{"id":379,"date":"2011-02-13T23:20:04","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T04:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/"},"modified":"2011-02-21T12:00:10","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T17:00:10","slug":"the-last-tree-christmas","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/writing\/short-fiction\/the-last-tree-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Tree Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I just cut down the tree my parents planted the day that I was born.&#8221; That&#8217;s how my story in the Fall 1981 issue of <em>Night Voyages<\/em> began.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an end-of-the-world tale, and the inversion of the title is meant literally&#8212;the story takes place in a time when Christmas trees&#8212;in fact, trees in general&#8212;are about to become a thing of the past.<\/p>\n<p>This was one the first few stories I wrote after my return from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop in 1979. At the time, completing it, I felt that I had finally figured this writing thing out, and that it would be smooth sailing from then on. <\/p>\n<p>Little did I know that I would <em>always<\/em> be still figuring it out.  I imagine that someday I will be repeating something similar to what the artist Hokusai said when he was an old man: &#8220;If Heaven had only granted me five more years, I could have become a real painter.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I just cut down the tree my parents planted the day that I was born.&#8221; That&#8217;s how my story in the Fall 1981 issue of Night Voyages began. It&#8217;s an end-of-the-world tale, and the inversion of the title is meant literally&#8212;the story takes place in a time when Christmas trees&#8212;in fact, trees in general&#8212;are about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380,"parent":13,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-379","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/379\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}