What I was more interested in over time was not species as much as individuals. And I think that was a big part of it for me—that when you have a wild creature look at you, stop what it’s doing, stop eating, look at you and not fly away, and then go back to what it was doing, you feel that you’ve been accepted in some way on their terms. You know, I’m not going to call it friendship, but it is a relationship that made me profoundly interested in these individuals,” said Amy Tan at the start of her discussion about The Backyard Bird Chronicles, the California Book Club’s September selection, with host John Freeman.
After talking with Freeman about her favorite birds (among them the Anna’s hummingbird and the great horned owl), Tan said that animals are examples of constant miracles, in terms of the systems they’ve developed within themselves that enable their survival. She said, “Survival was a big thing, something that I contemplated a lot, that had to do not just with the birds, but just, overall, with everything in the world, with people, with myself. What do we do to survive?” Nature journaling was a sounding board to herself to think about moral issues. “For example, to think about where I should be compassionate, and in what ways. What depth I should have. Whether I am segregating my compassion to only certain kinds of animals or certain kinds of people. All of these questions came up, and I love to have—as a writer—uncomfortable questions to think about. They are what propel me into telling a story, and certainly they are what propel me to keep observing and asking myself questions.”
Freeman commented that what’s beautiful about reading the book over time is getting to watch as Tan learns to draw and observe the birds, and watch the birds learning how to be birds, including being taught by their parents how to survive. “You have this incredible statistic that 75 percent of songbirds don’t make it past a month or a year or don’t survive,” he said. Tan noted that all birds are at risk in the first couple of years and many don’t make it, so when you see an adult bird, “they really are the survivalists.” Only 25 percent of birds make it to adulthood, and in her bird-watching, she’s seen the difficulties. “This all opened up for me,” she said, “as a result of doing the nature journaling and paying attention, because there have been birds out there in my yard—I just never paid attention to them…. [John Muir Laws] has this wonderful saying that when you pay a lot of attention to something, that becomes love, and that’s true.”
She commented that in 2016, the amount of open racism, much of it directed toward Asians, threw her into despair. She started thinking about how, when people were talking about invasive birds like starlings, the attitude was just to kill an injured starling because it wasn’t native. “That rhetoric reminded me so much of what was going on in the world about people who don’t belong,” she said. “I’m a birthright American, a status that is not, according to some people, 100 percent American. And there has been a movement to get rid of people who are birthright Americans. Our status can be a little tricky, depending on what we say.” This issue created a deep need in Tan to find beauty in the world, and that was why she started the journal.
John Muir Laws, Tan’s mentor in nature journaling, joined the Zoom. Tan noted that when she first met Laws, he would tell his students that it’s not talent that results in good drawings, but rather that you learn some techniques, and then you practice and put in “the pencil miles.” Laws responded that our brains change their shape depending on the stimulus we give them; at first, your brain might resist doing something that’s hard, but if you keep doing it, the brain creates new synaptic connections that make it easier for your brain to do it the next time.
After a discussion about curiosity, Laws said, “I think the invitation is that the world around us is, you know, 99.999999 percent really this unknown thing. And if we can get ourselves just to sort of lean into that mystery a little bit, there is—there’s beauty everywhere, and there’s wonder everywhere, and then we open ourselves to that through attention, and then we also get this extra feeling that the attention is also a bridge to connection and belonging.”
Tan explained that when he teaches drawing, Laws also teaches the function of different parts of the bird or the animal. She had to stop drawing what she thought the bird looked like and notice the actual details of the bird’s body, skull, bill, and feathers. “That is a practice that every fiction writer needs to have, to really be homed in on the details, because sometimes it’s the little details that turn the story…. If you’re not paying attention to all the nuances, you can miss something big, and that’s true in the natural world as well,” Tan said.
She noted that at one point, Laws had also mentioned that if you write down and draw a representation of what you have actually observed and pick out a detail about it, it becomes memorable. She explained that this is a useful thing for a writer, “because you want to use memories in a way that can serve your fiction when you’re trying to find truth about anything. And it’s those details that kind of magically coalesce in an odd, synergistic way when you’re writing.”•
Join us on October 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when CBC host John Freeman will sit down with special guest host Walter Mosley to discuss California Rewritten. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
