A Conversation With Author And Artist Rosalie Haizlett

This conversation originally aired in the Oct. 6, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

In 2022, nature artist Rosalie Haizlett set out on a trip to illustrate parts of the Appalachian Mountains that often get overlooked – that is, the tiny birds, reptiles and other critters hiding beneath leaves or up in the trees.

Her illustrations came together as Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains, an Artist’s journey. It’s a new book, full of colorful images and thoughts Haizlett recorded as she spent hours exploring the mountains.

Inside Appalachia Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Haizlett about the book. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lynch: To begin with, where did the idea of the project come from?

Haizlett: So, I have always had a special affinity for small creatures. Ever since I got my first hamster when I was eight.

I know a lot of kids go through hamster phases. I think mine was a little more intense than most kids, and that kind of spun off into a love for all rodents, and then that love for tiny creatures just kind of continued as I started to learn more about the natural world,, as I got older. 

And I always wanted to be an artist, but wasn’t really sure what to focus on with my art. It wasn’t until, probably, college and my early 20s that I realized that I could pair art and nature together. I could make work that celebrates the natural world. 

I started a personal project in 2017 called “Tiny Worlds West Virginia,” and that was just my goal, to get better at watercolor and also to learn a little bit about a new creature every month. 

And in 2021, I got really hyped up on caffeine one day, and I took a big walk, and I was like, “What if I illustrate a whole bunch of tiny critters from the whole Appalachian mountain range?” 

Before I could talk myself down from it, I called the guy that I was gonna marry in a week, and I was like, “Can we move out of our apartment and do this huge trip and document all these things?”

And he was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

Lynch: Tell me about your husband. This is a pretty big leap to do something like this. So, tell me about him. 

Haizlett: He is a water engineer and he works remotely. It worked out that he was able to keep working while we were on the road. We ended up going on this trip. It was six months in total: a continuous road trip that started in Alabama, which is the southernmost part of the Appalachians. Then, we ended in Newfoundland, which is the northernmost part in North America. 

The Appalachian mountains extend into Scotland. 

Pretty much every day, I would go out and look for interesting, small critters, plants, fungi, slime molds –all sorts of stuff. I would document my observations with words and sketches and take pictures. And then I’d come back to wherever we were staying, and I would illustrate what I saw using watercolor.

Lynch: The trip itself, the places you went, how did you choose them?

Haizlett: So we wanted to take advantage of discounted rates at different rentals. 

A lot of them, you have to stay in a place for two weeks or longer. 

We had, like, six main base camps all scattered throughout the mountains. We kind of just looked at a map of the Appalachian Mountains, found these locations that were close to public lands – so, a national park or something nearby state parks.

Lynch: Words and pictures, which was harder to get down? 

Haizlett: Words! I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer. I’ve been a journaler my whole life, like I kept very regular journals from the time I was like five to 18. Every day is documented. 

So, I always liked to record what I saw, but I never really tried to write essays or poems or, like, polished writing. 

It was always just very casual. So, I kind of leaned into that for this book, because I was really “psyching” myself out about the writing. 

I originally wanted it to be all illustrations and just the tiniest descriptions of what I saw. Then, as I was working on it, I realized that it was becoming disjointed, and I needed to tell the story more through words, so that people could understand what was happening. 

They weren’t there on these long hikes. I’d be by myself so much time in my own head. So, I would just jot down what I was thinking or what I was seeing in my phone, in the Notes app. 

Basically, I wrote the whole book while I was walking or sitting on a log. Because sometimes I’d be tripping over stuff. So, I’d stop. I’d sit on a log and I’d write out an observation or the beginning of an essay. Then, I’d edit it later.

That actually works really well for this book because I want it to feel like you’re walking alongside me through the mountains. 

Lynch: There’s definitely a feeling of being in your thoughts. There’s a lot of introspection. You talk, you kind of gloss over portions of your childhood, even how you got there, which made me interested in your childhood. You were homeschooled? 

Haizlett: Yeah, I was homeschooled till I was about 12. I’m one of seven kids. So, I had kind of a weird childhood, lived on a farm and was in a family band. 

