Deborah Fass
Ring Mountain
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
I am a wanderer. I am of multiple lands. I reside in one and long for another. A poem is a space where I can record and explore an encounter with a plant guide. Maybe figure out what it is, what I am, what we are together. Maybe lose my self-consciousness and connect deeply with the plant. Become part of the landscape.
Native and endemic plants are especially compelling. To be of a place so much that they are the place. To be in a place, and that is enough.
Among plants and in poems, a traveler can feel rooted. A stranger can find kindred beings and what it means to be a living thing. With plants and poems, we enter time that is both permanent and temporary. We share beauty that is both enduring and fleeting. We survive in environments that are hostile and hospitable. We stay and we migrate. With plants as companions, we learn to hold these contradictions. With plants as teachers, we learn to live with respect in someone else’s home.
DEBORAH FASS grew up in Los Angeles, went to Japan with a postgraduate Japanese Department of Education Research Fellowship (Japanese Literature, Oita University), and now lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Deborah’s chapbook, Where the Current Catches, won the Island Verse Poetry Prize and was published by Island Verse Editions. Deborah’s work appears in publications including Coal Hill Review, Terrain.org, Heron Tree, and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, Pittsburgh, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her website is deborahfass.com.