Anne Coray

Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants

It’s almost impossible for me to resist picking berries as they ripen at my Alaska homestead throughout the summer and fall. Maybe it’s that hunter-gatherer instinct coming alive. I usually make blueberry jam and currant jelly, but I’ve learned that our northern, and relatively small, rose hips are best eaten on the spot, and that’s because I once spent hours de-seeding a big batch of rose hips for jam. It was incredibly pain-staking, slicing each little fruit and scraping out the inside. I vowed to never do that again! I could have made jelly instead, but that would have meant straining out the skins and pulp, and it seemed like I’d be sacrificing a lot of nutritional value. Now I always just eat rose hips off the bushes. My poem “Before the Cold Season,” in this spring equinox issue of Plant-Human Quarterly, originates from such an experience.

Anne Coray’s debut novel Lost Mountain was published in 2021 with West Margin Press. She is the author of the poetry collections Bone Strings, A Measure’s Hush, and Violet Transparent and coeditor of Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment. Her work has appeared in Northwest Review, Poetry, North American Review, and Green Mountains Review. Recipient of fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation, she divides her time between the coastal town of Homer and her birthplace on remote Lake Clark.