Hannah Rodabaugh

Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants

One of the most incredible things about nature is the countless containers it has evolved to carry water. Every animal, plant, mineral, or canyon floor has also developed the capacity to hold water. The Tao Te Ching says, "We work with being, but non-being is what we use." Like this elusive non-being, water is also an indefatigable tool, a blank slate that is equally good and bad, constructive and destructive, animate and inanimate, original and mimetic.

In "Daguerreotype, 1825," I trace how rivers were used as tools of exploitation through botanist David Douglas' journeys on the Columbia River to collect plant specimens for wealthy patrons. The poem "Tumbleweed in Bloom" examines the rising tide of tumbleweeds in the US to bring awareness to how invasive species flood and destroy native ecosystems. Both poems speak to water's protean nature, albeit indirectly.

Hannah Rodabaugh is the author of Lost Cathedral (Cornerstone Press) and four chapbooks of poetry. Her poetry is featured in The Indianapolis Review, Camas Magazine, Glassworks Magazine, and Berkeley Poetry Review. She’s received a Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and has twice been an Artist-in-Residence for the National Park Service. She teaches at Boise State University, the College of Western Idaho, and The Cabin Literary Center. When not writing, she volunteers for the Golden Eagle Audubon Society and collects rare desert plants from around the world.