Conversations with Birds by Priyanka Kumar

Let me be honest—and be myself. I think writing a book review says as much about my own interests and biases as it does about any author’s words. I should also say, having recently completed my own book and now on the cusp of publishing, authors deserve kudos. It’s a long march.

So let’s begin there, with kudos to Priyanka Kumar whose new book, Conversations with Birds, has racked up impressive endorsements. Kirkus calls it “an eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.” Publishers Weekly says it’s “perfect for readers of Diane Ackerman.” That’s high praise! Ackerman’s sensuous, erudite prose is a hallmark of sentimental nonfiction often known as nature writing.

But for me, the reader—an environmental educator and historical interpreter, plus a White guy, fiftysomething—the entire time I was enjoying Conversations, I kept thinking about a different writer, one likely never associated with Thoreau or Muir or Carson. I’m talking about Vivian Gornick, particularly her dictum in The Situation and the Story on the “art of personal narrative”:

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

What’s the situation in Conversations? Kumar’s passion for birds. Their biology, their lifeways, how she celebrates diverse species while also highlighting pernicious and ever-growing threats. In terms of plot, her book follows mile after mile of Kumar and her family pursuing eagles and hawks, owls and woodpeckers, whatever resides in or migrates through the American Southwest, especially New Mexico, her adopted state. Conversations is a collection of twenty essays, each a journey of varying depth and distance, and through each flow keenly instructive sentences such as:

With its clean, freshly colored lines, the red-shafted flicker is a cartoon sprung to life. As if an endearing black bib and dark polka dots on a creamy underside weren’t enough, the males also sport a rust-colored cap and a malar stripe or “mustache.”

That’s as fine a description as any bird nerd could write, myself included. And Kumar, a filmmaker and novelist by profession, applies this sensory-rich skill to anything on which she trains her lens, even a recollection that troubles her:

At first glance, Pasadena was all blazing light and sun-dried concrete. In the evenings, we strolled around the periphery of the California Institute of Technology where the hedges were thick and coated liberally with dust. In the southeast corner of the campus, blooming jasmines perfumed the evening air, momentarily blotting the hiss of traffic. Otherwise the snore of trucks and cars filtered all day into our apartment, which was just a block away from the northern edge of campus.

Page after page, Conversations presents lush, Ackerman-like writing—details on natural and cultural history, hiking, homemaking, backyard visits by two-winged or four-legged neighbors, as well as local and global environmental woes, along with a few solutions. Chiefly, look, listen, pay attention! She also expresses heartbreak, much as I do, pinning blame on human greed and societal indifference: “We have fragmented our rivers and drained our wetlands and built malls over them.”

I’m surprised, however, to read little in the way of self-interrogation. Why doesn’t Kumar question her own resource-dependent adventures on what she calls our “sad and vulnerable planet”?

Still, as the book’s introduction lays out, I’m drawn to her circumstance as a child growing up in India, one robustly attentive to wild things, and later, as a young adult, when she had lost the ability of “seeing”:

In my twenties, I started to mull over the deep connection I’d had with nature as a child . . . I befriended a string of birds and began to understand why my life in the West was lacking rasa, which in Sanskrit means “juice,” literally and metaphorically.

Throughout the book, while rebuilding rasa—her “metamorphosis into a naturalist”—Kumar ensures that readers step through a “portal to a more vivid, enchanted world,” one we had better start appreciating before it’s gone. Case in point, since 1970, avifauna populations have experienced a net loss of three billion birds, or 29 percent. To put that another way, are your treetops quieter these days? Conversations helps explain why.

Having shared all that, I’d like to address this book’s emotional experience, at least how I perceive it. First, allow me to offer an aside, which reveals something of my own narrative behind the task of writing a review.

A colleague and I were discussing my early draft of this piece, and though he had not read Conversations, his words stuck with me. “Actually,” he said, “a friend of mine in Santa Fe read it and thought it way too much about herself and neglected the nature aspect. She didn’t like it at all. It’s too subjective.”

