I first read Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life almost 30 years ago. Her insights into writing have stayed with me. Like the idea of writing for writing’s sake. “Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be,” she warns. “But writing is.”
And the importance of finding the right people to critique with. (Thank you, BooksAroundTheTable “batties.”)
And “All good stories are out there waiting to be told in a fresh, wild way… what you have to offer is your own sensibility.“
But most of all, Lamott’s advice right there in the title reminds me to stick with the work, to keep it moving forward a little at a time. Bird by bird. That expression was coined when her brother, age ten, had struggled to create a report on birds. Their father sat down beside him, put an arm around his shoulder and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
So goes this post. Bird by bird.
It starts with the mystery of the bird nests. Walking up our driveway in mid-May, I found three nests carefully lined up across the road. Where did they come from? I could see no broken branches above. Besides, three nests falling from the same tree in a line? Really? I asked the few neighbors who know about my bird nest collection, but no one would own up to leaving three nests lined up on our driveway.
Two weeks later, our grandsons were here for a sleepover and we started playing with the Merlin app. You know, the phone app that listens and then identifies birds by their sonograms. Our eight-year old grandson took 13 different recordings – mostly two minutes long, but one the length of time it takes to put on his pajamas — then he tabulated and charted his findings.
I had no idea there are so many birds in our woods.
The following day we trekked up to Edison WA, in the verdant Skagit Valley to hear our friend Elizabeth Sandvig talk about Bird Song, her show at the i.e. gallery. Ah, the serendipity! The walls of the gallery were lined with her beautiful paintings of birds from across the decades. You can see them all here: https://www.ieedison.com/elizabeth-sandvig. Liz talked about various ways she graphically indicated sonograms of birds’ song: in various languages, with striking stabs of color, with a dot pattern, to name a few. (Two below to give you the idea, by permission.)
And she told a story about how she and her granddaughter had found an injured bird and played the bird’s song back to it after moving it to safety under some shrubbery. Later, it was gone. Hopefully renewed by rest and its song. Reminded me how sometimes we need friends to read our work back to us, to breathe life back into it.
If the Bird by Bird method of writing were a call, Liz’s gallery talk provided a response. She’s in her 80s now and told us she still likes to start each day by working on her art, moving it forward. Bird by bird.
More songs, this time from voices and strings – our ukulele band in 2015 with Liz front right and me in the middle back.
One last story.
On the solstice we finally noticed that a family of four barred owls had nested in a Douglas fir at the bottom of the driveway. The two babies perched on a branch next to the nest, just like in my favorite picture book, Owl Babies. Perhaps on that very day the owlets fledged because we haven’t seen them since. But an adult owl came by for dinner the other night. Hooted once so we’d notice him and flew on.
Bye, bird, bye.
Books Around The Table 