Bird by bird

February 7, 2020 a good book creative endeavors musings out and about the birds and the trees

I listen to a podcast on my morning walk, and I often let the length of the show dictate the length of the walk. On a recent morning the podcast was On Being; Krista Tippett was interviewing Brené Brown. I was engrossed — Brené (she seems like a first-name sort of person) is always an engaging mixture of funny and wise — and I just kept walking all the way down to the shore. It was a grey day, but there were lots of birds wading, swimming, perching, and foraging, so I lingered to take a look.

A large flock of what I think must have been sanderlings (or possibly western sandpipers) first caught my attention. I watched as they settled on the shore, then suddenly startled and took wing again, swooping low over the water, then circling around and around, their movements perfectly synchronized, before alighting again. And while their flightier cousins whirled above them like a single organism, a flock of coots bobbed and waded, stolidly ate their breakfast, and generally minded their own business. Check them out:

Further along the shoreline, other birds were feeding — or, in the case of this snowy egret, simply hunching his shoulders and wishing I would take myself off. You can also see American avocets, long-billed curlews, willets, and American coots in the photos below. Do you know which are which?

Craig’s cousin Ron, a wildlife biologist with a lifelong interest in birds, introduced us to Cornell University’s amazing — and free! — Merlin Bird ID app. You can download it from the App Store or use it on their “All About Birds” website. On your phone, you can download “bird packs,” regional databases that you can search to identify a bird. That’s how I decided that I was looking at a flock of sanderlings. A terrific tool!

Regarding the title

I’m reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I wish I could say that I’m rereading it, but the truth is that, like so many of my good intentions, this volume has been collecting dust on my shelf for ages, unopened and un-perused. I picked it up the other night, because I was thinking of naming this blog post “Bird by bird,” and it seemed presumptuous and chancy to borrow that title without ever having read the book. Plus, one of my intentions for this new year is to read some of the books that have been languishing in my study, so why not start with this one?

Bird by Bird grew out of the writing workshops Lamott taught for many years (and perhaps still teaches, for all I know). It contains, she says, all her best ideas about writing. And of course, it’s delightful — hilarious and wise and real. There’s a reason it’s a classic. But what becomes apparent in the first chapter is that what many of her students want most is not to write but to be published. They want agents and book deals and early retirement. They want to have written.

In contrast, Lamott offers her advice from the perspective of someone for whom writing is a calling or a compulsion. I’ve never felt that way, which may have something to do with the kind of writing I’ve done most in my life. I’ve written papers and essays and articles. I’ve written grant proposals, online courses, and teacher trainings. I’ve written emails. And texts. I’ve written a thesis and even a dissertation. But all these were primarily a means to an end, not an end in themselves. I didn’t write them because I wanted to write but because I wanted something else that producing this writing would help me achieve. I guess this puts me in the same camp as Lamott’s students — or just across the lake.

This blog, though, is a bird of another feather. As I declared when I began this project, I do it because I want to encourage myself to go through the world in what Lamott has helped me to see as a writerly frame of mind: paying attention and observing closely, indulging my curiosity and sense of wonder, remembering and reporting. She says:

This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have the sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious. Try walking around with a child who’s going, “Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!“ And the child points and you look, and you see, and you start going, “Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!“ I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world — present and in awe…

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that God is implicit in all of creation… Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world, of the human mind and heart, and can try to capture just that — the details, the nuance, what is. If you start to look around, you’ll start to see.

Exactly.

Instructions on writing and life

I got my most useful writing lesson on my first job out of college. I was working as an administrative assistant at Harvard, having moved East after graduation to see how the Other Coast lived. A few months into the job, I was charged with hiring a part-time assistant. So I interviewed a couple of people, decided to hire one of them, and then took great pains to compose a superbly convoluted letter to the other applicant, trying to spare her feelings while simultaneously letting her know that she was not my pick.

She took the rejection well. But more importantly — to me, at least — she also took it upon herself to critique my rejection letter, and thus to teach me something crucial about writing. Writing is about communicating, she explained, about making sure your reader understands your point; my letter was a masterpiece of obfuscation and confusion. She suggested that I strive instead for clarity and directness in my writing: be clear about what you’re trying to say (I often think this is the hardest part), and then say it clearly.

I was mortified, of course. But after the requisite bout of self-flagellation (coupled with a goodly measure of defiance), I began to follow her advice. I learned the trick of reading my words aloud, so I could discover where my tongue tripped, where the language eddied rather than flowed, and where my meaning was murky. I learned to murder my darlings (actually, I still spare quite a few of them). With time and practice, my writing gradually improved.

That one lesson did more than any other to make my writing readable, and I’m very grateful to this woman whose name I no longer remember. She has spared my readers lots of head-scratching — so I suppose you should be grateful, too!

Here’s to following a creative path where it leads:
beginning with birds and ending with words!

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