Too subjective? I take that to mean an emphasis on personal feelings and beliefs, or on one’s personal life, as opposed to, say, just the facts. Scientific facts? Whose facts? In any case, that comment led me to think about the nature writer Terry Tempest Williams, especially her book, Refuge, which chronicles not only birds in and around Utah’s Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, but also environmental trauma, death, and her mother’s passing due to ovarian cancer. Refuge is a profoundly intimate book written by someone who, at thirty-four (at the time), became the matriarch of her family.

I also thought about J. Drew Lanham’s recent title, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. Cover to cover, Lanham identifies and discusses his many selves—ornithologist, professor, hunter, family man, and how he often feels like a “rare bird, an oddity: appreciated by some for my different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water.” He also wrote a line I kept thinking about while reading Conversations: “But in all my time wandering I’ve yet to have a wild creature question my identity.”

The more I chewed on my colleague’s words, the more I realized why I like these books and so many others now emerging in the nature writing genre: their stories. Personal stories. In Conversations, Kumar reveals not only the intricacies of avian life, but also her life, her insight, her wisdom. For me, it poses, as Gornick suggests, “the thing one has come to say.”

And so what does Conversations say? That partly depends on what I care to listen to, which is influenced by, knowingly or not, my interests and biases. I guess that means you should all be aware that my professional work revolves around learning and teaching “difficult history,” what Kappan calls “periods that reverberate in the present and surface fundamental disagreements over who we are and what values we hold.” Another way to explain that: I’d likely be banned in Florida.

Take, for instance, this line in Conversations: “That curlews are faintly unwieldy does not prevent them from flying gracefully but it does make them more visible to louts.” Louts? People who enjoy offending others. Or, as Kumar notes, guys who like “target practice.” Is she merely writing about a bird, or something more? I’m drawn to seeking more.

So let’s throw up this passage, which highlights her early film work in Los Angeles (she directed the feature documentary about the Indian director Satyajit Ray, The Song of the Little Road):

But I was growing keenly aware that my artistic self was languishing here, that for each yes that I heard, a hundred noes reliably followed. My feature scripts had won numerous awards, but older white producers balked at letting me direct the stories I had written. When someone did take me on, they were either a novice or a retiree and were unable to secure the significant budget needed to make a feature. A master’s degree from the so-called top film school didn’t really matter if you weren’t one of the boys. Graduating at the top of my class didn’t matter either. Being an outsider and telling stories outside the cultural norm were deal breakers.

“Good grief,” I imagine my colleague’s friend saying, “What does this have to do with birds?”

Keep reading, I’d tell her, the very same passage: “When I was birding, these muddled, twisted considerations dissolved along with the haze over trafficky roads. I saw only the birds and their rasa, the deodars and welcoming arches, not the doors that were repeatedly shut on me.”

Huh. Sounds like nature can provide a refuge. As if the alienation and discrimination someone might feel in the human world, whatever his or her background, are ameliorated by spending time with non-human life. Got a dog, anyone? A kitty?

Throughout Conversations, Kumar discloses captivating details about her own biology, her history, her journey as a woman, a daughter, a mother, a person of color, as well as an immigrant who became a naturalized U.S. citizen less than a decade ago. All of these selves, these identities, also love birds. I’m cool with that as a White guy. Am I an oddity too?

Mouthy, I know. I can hear my mother saying that.

But here’s the thing. Whenever Kumar writes “I,” detailing personal hardships, her book starts feeling like a conversation. A conversation with other books. Also with Jeff Darren Muse, a kid born and raised in Indiana, himself juiced up on wild things as he escaped the pain of parental divorce, his father’s alcoholism, and the gnawing feeling of inadequacy among his peers. And now that kid is a park ranger, a public servant, and he and I are often surrounded by people who look a lot like us. But Kumar’s sentences remind me that saving the world—the world I want, anyway—means not only appreciating non-human life, but also trying to understand the perspectives of people who are not White, not male, not born in the U.S., or perhaps not as free as I have been.

