She Built a Terebinth Tree: An Interview with Anna A. Friedrich

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by Whitney K. Pipkin

Anna A. Friedrich’s poems are an invitation, not to a dinner table, but to a tree. They bid readers to sit beneath the boughs of a life filled with questions—so many questions—yet dripping with comforts too.

Rev. Friedrich is the Arts Pastor at Church of the Cross in Boston and a regular contributor to Rabbit Room Poetry. Her ability to create a contemplative yet playful space for others is what makes the title of her first collection of poems, Under the Terebinth, so very fitting. 

The phrase comes from a story in Judges 6:11-13 where the angel of the Lord sits “under the terebinth” and calls unlikely Gideon to his service. Gideon, at first, protests.

“Please, my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?” he asks. “And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us…”

Friedrich’s poems inhabit the theological space carved out by these questions. And they invite others to do the same. For a party celebrating the launch of her book, Friedrich even built her version of a terebinth tree in her backyard. These long-lived, gnarled trees mentioned in Judges are in the same family as the pistachio. They grow in the Middle East, not in Boston. But Friedrich wanted people to be able to read her poems under one, at least on this one occasion.

“I planted logs in the ground and spent weeks making branches out of old books and wire,” she said, laughing at herself. “It’s not the first time I’ve built a fake tree.” 

Friedrich oversaw the building and dismantling of another artistic tree during her Anglican church’s Easter vigil, one of many art installations intended to immerse parishioners in the themes of Holy Saturday. That’s one part of her work as an Arts Pastor at the church where her husband is the rector. Friedrich is also the mother of two sons, ages 17 and 19, and maintains “a pastoral presence” in the lives of artists in and around her church. 

Each of these roles shapes a poetry collection that has “a long, subtle, sometimes oblique conversation with the stories of scripture and the seasons of the liturgical year,” as Malcolm Guite said in his foreword to Under the Terebinth.

“The hope that comes in this collection,” Guite continues in his foreword, “the hope which the poet offers as her calling, comes not in the form of certain answers to the questions we ask under the Terebinth, but comes rather in a growing intuition of that tenacious love that sustains us even as we question it.” 

I talked with Friedrich over Zoom about her book. Edited excerpts follow: 

Whitney Pipkin: The foreword to your book contains high praise from the English poet Malcolm Guite. How did you come to know him and bring your poetry collection before him? 

Anna Friedrich: I took a class with Malcolm Guite at Regent College in Vancouver—a summer intensive, graduate-level seminary class that was on the liturgical seasons and poetry. I really took the class because of the liturgical seasons part of it. I’m an Anglican, I was considering ordination, and I love the church calendar. That’s why I took the class. Honestly, I didn’t know who Malcolm Guite was. This was eight years ago, and I had never heard of him.

It was like a new sense of calling entered my life in that class. I’m not one of those people who’s been writing poems since I was 5. I mean, I have journaled very faithfully my entire life. But I was more of a musician than a writer in my younger years… I took that class and Malcom—or the Holy Spirit through him—really kind of changed the trajectory of my life. 

I was in full-time ministry at the time and I was getting to write a little bit. But after that class, poetry became more and more a disciplined part of my sense of vocation. I started really studying poetry on my own, reading all about forms and the history, trying to write sonnets, trying to read poetry every single day and joining workshops, eventually leading some workshops… That’s when it started. 

What are some of the scenes or experiences that make you want to write poetry? Are some of these the themes you found yourself working through in this book? 

I think Malcolm really named it in the end of his foreword with the words, “Wrestling and Dancing.” Reading that was like having a mentor explain to you your own work. I mean, I just wept when I read his foreword. I felt like he totally got it. 

The wrestling and dancing, those two together, that just resonated with me unlike almost anything I’ve heard to describe why I write and what I’m doing when I write poetry. It is probably primarily a conversation with God, but also just a delighting in creation and redemption to some degree. 

This is seven years of writing in this book. It’s not like it necessarily takes seven years to write 40 poems, but I wasn’t necessarily working on a collection. I was just writing and working. It was only in the last year that I was like, ‘I think I have enough for a full collection.’ 

Does this collection mirror some of what was going on in your life over that seven-year period? 

Yeah, they are very personal. And yet my hope is always—I really strongly feel this, maybe because of how I came to poetry so much later in life, so to speak—I want my poems to be hospitable. I’m not interested in them just being like so bizarre and elitist and confusing that people think poetry is awful. 

I really want them to be a hospitable space, even the sorrow poems. I want them to find something of their own sorrow expressed there too. 

The book is laid out in four sections that consider nature, seasons of the liturgical year, people you love and the sorrows you’ve met along the way. How did that shape come together? 

I wouldn’t say I imposed any themes on it. It was really just noticing, okay, these are four themes I keep coming back to: grief, real people in my life—I don’t want to just write disembodied, airy, fairy poems; I want to write poems about people I know and love—and real moments in my life with a butterfly or with a caterpillar. 

And I’m going to keep writing about the liturgical calendar probably forever, because I have found such a home there for my emotional life. There’s a whole season where you can be really down. And there’s a whole season where you’re meant to remind yourself to rejoice—resurrection has begun and it’s still coming. And then there’s just this long stretch of ordinary life. 

I agree with Malcolm that your poems are in a “subtle, sometimes oblique” conversation with Scripture, which is so hard to do well. How have you cultivated that subtlety? What have you learned along the way about forming poems that ring true to Scripture but also true to reality? 

This is something that comes up as an Arts Pastor and that I think about a lot. If you think of your faith and your art as these two things, outside of ourselves—like sometimes we have some faith and sometimes some art, these two separate things—it doesn’t work. That’s not how I think of it, and I don’t think it’s the best way to think of it. Nor is it like two little seeds inside of yourself. My little faith part and my artist part. Those aren’t the right image to me. 

The best way to put it, or the best way I have so far, is that my relationship with God—who God is, who I am, what’s been revealed in Christ, what we’ve been given in the Scriptures—that I’m headed toward death but resurrection has been promised—all the big, big stuff. It’s not that my faith is over here. It’s the entire landscape that I live in. It’s everything. It’s everything I’m thinking and breathing and wondering and questioning and enjoying. It needs to be way bigger. The more I see it as just the landscape or maybe the whole kingdom, the more I see that it’s so big that it’s just where I am. Of course I’m writing from that place. There’s no escaping that. 

Similar to that, but slightly different, I have been convinced that artists who are Christians, writers and makers who are Christians, one of the best things we can offer the world, maybe even a really important part of our calling, is that we hold on to life and death. We hold on to the fact that, yes, Jesus is coming back and he’s making all things new and he’s already started that. And also, things are not the way they are supposed to be, and where is God, and what is happening? 

We have to hold on to both of those. If you let go of one, you get despair. If you let go of the fact that things are not the way they are supposed to be, you get this cheesy, triumphalist, horrible Christian art thing, this happy-clappy hypocrisy. 

So I try daily to hold on to both. But it’s very uncomfortable. It’s a real tension. It’s the tension under the terebinth. 

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Whitney K. Pipkin is an author, journalist and occasional writer of poems. She lives with her husband, three children and a dog named Honeybun in Northern Virginia. Her book, We Shall All Be Changed: How Facing Death with Loved Ones Transforms Us, was released in 2024.