Auburn poet’s first book celebrates the tree

Published 1:50 pm Wednesday, June 24, 2015

In the late spring of 2014, a publisher, editor and fellow poet tasked her friend, Cindy Hutchings, as follows: write a poem to a tree, every day for a month or so.

Warming to her assignment, Hutchings picked a cedar across the street from her house in Auburn. And between June and July of 2014 she wrote 38 poems to that one tree, adding four more in January and one dedicated to her dad.

Forty-two poems to the same tree?

Hmmm …

“I tried to work double meanings into them,” Hutchings explained this week with a laugh.

Now Hutchings has released those poems into the wide world, swaddled in her first-ever book, “Tree Talk”, published by MoonPath Press of Kingston, Wash.

James Rodgers, like Hutchings a member of Auburn’s Striped Water Poets group, originally contributed 30 black-and-white photos to the book, but later added 12 more. All of the photos in the book are his.

Excited? Of course, Hutchings said.

Nervous? Yeah, that too.

“A little bit,” Hutchings said. “I wonder, will people like all these poems, or some of them? I have had poems published separately before, but it’s a little bit different when you have your whole collection out there. But it’s feeling pretty good, too.”

Hutchings, a member of Northwest Renaissance and Striped Water Poets, finds inspiration in the outdoors. Since 1996, she has had 14 poems published in publications like the on-line journal QuillandParchment.com, Green River College’s Espial, the Auburn Reporter, and the New Times newspaper, which is now out of print.

A few, she said, even found their way to the Washington State Arts Commission’s ArtsWa, part of a collection for the city of Oso following last year’s fatal landslide.

She has a degree in English and Women Studies from the University of Washington.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, editor and publisher of MoonPath Press and a Striped Water Poet, thought up the assignment.

Hutchings started out her assignment writing poems that followed each other. Then events in her own life and in the life beyond started to influence her work.

She described the first poems in her book as “relaxing, unwinding-type poems” for after work.

“One day I drove to my mother’s house along the Hood Canal. It was about mid-June, and the drive to and the drive back kind of inspired me,” Hutchings said. “I was admiring all the beautiful trees and thinking of my tree back home. After that, the poems just flowed along with different events that were happening that brought up things I was thinking about.

“In January, (Ayers) asked me to find black-and-white photos and if (Rodgers) had any tree photography. I sent James the manuscript, and the next day he sent me 30 photos. Now there are 42 photos in the book, one paired with each poem. It’s amazing because the photos really match nicely throughout the book,” Hutchings said.

Hutchings said she often writes poems on the train she catches every morning north to her job for a local fire department, and at home in the evening.

According to its website, MoonPath Press is “dedicated to publishing the very best poetry collections by U.S. Northwest Pacific states authors – poets residing in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and extreme Northern California, north of San Francisco Bay.

Tree Talk is available through Amazon.com.

____________________

Poem from Tree Talk

Driving Through

Driving through

stands of green

I think of your

waiting arms

back home

so far away

I don’t lose faith

even though

I love

these others