Call me woke. Whoopee! As a reader, I was hooked by Conversations with its first sentence: “Birds are my almanac: they tune me into the seasons, and to myself.” And then I really got going with its second line, when Kumar introduced the western tanager, including its scientific name, Piranga ludoviciana. It’s a “flaming yellow-orange” migrant, she writes, “whose presence is one indicator that the insect population in an area has not catastrophically plummeted.”

Where did this reader go with that? Where I’m drawn to, of course.

Piranga comes from the Tupi word “tijepiranga,” which is what a tribal member in the Amazon might call an unidentified small bird. As for ludoviciana, that’s more revealing, and for some, troublesome. Alexander Wilson, a Scottish American poet-ornithologist, chose the moniker as a reference to King Louis XIV—as in the Louisiana Purchase, the 1803 land deal between the United States and France that essentially annexed the entire western half of the Mississippi River watershed, not to mention its inhabitants, both human and non-human.

As you might recall, the Louisiana Purchase was meant to provide access to the elusive Northwest Passage, a route to the Pacific and thus more trade, more wealth. More wealth for whom? Anyway, Wilson was tasked with examining the dead bird collected by the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the spring of 1806, in today’s Kamiah, Idaho—what had been the winter home of the Nez Perce tribe.

All of which got me thinking: what do the Nez Perce, the Nimiipuu people, call the western tanager? I don’t know yet, but I’ll get there. Conversations is a welcome nudge.

Milkweed Editions
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Jeff Darren Muse is a fatherless, childless Hoosier who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay put. With master’s degrees in science and creative writing, he has worked throughout the United States as an environmental educator, historical interpreter, and park ranger. Today, he and his wife live among the pines of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His new book, Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope, will be released by Homebound Publications in early May. Learn more at www.jeffdarrenmuse.com.

Looking for a “successful” author/writer to help me with my book. That was the subject line on a recent email. I had no interest in working on a biography of a military general. And I confess to being annoyed. Why is my success in quotation marks? I wanted to ask him. But, just in case he turned out to be brilliant, before turning down the work, I did my research. Was there any intrinsic value, any way this project might serve me, above an hourly wage? He was a Vietnam veteran. Maybe reading his work would help me in my mentorship with another veteran of America’s post-9/11 “Forever Wars”? Or inform a novel I wanted to revise? The guy said he’d published a book. I went online. I read a few pages. Completely expository. No spark to the prose. Ah, I thought, he needs a ghostwriter.

My need for money fell away. I recommended a local writer to him, but this writer turned the work down, too. “He is being commissioned by the wife of the general,” my friend told me. “He has boxes of documents he wants someone to go through.” It was all worse than I’d imagined. I could see myself late at night sitting on the floor, sifting through boxes of military memorandums. This guy wanted a secretary, a typist, and he figured that I, with only four small-press books to my name, fit the profile. No wonder he put “successful” in quotation marks.

His definition of success was probably John Grisham, maybe Tim O’Brien. I had long ago taken to heart Alice Mattison’s advice to resist comparing my writing career with that of others. Still. I spent way too much time mulling my irritation instead of just letting it go. Joan Frank, in her new essay collection, Late Work, writes about that “falling away” of concerns as a writer ages. We sometimes let friendships go, we don’t finish reading books that don’t compel us, we redefine what ambition means, but we can still be caught in the trap of comparing our work, our successes, to those of others.

In fact, Late Work begins with just this conflict. In “What Would John Williams Do?”—Williams was the author of the lately renowned novel Stoner—Frank recounts a conversation she had at a cocktail party with another writer who was describing “rampant writerly success. Travel, publication, money.” After this other author’s good fortune with a new book, the author had snagged a top-tier agent who’d sold the next book for a high five-figure advance. This writer, tall and smiling, teeth flashing in the late afternoon sunlight, hoped for six figures. Frank confides to the reader that she wanted to disappear. The only thing she was hoping for? A “handful” of her husband’s Ativans.

