One day this spring, my dad brought a dead plant to our house. It was a brittle brown ball, packed in an old parmesan shaker for safekeeping, plucked out of a box in my parents’ basement. It’s called a resurrection fern, he said. My dad showed us how to put it in a shallow dish of water and we watched it slow-motion unfurl and revive over the next few days—brown turning to green.

“How long has that been in your basement, Dad?” I asked him. 

“Oh,” he did some counting back, “Probably ten or eleven years.” 

A decade in the basement. No water, no light. And yet, here it was blooming. If you watched my book announcement video, you got to see its magic in motion. 

The house we brought our babies home to had a postage stamp urban backyard, but a few raised beds, and my favorite part of every spring was seeing the ostrich ferns start to rise up in the garden. Who ever saw such absolute green rise up ex nihilo—out of nothing? 

So much of this book is about the rhythms of the life cycle—both trusting them, and reckoning with them—and to me, the fiddlehead expresses this so beautifully. A fiddlehead is a moment in time—look what has come from nothing! A fiddlehead is a promise—something beautiful is here becoming.

As I write in my book, Even After Everything,

“Life is like this: a great shimmering color wheel of emotions that jostle against each other in surprising, sometimes unsettling ways. Time holds many memories, and anniversaries overlap and overlay the present. Life, death, and resurrection cycle through our days like the turning colors of a kaleidoscope. We weave in and out of bouts of brimming-over joy, impossible hope, and fragile fear.

Life is absurd—because so much happens and so little makes sense. 

And it is exquisite—because even as the kaleidoscope turns, look at all that color.”

To me, the fiddlehead takes the shape of an ellipses—a dot, dot, dot of the ongoing story of life, death, and life again. When I wrote the book, I had not yet imagined the cover, and it took layers of the design process to realize that the fern was exactly what this book wanted. Here I must hand it to Karla Colahan, who designed my cover and our Slant Letter look, who knew just how to translate the beating heart of this book into visual form. Isn’t she lovely?!

So—let’s do what we do as writers and metaphor this thing within an inch of its life!! I love this cover image for so many reasons and thought it would be fun to share a few of them with you today. So many interpretive layers! Be still, my little artist-diva heart!

• First, and at the face value level, the color of a sunlit fern is my exact favorite shade of green. That pop of color feels utterly alive to me. It does something to my nervous system—blow it in a breeze, and I will come home to myself. It’s also a natural nod to our Slant Letter neon and I love an inherent connection like that! 

• The fiddlehead visually expresses the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio, the asymmetrical standard lauded among mathematicians and artists. As someone who is into her aesthetics (see: artist diva!) I’m still laughing at how on-the-nose it is for me to have the literal golden ratio just face-out like that on my cover. Like, it couldn’t be more subtle? No? 

• In the book, I write about being pregnant with our daughter and in her early ultrasound images considering “a spine and its nervous system unfolding like a tender fiddlehead.” To me, those embryonic images will always look like a fiddlehead to me, both saying: something beautiful is here becoming. 

• In a later chapter in the book, set in the Easter season, I reference fiddlehead ferns rising up in the garden, which will always tell of resurrection to me. 

• The word “fern” derives from the Greek word “pteron,” meaning feather or wing. I learned this from my friend and literary agent

  Joy Eggerichs Reed
  and her husband, Matt, who named their daughter Fern.

• Listen, we hit that moody botanical vibe real hard here, and like any Enneagram Four, I’m running with it!

Ancient and wild, ferns are one of the oldest groups of plants on earth, as fossil records show us, belonging to the plant family called Pteridophytes. In prehistoric eras, ferns not only proliferated on the planet, they grew much larger than they do now. Imagine whole fern forests, some growing over one hundred feet tall, dwarfing the dinosaurs. 

Today, ferns are “the second-most diverse group of vascular [meaning, able to circulate water and nutrients throughout the plant] plants on Earth, outnumbered only by flowering plants,” according to the American Fern Society, with over 10,000 living species today. 

Like the ferns, we are an ancient species. Like them, we are more resilient than we might think. Germinating spore to fiddlehead to mature fern, life to death to rebirth—it’s been doing this a long time. So have we. Like an ellipses, the story rolls on. Something beautiful is here becoming. I believe that—for all of us. It’s a leading part of why I wrote this book. 

Thank you for celebrating my book announcement so generously with me! If you haven’t yet, you can preorder it here and get all the details. 

Coming up for paid subscribers:

The conclusion of our close reading of Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful! Save the date for Tuesday, July 9th 8pm ET when we will have a LIVE Zoom gathering to share craft notes and final observations. You asked for a live session and I’m so pleased to host this for the first time and see your lovely faces! I’ll send the link out next Tuesday to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet but would like to be, join us! 

Take heart and stay feisty,