Ellen Wade Beals
Overlook
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
My work usually centers on domestic life, celebrating the ordinary. The natural world figures prominently though it may be urban and indoor. Although humans are part of nature, we often think of nature as something other, something elsewhere—a place to visit, a place apart from human activity and productions.
We have always looked to the natural world for wisdom and explanation. Sometimes we assign human qualities and desires to it. Other times we learn through metaphor in which nature represents a part of the human condition.
My poem in PHQ is about a potted plant, a plain-faced flower that blooms late; it is also about how a human interprets the flower’s growth cycle and struggle. How the narrator reads into the flower’s life story says as much about the narrator as it does the daisy.
Humans and nature are not separate but interconnected in a reciprocal relationship. The late-bloomer might be us. Or we could be benevolent caretakers. Whatever our roles, we are all in the garden.
Credit: Bob Godwin
Trained as a journalist, Ellen Wade Beals writes poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in literary magazines, in anthologies and on the web in the United States, Ireland and the UK. Her poem “Between the Sheets” appears in the textbook Everything’s a Text (Pearson 2010). She is editor and publisher of the award-winning anthology Solace in So Many Words.