Frank calls ambition a “bomb-like subject” while admitting that, though it gets a bad name in art, ambition is necessary, “keep[ing] us alive and fertile as artists, audacious as explorers and adventurers.” She quotes Lee Upton who says, “The aim of ambition is what matters.” So what is Frank’s aim? What drives her? The answer isn’t simple.

She includes herself when she says that writers are aiming for various things: truth, artistic integrity, to make something beautiful or new, to connect with readers, to create work that brings change—yet all these things are ephemeral and need constant redefinition. Ambition, she says, can also mean “seizing as many chances as possible to be generous” by supporting the work of others. Especially as we get older, our ambition might be to emulate “any writer we’ve admired across the years, dead or living, who quietly persisted at making work that matters.”

In “Your Baby’s Ugly,” Frank writes about visiting a book club where, after buying and sharing wine and cheese with the group, they question the believability of the relationships among the novel’s characters, Frank’s emphasis on interiority, and her use of sentence fragments. She admits to feeling “somewhat brutalized.” Having myself just had a similar experience in a classroom where I was a visiting writer, I appreciate her vulnerability. This, too, is something we’re not supposed to talk about as seasoned writers, lest we come across as defensive. Frank notes how difficult it can be to “replenish and protect what is needed for carrying on: vigor, urgency, fearlessness. Freedom. Confidence to make a mess, to spatter.”

On that note: “You’ve Made It” should be required reading for any aspiring author or graduate student and their family members (or other first-responders). It describes the life of someone who publishes with small, independent presses: no advances, no royalties. In fact, a writer needs a day job, maybe two. It seems like material for an absurd play: a person foregoes gainful employment to sit alone in a room and write—with great agony at times—and then, if the book is published, she spends more money to travel and promote it even though she will likely never see more than $135 a year from the sales. (This number was not chosen randomly.) And if that book were to win a prize or garner an advance on a next volume? What would she do with the money? She would buy herself time to write.

One persists. This is a life, Frank writes, that we have to “re-choose and re-choose.” The essay “Ready or Not” is an homage to her own perseverance. After fifteen years of sending her novel, The Outlook for Earthlings, to agents and presses, she found an enthusiastic publisher. In fact, because she never stopped writing and sending her work out, she had three books published in 2020. Yes, in one year!

And even as we persist, even as we re-choose this life, we have our doubts. In “What Are We Afraid Of?” Frank lists them. Doubts of both beginning and experienced writers. What do others think of me? Exacerbated, of course, by the negativity of social media. Will my family forgive me? A worry that never goes away. Is my work good enough? An uncertainty that even success can’t assuage. But late-in-life fears, Frank points out, don’t go away; they deepen. We become afraid of our own cleverness, believe we’re inauthentic. We find we need to “relinquish a favored habit—of focus, ideation, style.” In other words, we “must continue to surprise ourselves.”

I wondered, as I read “I Say It’s Spinach,” if Frank had surprised herself with this essay. I felt her wrestling with the subject matter: “editorializing in the course of storytelling” or literary fiction “bearing a Message, with a capital M.” I loved the energy of her prose as she worked through this conflict. She cites writers like Toni Morrison and Rachel Kushner who balance the messiness of creating human beings in stories with their own agendas for telling them. “Again: my argument is never with Cause,” Frank writes towards the end of the essay. “It’s with the accelerating problem of Cause preempting the integrity, weight, and fluid primacy of art, or Story.”

But who gets to define what artistic integrity is? Aesthetics and craft choices are always bound by culture. Read Toni Morrison’s essays in Playing in the Dark! And, maybe, to Frank’s point, compare them with one of her novels? Is there, as Frank seems to think, a place for the overtly political in nonfiction but not in fiction? The question is open.

