Cynthia Snow
Dear Beech Tree
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
Some of my favorite experiences have been outdoors in nature. Climbing rocks, searching for lady slippers, finding lichen on headstones, or scrambling up nearby hills to pick wild blueberries. I am lucky to pass flower beds on my walk to work. I am lucky to look out our kitchen window and watch the sun rise over tall pines.
I grew up with my mother’s plant vocabulary and my father’s adventures in the wild. I like close observation, listening to tree trunks rub together, and moving like wind as it ripples cattails. I’ve written poems in the imagined voice of a skunk cabbage, a ruby-throated hummingbird, and a 17th Century naturalist and botanical artist. I like to inhabit.
While caring for my father, who has Alzheimer’s, I had to take a hiatus from intense writing. Now that he’s moved to an institution, I am reentering a writing space. I go outside to embrace the joy I feel there, to connect with each of my senses, to feel them come alive, to breathe.
Cynthia Snow’s writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Peace, Worcester Review, Crannóg, and elsewhere. In Amsterdam, at the 2017 conference “The Changing Nature of Art and Science,” she read from her manuscript on the 17th Century naturalist and botanical artist, Maria Sibylla Merian. She holds an MFA from Drew University, and Slate Roof Press published her chapbook, Small Ceremonies, in 2016. Cindy works at Greenfield Community College and lives in Shelburne Falls, MA, with her family.