Birds Art Life Death

For a long time I did not tell anyone I was writing a book about birds. Depending on my mood I referred to this book as "a project," "some bits of writing," and, finally, and probably most correctly: "a sketch book."

This quiet memoir is more a book about life and art (writing), than it is about birds. I went into it hoping for a gentle nature memoir, and although it was not quite what I was expecting, I felt it won me over pretty quickly, and for that reason I'd give it a 3.5 star rating.

Kyo Maclear is a Canadian mainly children's book author, who decides to take up a new hobby of bird watching in a difficult year; her father is aging and unwell, she feels her career is stalling, and she is raising two young sons who she cannot help but notice share a lot of her own insecurities about life. This is one of those “meta”-memoirs: writers talking about writing, artists talking about art...people who live talking about life? It is also, as Maclear states herself, more of a “sketch book”, or a selection of vignettes, rather than a cohesive, developing narrative. I find these kind of books can sometimes become wearisome, and feel overly self-indulgent and unfocused, like reading someone's rambling notes, rather than a clearly crafted “book”. And, yes, at times, I did feel this way about this memoir.

But having said that, Maclear writes beautifully and it was easy to give in to the escapist, calming feeling of reading her words. Even though there are many digressions and unfocused detours, the moments of beauty and insight made this an entirely worthwhile read. As you may have seen from my updates, I found many chapters of the book wonderfully perspective and quotable. In particular, the chapter on appreciating “smallness”:

To some people, the desire to do small things and stay small may be perceived as a cop-out, a self-protective position or form of pathological timidity and constriction.Small is a safe harbour. The smaller your goals, the less likely you are to be deflated or “cut down to size.” In this sense, a bias towards the small could be a version of low expectations. Or a form of feminized compliance, as in “I don't want to be seen as loud, fat, assertive, or ambitious”;

I want for every overextended person in my life stretches of unclaimed time and solitude away from the tyranny of the clock, vast space to get bored and lost, waking dreams that take us beyond the calculative surface of things