One reason I’m drawn to “I Say It’s Spinach” is that it pushes at the edges of the personal, queries the larger culture in ways that some of the other essays do not. I mean, after all: why is it that the successful writer urged Frank, at that cocktail party, to come up with a male protagonist, to have “more stuff happen,” if she wanted to attract a New York publisher? Is the question too obvious: why does marketing drive everything, even art? Or maybe Frank did ask that question, however subtly, and I simply still have an axe to grind.

Given all of this: “How can I go on . . . to what end . . . and for what purpose?” These are the questions the book sets out to answer. The perennial questions of the artist are perhaps felt more acutely as we age—although I remember them weighing more heavily when I was a mother who also taught full-time. Frank quotes T. C. Boyle, the author of thirty-two books and counting, as saying he sacrificed everything for his art. I feel, more like Grace Paley, that I’ve been too busy living to write a novel. To paraphrase James Baldwin, writing is something I must do. And Frank realizes that she, too, is grateful to have been able to “inhabit her calling.”

All of these statements are profound. They seem to require a shift in the way we think about what makes an artist’s life “successful.” Recently, reading about the death of the world’s oldest woman, a French nun, at 118, I thought, Wow! Just think of the extra time she had to write! But she said she’d spent her life eating a lot of chocolate and drinking a lot of wine, which brought to mind another of Frank’s questions: “If you gave up making art, what would be left?”

Chocolate and wine, evidently.

University of New Mexico Press
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Beth Alvarado is the author of four books. Her essay collection, Anxious Attachments, won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award. Three of those essays have been chosen as Notable by Best American Essays. Her fabulist collection Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales was published by Black Lawrence Press in October 2020. Her earlier books are Anthropologies: A Family Memoir and Not a Matter of Love and other stories, winner of the Many Voices Project Award. She lived in Tucson, Arizona for most of her life before migrating to Oregon, where she is core faculty in the MFA Program at OSU-Cascades. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Career Fellowship.

Before the pandemic, a book I invested my time in had to teach me something. During the roughly two years of Covid, the books I spent time with had to shelter me, had to let me hide inside them while they disarmed my anxieties with twists of plot that usually unfolded in English villages and sometimes in France. Now that I have crept back into the world and am warily looking around, my curiosity is growling like an empty stomach, and it’s nutrients I crave again—eloquence and insight, irony, paradox, poetry, wit. I am ready to be instructed and I sure as hell want to laugh.

Still Life At Eighty, Abigail Thomas’s smart, tender, acerbic new collection of short essays, gives us all that. She is writing at eighty but these essays are anything but still. They recount and inquire. They celebrate the familiar contours of her own beloved place while nudging the edge of mystery. They are frank and fearless.

And they are funny. You don’t have to be eighty to recognize many of the moments Thomas shares as your own. Anyone who’s rounded forty and has come suddenly upon their own reflection (when we bought the house I live in twenty-five years ago, the first thing I had removed was that wall of mirrors in the living room) knows the shock and comeuppance of these tiny, brutal revelations.

“I bought myself a magnifying mirror,” Thomas writes, “and took a look. It was like traveling to another country” with an “unfamiliar topography that turned out to be my face.” But she takes aging in stride, no—better—she takes it as interesting, a sort of marvel, in fact. She is “happier being old . . . coming up on eighty . . . probably even older,” she allows, “when you figure in the cigarettes and alcohol not to mention all the crazy fucking things” she did. But, even with the erosion of body and memory, chronicled throughout the book, she concedes, “There’s still enough of me around to like my hair better today than yesterday”—and don’t we get that? Finally, sharing an insight that enlarges her own experience, she observes, “Where there’s a shred of vanity, irony is not far off.”

