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.