I talk about a lot of these things in the book, and it was a very beautiful childhood, but a little weird.

Lynch: The family band tell me just a hair about that.

Haizlett: So, I have… let me see… I don’t even know how many older siblings I have… I have three older siblings….lost count… three older siblings. And so by the time I came along, there was already a family band established. They all played instruments, and so it was just kind of a thing that when you’re born into my family, you are part of the band. 

And we were not a big deal, but we did travel around quite a bit to state fairs, festivals, churches, family reunions. We’d all be standing up there with our old-timey instruments. It was very much like Americana music, so a lot of John Prine and the Carter family. 

Yeah, we played, played lots of tunes together. 

My dad wrote a lot of the songs too. It was a good time. 

It lasted until I was about 14. I write about that in the book that I was kind of the demise of the family band, because I went to school and my peers found out about the band, and they did not think it was cool.

So, I ruined it. I broke up the band. 

Lynch: Well, this project, what was your favorite part about it? 

Haizlett: Oh, well, there’s so many things. 

One of the things that felt really special was just getting to dive deep into a project for a couple of years. So, the trip took six months. Planning the trip, getting some grants to help pay for the trip and finding a publisher took a full year before we even left. 

Coming back afterward, I spent a year finishing all the paintings from those reference materials. I was able just to kind of lose myself in the project, to lose myself in the places. 

Even after we got home, I had spent so much time in each place, and was so present in each place, that I was able to access those memories in a way that I hadn’t been able to before. 

So, I’d be working on the section about Quebec, I would see my husband at lunch, and he would ask me what I’ve been up to.  And I’d be like, “Oh, I’m just in the woods of Quebec right now.”

Like, mentally I was there because I had so much time in each place, and that was really a treat. 

Lynch: Do you have a favorite critter?

Haizlett: Oh, there’s so many good critters. I’ll tell you about two.

In Alabama, one of the very first things that we saw was a green anole lizard. 

They’re sort of like chameleons. They change color based on their temperature and mood. 

So, I saw this little, brown lizard on the trail, and it was holding very still. So I was very pleased, because small critters, often, because they don’t have a lot of defense mechanisms, they’re very speedy. 

So, that’s a constant challenge with this book, because I only wanted to include things that I actually saw and got my own pictures of. So, even though Hellbender salamanders are so iconic for this area, I didn’t see one on the trip. I couldn’t include it. 

I was watching this little lizard. It was holding still. I was very happy. And then it dove under a leaf and ate a beetle. 

It stayed under there for a long time. So, I got curious. I lifted up the leaf and it had turned bright green, and I was shook because I did not know that they changed colors. 

I just thought I was looking at this brown lizard, and then all of a sudden it’s this beautiful, lime green. 

That was a really cool surprise and a lesson that just watching a critter for a long time will lead to interesting observations. 

The second one I want to talk about is actually an eastern screech owl that I saw after we returned from the trip. 

After six months on the road, we came back to the farm that I grew up on and we lived there for a while. My goal was just to see this place that I knew so intimately with fresh eyes after the trip. 

I wondered after so many months of slow hiking and paying attention, “what will I see that I might have missed before?” 

One of the coolest things that I saw right around the farm was an eastern screech owl who lived in a hollow in a tree. I just stumbled upon this owl one day. I don’t even know how I saw it was so camouflaged, but I was just looking around and saw two eyes staring back at me from this hole. 

That owl stayed there all winter long, and that’s something that they often do to kind of stake their claim for nesting in the spring. 

That owl kind of became my muse when I got home, because it was really easy, after seeing all this cool stuff on this long trip, to think like, oh, what else is there to see in my home? Like, I know everything. It’s less exciting. But then thinking about my owl being there and how hidden it was, and how I wouldn’t have found it unless I’d been looking closely, made me think “Oh, there’s probably so much more here that is yet to be discovered.” 

And that’s been a really nice takeaway. It’s not always about going elsewhere to find that inspiration. You can find it in your own backyard.

Lynch: The book is Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains: an Artist journey by Rosalie Hazlett. Rosalie, thank you very much. 

Haizlett: Thank you so much for having me.