To discover and ingest just those sorts of insights that are born of but transcend one writer’s experience is why we read personal essays. Their universality is the love in the sex, the spirit in the wafer. It’s also a cure for feeling desperately alone. And Thomas’s reflections are full of wise moments that boil up out of her humor and brooding, which make us pause and say, “Yes, me too, I feel that way too.” She doesn’t believe in God but is sure a deceased friend is in heaven. She experiences the things she loves “over and over again for the first time.” There is “somethingsomethingsomething” coming at her “unaware” in the blue jays on her lawn, the phone call from a friend, her grandson weaving geraniums through a lattice at her window; then, there it is: She’d been entertaining angels unaware “and it isn’t even noon.” Angels or, at least, she muses, “you never know, you never know, you never know.”

You never do know what’s up, really, in this world we pretend to grasp with the puny five senses we evolved, just enough equipment to enable us to successfully breed in our niche. That’s where natural selection lost interest in us and left us stranded. Yet still we yearn to know more. And Thomas, declaring herself “comfortable with mystery,” is full of that yearning. “What is this breathing thing I seem to be?” she wonders. And “What part of our body remembers we are forgetting things?”

Why does she remember her mother telling her about a sign that read, “One flight up for a proper English umbrella” but not the friend who drove her daughter to the hospital? She wants “to be conscious.” She doesn’t want “to miss anything.” She is “curious to see where [her] mind goes when it’s off-leash.” But sometimes she does know just what’s up, which is a mystery in itself. The moment her husband finishes “the hard work” of dying, “over by the window a glass of water fell to the floor, which was goodbye and goddamn and he knew she knew because she almost smiled.”

She wonders what saves us, and how to save. There is a pandemic; Thomas lives alone. Naps, she decides, curling up with her dogs. “We’re not escaping reality. We’re surviving the day.” And though every survival is merely a reprieve, “not yet a cadaver,” she throws her hat in with it broadly and wholeheartedly. When a wasp missing a wing latches onto her sleeve, she knows she “can’t fix it . . . can’t make its life workable.” But extending what comfort the universe permits small creatures, she carefully brushes the insect onto a Rose of Sharon, thinking, “Good luck, little wasp. I didn’t know what else to do.”

And there are glimmers of other savings afoot, of large forces working in small ways. At the beach with her daughter and grandkids during an eclipse, a disruption of the usual rhythms in its own right, and powerful enough to provoke a “primitive” fear in one woman she meets, Thomas watches a child saving saving saving the lives she can.

Millions of small silver fish glint all over the sand, shining like tiny twists of tin foil. At the water’s edge, a small girl is bending, scooping, straightening up, and throwing handfuls of the dying fish back into the waves. “If their tails are wagging, they’re alive!” she cries, bending over again. She is joined by a bunch of other kids, but the job is endless and futile.

Unless, of course, it isn’t, a possibility which Thomas’s attention to mystery and perseverance invites us to consider. Unless salvation lies with just such empathy, that draws no lines between species, and is building in waves that are yet to arrive. As with so much we experience, you never know.

If aging well is an art, Abigail Thomas has mastered it. Still Life At Eighty is a montage of moments that are wry and generous and illuminating. If I count up all the times I answered, “Amen!” or “Damn straight!” it’s even interactive. All of the virtues that ought to come with age are there and few of the bad actors like parochialism, intolerance, and self-righteousness, as if having invented the fable of our own correctness and success, we end up buying the story in which case there is a bridge in Brooklyn we might sell ourselves. Instead, with this memoirist as guide, there is humility and vulnerability and wonder and the long view that comes with enough decades. And paradox—because that’s the stuff of mystery and the currency of life. “The past is unpredictable,” Thomas says. She has lived and loved and written long enough to know.

Golden Notebook Press
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Jan Shoemaker is the author of Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World, and The Reliquary Earth. Her new essay collection, Slow Learner, will be published early in 2024 by Trail to Table Books.

on Unravelings by Sarah Cheshire

Sarah Cheshire’s chapbook, Unravelings, published in 2017 by Etchings Press, is a work of creative nonfiction in which the author blurs facts so creatively that it is difficult to know what is fiction and what is truth. The only part readers can be sure is entirely made up is the Title IX document woven throughout the story. Cheshire tells us in the prologue that she created the Title IX report and its narrator or subject to make sense of a distorted memory involving her and a professor, imagining how her university might have handled their affair.

The story opens with the narrator, a recent college graduate, sweating in a leather armchair and facing the Title IX coordinator who is investigating accusations of misconduct between her and Professor X., her creative writing instructor and advisor for her senior thesis. The narrator says that she had been at the local bar with the Dean of Students and other colleagues, networking the night before. Unwanted advances were made by an unnamed man. His behavior triggered a chill in her, a reminder of all the other unwanted touches her body has felt in the past. Suddenly she is back in X.’s kitchen for another of their many secretive “advising” meetings. He had sandwiched her between himself and his stove.

   Did he initiate the kiss or did I?

   I know I should keep his touch tucked away, but it has been growing more and more potent throughout the past seven months; since he started subtly changing my final grades, pausing his hand over mine in advising meetings.

Pushing back the memory of his kiss, the narrator struggles to respond to Coordinator O’s question: “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what happened—between you and Professor X.?” Now we hear the distant narrative voice of a Jane Doe, as she is identified in the official Title IX document, braid her story against Cheshire’s own voice as commentary. Coordinator O. reports in the official document that “Doe allegedly feels her senior thesis meetings becoming ‘more intimate,’ as she begins to explore ‘personal topics related to the body memory and violence’ in her creative work,” that is, her thesis.

The writing becomes charged when the author’s commentary describes taboo moments and secret meetings in his kitchen, for example, when Professor X. presses her up against his stove. “We were his hand, my hipbone. We were my hipbone, his hand. We were his hum, my giggle. We were my giggle, his thigh.” Her descriptive play helps readers feel excitement, euphoria, love, confusion, and even a sense of numbness along with the main character. “How was I to know that when he returned, he would no longer look me in the eye.”

Throughout the investigation, Jane Doe’s testimony emphasizes that any intimacy between her and Professor X. was mutually desired and acted upon, something she, naively, hoped would keep him out of trouble. But in the commentary voice, Cheshire wonders about the true level of closeness that may or may not have existed between her and Professor X. Was the illicit affair truly mutual? Or was it all just a power game?

The result is, Cheshire seems to be interrogating her own memory. What is accurate? What did she imagine? How much of what happened is too foggy for her to discern the truth from the fiction of her memory? Was she a participant in the seduction? Or was it all his? Unravelings explores these questions and more, leaving readers to wander between the lines for what else is fact or fiction.

Unravelings by Sarah Cheshire

on H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge.

Contemporary creative nonfiction allows writers the opportunity to generate a unique—even idiosyncratic—approach to their work. For example, if one considers writing a book about a bird, one needn’t be confined to a scientifically ornithological presentation or a conscientiously reportorial record or a tightly observant narrative. Instead, a writer might combine a range of literary and academic and journalistic elements into a unique blend. On the back cover of Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, which first appeared in 2016, a quote from The Economist’s review describes the book as “One part memoir, one part gorgeous evocation of the natural world, and one part literary meditation.” Having read other books about birds—not only Audubon Society compilations but also volumes centered on the peregrine, the swallow, the eagle, and the osprey—I’d argue that Macdonald’s book fits that description aptly, especially since those “parts” are evocatively and often lyrically combined throughout.

The memoir thread is anchored in Macdonald’s response to the unexpected death of her father on a London street. Father and daughter were close; his loss capsizes her sense of herself in the world and haunts her throughout the book. She asks herself, “Had I learned to be a watcher from my father?” She “kicked the thought away” but then remembered, “All those thousands upon thousands of of photographs [her cameraman] father had taken,” his stepping back from the world to commit what he sees to memory. She was already an experienced falconer and her need to escape her preoccupation with his passing focuses her on the demanding challenge of training a goshawk, a bird more feral and independent than the falcons with which she has been familiar. “I never thought I’d train a goshawk,” she writes. “Ever. I’d never seen anything of myself reflected in their solitudinous, murderous eyes. Not for me, I thought, many times. Nothing like me. But the world had changed and so had I.” Coping with her father’s death forces her to concentrate on something as or more difficult, and she hopes that training a goshawk will fulfill that need.

Macdonald felt that, in her childhood fascination with birds and her habit of feeling a deep immersion in those she watched, she made herself “disappear.” She refers frequently to T.H. White’s much earlier book, The Goshawk. Written in the the mid-1930s, it recounts his failure to train a goshawk and was only published in 1951, after he added an epilogue explaining what he should have done. Macdonald had read the book as a child, found it disappointing, but returned to it when she resolved to train a goshawk herself. Having learned from White how he kept his psychological distance from his goshawk so that bird and man each maintained their individual independence continually guides her in shifting the balance of her relationship with Mabel, her hawk. Instead of making it conform to her objectives, she increasingly tries to think more like the bird and adjust to its intentions and strategies. She tells us, “I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away.” The more she takes the goshawk into the fields and woods where it will find prey, the more she adopts the bird’s values and the more she alters her behavior to the bird’s needs. When she begins snapping the necks of rabbits in Mabel’s clutches and being feasted upon, she is operating no longer as a trainer but as an accessory, an associate who has assumed the hawk’s perspective.

Referring in passing to a number of other earlier studies in falconry, one published as early as 1686, Macdonald’s research includes White’s unpublished letters and manuscripts, stored at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s evidence of how writers are inspired and influenced by what earlier writers wrote, including what appears only in unpublished manuscripts, and how they build their own distinctive text. The literary scholarship of H Is for Hawk is thorough and deftly integrated into the narrative of her relationship with Mabel, her goshawk.

As much as she tries to concentrate on training her goshawk, she can’t ignore her grief for her father. When Mabel kills a pheasant for the first time, Helen helps remove the feathers, then sits to watch her feed.

Feathers lift, blow down the hedge, and catch in spiders’ webs and then thorn branches. . . . And I start crying. Tears roll down my face. For the pheasant, for the hawk, for Dad and all his patience, for that little girl who stood by a fence and waited for the hawks to come.

Her power of empathy is a burden and a strength. Macdonald will observe and commiserate and perform but seldom stand aloof or remote. Eventually she reaches a point where the goshawk is the dominant partner in their relationship, and she has to recognize how much their roles have altered. Essentially, unlike other stories of a human’s interaction with an animal, Macdonald is able to make readers understand the distinctive nature of the goshawk and its separateness from the values “owners” impose on it. Only when she feels that she has adopted the attitude and outlook of the goshawk does she understand how bird and woman might be able to live comfortably with one another. She observes: “There is a vast difference between my visceral, bloody life with Mabel and the reserved, distant view of modern nature appreciation.”

Once Macdonald realizes how, in taking up the challenge of the goshawk, she has stepped further away from the self she occupied before her father’s death, she recognizes her own identity. She tells us how Aldo Leopold “once wrote that falconry was a balancing act between wild and tame—not just in the hawk, but inside the heart and mind of the falconer.” Eventually Macdonald reassures us that “the balance is righting, now, and the distance between Mabel and me increasing. I see, too, that her world and my world are not the same, and some part of me is amazed I ever thought they were.”

One of the wonders here is the way in which we are drawn into the goshawk’s worldview as well as into the narrator’s experience of it and an appreciation that she can relocate her self in her human form.

H Is for Hawk is a richly rewarding read, simultaneously moving and intimate, learned and authoritative, lyrical and informative. It invites us into the writer’s consciousness and illustrates that what we read shapes our own life experiences, which can have a lasting effect on what and who we think we are. H Is for Hawk is a vital, enduring literary nature memoir.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald