California Book Club Transcript: Amy Tan’s ‘The Backyard Bird Chronicles’

John Freeman: Thank you, Blaise. Welcome everybody. I am coming to you tonight from actually within California. I'm over in Berkeley at the Offices of Hay Day Books, which is the publisher of one of the books we're going to be talking about tonight is the book which made the book we're talking about tonight possible, and that's The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling. Amy Tan, who's here tonight to talk to us once said in the book we are going to talk to her about, "I want to know how things happen." And that's one of the reasons I think we all love Amy Tan as a storyteller from Saving Fish to Drowning from the Joy Luck Club, The Opposite of Fate.

One of the joys of reading her books is that you see a whole engineering ecology of why people do the things they do, often in groups, sometimes inexplicable. But about 10 years ago, Amy Tan began to do something she was less comfortable doing, perhaps more uncomfortable than writing, which is she began to start taking drawing classes followed by nature journaling classes with Jack Muir Laws. From the age of three. She knew she loved drawing, and from the age of seven she wanted to be an artist. Her parents had another idea. They said, "You're going to be a neurosurgeon." That didn't work out. But thanks to that failure, we have a wonderful novelist in our midst.

But at age 64, she wanted to do something that she had always loved doing, which is to take up drawing again, and she did it with passion. From the beginning of this, she could only recognize one to three birds in her backyard, but she persevered and she drew and she drew, and she kept a journal of what she did. Roughly 10 years later, she had 9 complete journals full of drawings and notes to herself and thousands probably of words, hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds and hundreds of drawings.

Those drawings have all been whittled down and compiled into The Backyard Bird Chronicles, which if you've been living under a rock, has been a huge bestseller, probably her second number one bestseller of her life. There's very few people in American literature who've been a number one bestseller in fiction and nonfiction. But Amy is one of them. And one of the joys about this book is it's like watching someone fall head over heels in love with what they're doing.

With birds, with looking at birds, with learning to draw them and with the obsession of not categorizing and not simply becoming a birder, but rather trying to figure it out what it is birds do, and also trying to figure out how to draw them. Over the course of the book we watch as her drawings get deeper and with more perspective, more beautiful, more sophisticated, we also watch as her understanding of birds changes. It never becomes total knowledge because who can talk to a bird?

We might meet some of you tonight, but we do watch as her sense of time changes, it begins to move with the seasons, with the migratory patterns. We begin to watch as she spends more and more up to $250 a month getting bird food, not just sunflower seeds and blocks of suet, but I think 5,000 live mealworms a week her birds were going through. She dedicated her back patio and her house, which she's going to be calling us from. Her window sill and her bathroom, and another spot to looking at birds. I think the Anna Hummingbird became her favorite and we're going to talk to her a little bit about why.

But this is someone who really knows how to describe the staticky sound of a hummingbird whose toes are the width of dental floss or a male house finch eating sunflower seeds like he was at a sports bar or [inaudible 00:08:48] strolling like landlords, inspecting the premises of damages. But as good as her words are about birds and they're fantastic, her drawings are equally beautiful. Come on Amy Tan, and let's talk about this journey of you going from a novelist to a full-fledged bird artist and a person who gets bird tachycardia when you saw new birds.

Amy Tan: Okay. Here I am. I hope. There we go. Oh, what happened? There.

Freeman: There you are.

Tan: All right. There I am. I'm sitting on top of the world.

Freeman: So, for those of you who haven't read the book, do you want to describe where you are? Are you in Sausalito?

Tan: This is Sausalito where I live. I live in New York as well, the concrete jungle. This is my roof in my house in Sausalito. It's a green roof of succulents and it's also something the birds like. They're flowering succulents. We let them go to seed every winter so the birds have additional food resources.

Freeman: Well, one of the most beautiful sentences in your book I read was when you're describing what it is you do was "They are portraits of individuals who looked at me whenever I looked at them." And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that, because I feel like what's beautiful about this book is it doesn't say I'm going to be a bird naturalist. It's like a book about the encounter between you and wild birds and what happens between the two of you.

Tan: Yeah. I don't know. I started off not knowing all the bird names and I certainly don't know the Latin bird names. But 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. I'm not going to call it friendship, but it is a relationship that made me profoundly interested in who these individuals were.

Freeman: The very first encounter is with ... Well, maybe the second encounter is with a hummingbird. And very quickly it comes over and you have this almost face-to-face interaction. And you think that was quick.

Tan: Yeah. Go ahead.

Freeman: I'm curious if hummingbirds remained your favorite bird for that reason because you connected so quickly or something else.

Tan: Yeah. They remain one of my favorites. I have a lot of favorites, but I will say I go with the biggest bird in my yard and the smallest bird in my yard, so that would be the great horned owl and the Anna's hummingbird. You have such a contrast of a very powerful big bird that could tear any other bird and my dog apart to a little hummingbird that is so tiny that you think that it would not do anything that harmful to anybody. But in fact, is one of the most ferocious birds out there, milligram per milligram. So, it's a contrast of a peaceful giant sleeping owl in my yard and buzzing activity territoriality going on constantly throughout the day.

Freeman: You have this wonderful passage about how hummingbird's heart slow down at night, and I forget the word you when they go in ...

Tan: Torpor.

Freeman: Torpor.

Tan: Yeah. Torpor. Yeah.

Freeman: And go from 1,000 beats per minute down to 60?

Tan: Yeah. They slow down their metabolism because they need to otherwise feed about every 15 minutes. And by slowing that down, slowing down everything, they can go through the night and hopefully wake up in the morning. But immediately have to eat when they do get up. Bears do it to a certain degree only their heart rate doesn't slow down to being less than one-tenth of what it was. But animals are examples of constant miracles, I think, that you see these systems that have developed within them that enable them to survive.

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? And I think that's what nature journaling did as well. It was not just about the creatures I was looking for. It really was a sounding board to myself to think about moral issues, for example, to think about where I should be compassionate, 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.

So, all of these questions came up and I love to have as a writer, uncomfortable questions to think about. They are what propelled me into telling a story, and certainly they are what propelled me to keep observing and asking myself questions.

Freeman: In addition to the birds in the book, there are squirrels, there are rats, there are creepy crawly things. You feed to the birds and it is that capacious sympathy for all living. You don't even condemn rats to the term pest. And you very nicely in a very brief form say, "I don't like talking of them that way because it reminds me of how people talked about Chinese people in California when I was young. And talk to us a little bit about rats, because you come to a big plot with them where you ...

Tan: Yeah. Yeah. I had a real big problem with rats and at one point it seemed like there were 10 rats running across the patio in the evening as if they were in a marathon. And I had to look at their lives and say, "These creatures don't live usually for more than a year." And that gives you an idea of how difficult their life is in the wild. On the other hand, I found out that they're ready. They have sexual maturity usually about at age 30 days, and they can have six litters a year. And so, this population of rats can continue to grow geometrically.

If you see 10 rats, those are the ambassadors of a metropolis, they're way out there. So, I had to think about their lives and also why it is that we can feel a great deal of affection for pet rats, which are different. The domestic rat is different from the wild rat. And all these questions about why we want to kill rats? Now, I do not kill the rats, but I managed to get rid of them in very effective way.

Actually, I didn't do anything. It was when the great horned owls, two of them moved into our backyard and pretty soon within about a month we had no more rats running through our yard. That tells you how effective they are as exterminators. You can't use poison because you'll end up killing things like owls when you're trying to get rid of rats, glue traps, lots of birds get stuck in glue traps and die of dehydration, trauma, all of those things. There's so many things, catch and release traps takes them to a habitat they're not familiar with, where without their social system, they end up dying as well.

So, the only thing I could do was clean up the mess in my yard and then the great horned owls moved in and took care of that for me, took care of my moral dilemma of not being able to kill the rats. So, yeah.

Freeman: Well, what's beautiful about the book reading it over time is you get to watch as you learn to draw and observe the birds, but also you watch the birds learning how to be birds. You watch various birds give birth to babies and you chronicle the way that they're taught by their parents how to function and how to survive and how ... You have this incredible statistic that 75% of songbirds don't make it past a month or a year or don't survive ...

Tan: They don't make it to breeding age, so they don't become adults and further the population. So, yeah. It's not just songbirds, it's also raptors. So, owls, hawks, all of those birds are at risk for those first couple of years and don't make it. So, when you see an adult bird, they really are the survivalists. Only 25% of them make it to adulthood. And I got to see the difficulties. Now, I could tell you about all these things that birds that I've seen with birds and what they do and everything, but I have to say that this all really opened up for me as a result of doing the nature journaling and really paying attention, because there've been birds out there in my yard. I just never paid attention to them.

And by paying attention, Jack has this wonderful saying that when you pay a lot of attention to something that's love, that becomes love. And that's true. It became obsession because then I was seeing all kinds of things that they were doing, patterns. And I had to ask myself, are these simply one-offs or is this instinct? Is this learned behavior? All of those things that kept my mind really open and ultimately having to say to myself so that I didn't close my mind off, I will never know the real answer.

And that freed me to just continue to ask questions knowing that I didn't have to know what the answer was. The question was my touchstone for curiosity. It was the sign post in a way to just go anywhere with this curiosity.

Freeman: And each chapter is like its own little genre? There are comic books, there are telenovelas, there are vampire stories, there are murder mysteries. I mean there are parables. I mean, it's like you cycle through the entirety of storytelling genres along the course of the book.

Tan: You know why, because this book was not meant to be published. This was not organized in any way as genre or the drawings I was going to do. I thought it was doing realistic drawings and they turned out to look like cartoons. And over time, I was able to do other drawings. But those are what I call portraits. It's not really nature journaling. Nature journaling are the quick sketches, the capture, the sense of the scene for me, the story that's going on, something about the birds themselves. So, it's fun to look at these dramas.

But at the same time, as I said, this was never intended to be a published book. It was a private journal, which is something that's always been important to me as a writer. Journals are your place where you do self-reflection, where you think about questions, where you think about ideas for further books where you note down ideas that came up in conversations. And they are really a diary of your life, a narrative, the ongoing narrative, who you are and how your mind developed, how your questions that go into your novels develop.

And so, I was again doing just that. My nature journaling started in 2016. There was a lot of open racism going on and it was directed for the first time ... I found a lot of it was directed to Asians and it just threw me into such despair. And I will say that ... and of course it got worse with COVID. But what I was thinking about also during this time when people were talking about invasive birds like starlings or house sparrows, and when people said, "I found an injured starling, what should I do? Should I take it to a rehab center?" And people would say, "Oh, it's not a native, it doesn't belong here. Just kill it."

And that rhetoric reminded me so much of what was going on in the world about people who don't belong. I'm a birthright American, a status that is not according to some people, 100% American, and there have been movement to get rid of people who are birthright Americans. Our status can be a little tricky depending on what we say. So, this is an issue that really created deep need to do something else, to find beauty in the world, to find that this planet earth, I belonged here and that's the nature of the journal. That's why I started the journal.

Freeman: It's evident on every page in the way that you watch and look and the variety of birds that you care about. I mean, there are crows that are characters here too and that you observe very closely. And some people really feel scared of crows and they don't consider them on the same plane as the rest of the birds, the nuthatches and the California quails and the beautiful sparrows that this book is full of. Do you want to read a little bit from the book and maybe we can feel what it's like to be with you?

Tan: Okay. I'm going to read something about crows actually since that's something that most people are familiar with. This is called Crime Scene! and cheekily called A Murder of a Crow. It's December 23rd, 2018, breaking news from The Backyard Bird Chronicles. At 2:00 p.m., I saw large flocks of crows flying over the patio from different directions. There were about 10 to 20 in each cawing cloud. They took refuge in the oak trees nearest the patio. Others landed on our green roof where they scanned the sky and screamed. A few dug up and ate the caches of food on the roof that the scrub jays and squirrels had hidden.

The songbirds dispersed when the crows flew nearby. Later, most of the little birds returned and remained at the feeders on the patio. They must have concluded the crows were not interested in their food and were not a threat. But the crows remained alarmed about something. I guessed the reason some terrible person had murdered a crow in broad daylight. Okay. I admit. I placed the dummy crow hanging upside down on the rail next to the patio. Our yard was becoming a crow hangout, which scared the other birds. They were making a mess knocking the feeders every which way to shake out seeds.

I bought the dummy crow from the bird store. It was a little small for a crow, but it was well-proportioned and covered in black chicken feathers, some of which were askew, giving the impression that a mighty battle had taken place before the valiant crow succumbed to the murderous human. Crows are smart. So, I was impressed that a $14 fake crow had so easily fooled them. I wondered if crows were mourning their fallen member, given so many had flown in from all directions to join the mourning or lynch mob, the fake crow must have resembled the much-loved mucky member of the tribe.

Would they mourn a crow they didn't know? Humans do. I have for the victims of 9/11, for children shot in schools, for fictional characters, no less real than a fake crow. And there you have the illustration.

Freeman: I love that. That's one of my favorite sections. Because I love crows and there's something so engaged by them that you really feel like they're studying you as much as sometimes more than you study them.

Tan: Yeah. I think corvids in general are incredibly smart, and so you have many things to lock onto as being fascinating and endearing about them. We have scrub jays now. They're smaller than crows, but they're equally obnoxious, obstreperous in our yard, but they're also very dear. You get to see how incredibly smart they are. I discovered there is a common feature of birds that are intelligent, and that is persistence. And I think that's true with humans as well.

Persistence, never feeling you have to give up. You just try a different way. You come back at a different time, you try a different tool, whether it's your talents, whether it's your bill, your longer bill, whether you lose weight to fit into a little hole to get to something, whether you drag something, push something. And that's what I got to observe as well, how smart they are in ways that are not analogous to humans.

And I think that's an important distinction. Something that I became aware of when I was reading about bird intelligence that often people use comparisons to human behavior as evidence of intelligence, the ability to understand human words, to respond to commands, to figure out human puzzles, to get food, of course. But still these human-conjured up puzzles, whereas out in the wild there are plenty of puzzles for birds to solve to get to food.

And they just took that a composite of those skills and they layer it onto the human created puzzles that are out there. But I think to truly appreciate what they have to do to survive, it's good to see what they do out in the wild with the natural impediments to their survival.

Freeman: Since you've been talking about scrub jays, Kara Corn Gold, who's been written in from the audience is, Amy, I have a mated pair of scrub jays that literally knock on my back door with their beaks to be fed. One eats peanuts in the shell out of my hand, the other waits until I put the nuts on the porch railing. Do you know which of the pair might be more fearless, male or female? Thanks so much.

Tan: I have no idea whether it would be the male or female. I mean your natural inclination to say it's the male. But for example, in the world of owls, it's the mother who defends their progeny. I saw the mother defending her son for about five months before she flew off and he had to be on his own. And the females tend to be larger in the case of these raptors, whereas they tend to be, if they're any size differences, they might be a tad smaller in say like golden crown sparrows, size differences, though you wouldn't be able to see.

So, it's hard unless you can differentiate what the males and females are if they are dimorphic, which means they do look different between the sexes. And corvids do not look different. They're not dimorphic. So, it would be very hard unless you were to see some kind of courtship behavior that indicated the male was doing particular behaviors that are part of what male scrub jays would do.

Freeman: Which was the bird that you described getting on a branch and moving millimeter by millimeter.

Tan: Yeah. The hummingbird. The hummingbird, which was ... I'm just watching it with these two little feet and it's like this. There's a female on this end just about 10 inches away, and this little hummingbird, which does not walk, it does not usually do this movement. I'd never seen it before. Instead of flying up, which easily could have done and landing next to the female, it was moving like this on the branch. It's like I likened it to a juvenile, a teenage boy in the movie theater in the old days, moving toward the popcorn box and getting, touching the girl's leg and say, "Oops. I'm sorry, I was just going after the popcorn," or putting the arm around the shoulder, these little movements to get closer.

And it was a tactic that did not work because as soon as he got within about five inches of the female, she took off and he looked shocked and chagrined, which there's so many times they leave me laughing hysterically by what they do.

Freeman: The way that you observe the power of your observation and its precision has all been inspired by your mentor and bird watching. John Muir Laws who's here with us. He's an artist, he's an educator, he's a scientist and a naturalist. He's the author of many books including The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, as well as How to Teach Nature Journaling.

Tan: And one on drawing birds, too.

Freeman: And one on drawing birds, which I think The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds.

Tan: Yes. Yeah.

Freeman: And John, if you're out there, Jack, why don't you come on and maybe the two of you could talk about how to make a bird out a pencil or anything else.

John Muir Laws: Hey there. Amy, it's great to see you.

Tan: Hey, good to see you. So, here we are. One thing I remember Jack said at the very beginning that it rings true with actually everything I do, and that is that people say I can't draw, I just don't have the talent. It's not talent, it's really, you learn some techniques, but you have to put in the pencil miles, you have to practice. Like anything, you can't be a concert pianist if you don't start off real early learning the basics and just practicing. Any discipline you have to do that. I could learn to speak French again if I only practiced.

Laws: That's right. You're talking about the persistence in those birds, and it's the same thing with us. Our brains change their shape depending on the stimulus that we give it. So, if we're pushing our brains to draw or speak French, that's how we learn. That's how we grow.

Tan: Yeah. I think we're creating more white matter, something, that we can draw down from a bank account as we get older and older, so we don't lose our memory quite as quickly. Yeah. Strengthening my brain through what I'm doing with nature journaling is a big deal.

Laws: That's right. So, if you are doing something and it's challenging for you at first your brain just said, "Stop, stop doing this thing. It's hard. Okay." But you keep doing it and your brain goes like, "Okay, fine. I'm going to actually create new synaptic connections out here in your brain, and that's going to make it easier for your brain the next time you do that." And so, then your next time you sit down with your little pencil, "Oh, gosh. It's a little bit easier, and then you just move the goalpost.

So, that thing that was hard before is now easy because you've been putting in those pencil miles and then you move the goalpost and now, you're challenging it in a new way and you keep growing.

Tan: Yeah. I think one of the greatest things about nature journaling is how it engages children and helps to stimulate their minds and make them smarter with greater attention, longer attention spans, but also seeing now patterns of in the world, phenomena in the world they never would've noticed before. How could they not be happier, smarter kids by doing that? And I know that's a huge focus that you have. And quite ironically, it's something that I try to emphasize in relationships I have with children, with my goddaughter and my great goddaughter.

But I also found that it was a 13-year-old girl who became my curiosity mentor, thanks to you when I thought she was this annoying child who also ...

Laws: This is a beautiful story. She needed to share the story. This is so much fun.

Tan: I saw her journal. I was standing next to her, we were looking at sandhill cranes or something, and she's scribbling away and her handwriting is going every which way, and she has question marks all over it. She's asking some of these questions aloud. And I thought, "Oh, my God. This annoying child. I should get away from her endless questions that are unanswerable." And then later, I realized by the second field trip, this actually was the purpose of nature journaling, being curious, asking questions, paying attention, not worrying about what the answers were, and then noting more and more and more through the guidance of these questions.

And then I started looking at what she was writing. It was like cheating on a math quiz, "Ooh, okay," and asking her things. So, she became my mentor and my dear friend, Fiona Gillogly, we go birding together. We're going on trip to Mexico, to Nebraska. We do a lot of bird stuff together now.

Laws: You're right. I think of curiosity as the secret sauce.

Tan: Yeah. Yeah.

Laws: And because the minute you get curious about something, you're willing to stick with it longer. And Fiona, the same person that you're talking about, she said that the more interested you are in something, the more interesting the world becomes. We usually think of it the other way that I'm interested in things that are interesting. But she's discovered that if you get interested, then whatever you're looking at becomes interesting. And those interesting things are then around you everywhere, but you can actually be intentional about that curiosity.

Tan: Yeah. You can even nature journal in a TSA line at the airport with all these frustrated people and you could just journal and look at all this stuff and see how people are reacting. You can make anything interesting by nature journaling and just noticing things in a completely different way.

Laws: I think the invitation is that the world around us is 99.999999% really this unknown thing. And if we can get ourselves just to lean into that mystery a little bit, 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 of the attention is also a bridge to connection and belonging.

Tan: Yeah. I found that in drawing when you were teaching things, you also taught what the function was for these different parts of the bird, for example, or the animal where the eyes were placed, what was the reason, did that enable the bird to do? And also, that I had to stop drawing what I thought the way I thought the bird was like the very rounded body. It's not completely round because it has a skeletal structure to it. It has a skull that's not necessarily completely round in some of them, and the bills are different and so many other things. The feather length, and it's not just the colors, but the function of all these things.

And by looking at details, that is a practice that every fiction writer needs to have to really be honed in on the details. Because sometimes it's the little details that turn the story and you're just not aware of it. If you're not paying attention to all the nuances, you could miss something big. And that's true in the natural world as well. If you're not paying attention and over time, over seasons, you could miss out on a great deal.

Laws: So, both the paying attention is a skill that you can learn. And when you're journaling, so drawing pictures and writing down your notes, you have to, that the process makes you pay attention. You can't help but pay attention if you're journaling. But then there's also this link of, at least for me, and I think the research on this bears it out that the human memory is a terrible data storage and recovery tool.

Tan: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that you also mentioned that's been very helpful to me because I have a bit of brain damage from Lyme disease is that you remember something better when you write it down. But you remember something even better than that if you write it down and draw it, draw a representation of what you have actually observed and paint some detail about it becomes really memorable. Write down the date plus what the weather was, and you recall, it takes you instantly back to the day when you were observing this. And that is a very 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 later you have a lot of them, but they magically coalesce an odd synergistic way when you're writing. And so, that has really honed that observational skill that I have to have as a writer.

Laws: And a lot of writing, you're handling a lot of language with your prefrontal cortex up here, and you've got a visual cortex in the back of your skull where you're processing a lot of stuff with imagery. And then on the sides of your brain, there are areas that light up in fMRIs when we're doing math problems. So, part of then the routine is it's not that drawing is better than writing. That's not the footnote here. It's that they're different. So, let's do it all.

Tan: Yeah. Let's engage the brain. Yeah.

Laws: It's this party, there's this ... I mean, why is the party only in the back? You can play with all these different parts of your brain with whatever phenomena the world has presented to your heart.

Tan: Yeah. I think the reason also why with using these different parts of the brain, we also are using our emotions more. We're seen, living and feeling deeply when we are engaged with nature at that level and doing something to really try to understand what's going on and capture it. That effort is what really makes a difference in leading a meaningful life, our intentions in anything we do. And so, nature drawing in and of itself is meaningful, but it also I think fosters that our ability, our nature to continue to do something like this in all ways in life.

Laws: So, I think when I was starting this somewhere in my head is with this idea that I should be this objective thing, and I'm scientist man over here in a little objective bubble. But the more that I am alive on this world, I realized that that's just a vanity and I'm not objective and I have feelings and biases and all these sort of things, and that's all in this crazy mixed up way, part of my human experience. And all of that can come and ... I can put down on my page how I'm feeling about this. And I really see that in your work, you're falling in love with these birds and you're laughing at their silliness, and ...

Tan: And my heart is breaking oftentimes.

Laws: And also, with that, it is through this process of attention that we fall in love with these different little things that you fall in love with your rats the moment you start paying more attention to your rats. For me, my working definition of love itself, it's the act of sustained compassionate attention.

Tan: Yes. Compassionate attention I think is really key and something that we need more of in the world. So, it's a good way to do it. If you can't bear to do it in other ways right now that in this great political divide, I think that practicing compassion can be something you can do with animals until you're ready to look at the vast array of what humankind encompasses.

And I do have to say one of the things that I heard the other night from Sonia Sotomayor, I went to a book event she did for kids, and that is that with everybody, one of her messages to kids is to find the good in everyone. And she certainly has seen the bad in a lot. But she talks about that, and that's going to influence me as I move forward because that's also what is essential for a fiction writer, and that is to have sympathy for your character. I call that sympathy, actually compassion. Compassion is an imaginative and can involve imagination that you are the other person as well.

You are in their shoes. You are feeling what they are feeling. And so, that's all of what I've been doing with nature journaling. What you've taught me about curiosity and attention has really fed into that. So, I'm grateful not just because you taught me the techniques for drawing a bird or drawing a elk or a landscape. But the fact that what else goes into that to make that page, that those hours I was out there much more meaningful, a discovery of nature in myself.

Laws: Something that's beautiful about this growing nature journaling community and movement is that you may have been inspired by something that I did. I'm then in return inspired by how you're taking that and finding the stories. And then that changes my practice and then somebody else looking at that will take this pieces of it. So, we are all sharing these different ideas back and forth. I am so delighted and honored to be on this journey with you. It's so much fun.

Tan: Oh, well, thank you always. I will say, in closing our segment here that everyone can do this. If you say, I don't have the talent to do this, go to John Muir Laws' website and he has the videos, he has free videos, he has resources, he gives you a whole list of what you need to do, and you just get started and you start practicing. And I've seen a lot of people who said they couldn't draw a bird, and then a year later they had relatives say, "Oh, my God. That's great. You drew that?" And that's what can happen with anybody.

Laws: That's right. The idea that it's a gift shuts us down from trying. I've just started a project at a correctional facility here in California. We're going to take a group of men who are currently incarcerated, and we're going to do a deep dive into drawing birds for four months and see what happens. And most of the group have never really drawn before. And what we're going to do is see how we can change our brains through deliberate practice. And you're absolutely right. It's not a gift. It comes through that persistence that you were talking about.

Tan: Yeah. Yep. And you, too, John Freeman, you too can learn to draw birds.

Freeman: One day, I too, will draw an owl beautiful as this. I mean, if you want to see what a gorgeous artist John Muir is, Jack, I've been sitting here while you've been speaking, and also Beth Gillogly, mother of Fiona who you've been speaking of, has been quoting Jack Laws to us, "Keeping a nature journal is a learnable skill that can change our lives forever. Opening doors to mindful attention, curiosity, wonder, beauty, connection, peace, and joy." This has been such an inspiring conversation because you've essentially said that everyone listening to this call has the capacity to have connection, wonder and community in their life by paying attention to what's around them.

And that is a really, really inspiring message. And to see the effects that just over a short period of time on Amy Tan's own drawings and the spirit in which the journals are written is really remarkable. So, yes, please, everyone who's listening go to Jack Laws' website. But to come back to your book, Amy, there's been some questions also from the audience, some factual or just advice column. Peggy writes and says, "I have great horned owls, but I still have rats. Any ideas?"

Tan: Put a little target on the backs of the rat so that the owls get to see. They're very good at hiding. And it may be that you have ... Are they living in an ivy patch, for example, which is where the rats were living in the yard next door. I wasn't able to clear that ivy because it wasn't my yard. But if you do have things like that, if you can get rid of that ... Oh, yeah, Peggy, they have the neighbors have ivy and has a perfect hiding space, a perfect habitat for rats.

Once the owls, however, see that that's there, they're able to hunt pretty well with their night vision. And I think they just need to have one taste, and then they'll just go after it a lot. I tell you. It was dramatic to go from 10 rats to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then 0, 0. It was so wonderful. And until then, I would say the best thing you can do is just clean up your feeders every single day at the end of the day, sweep up anything that's fallen off the ground. They won't have things so to eat, so they're not going to stay.

Freeman: Another advice column question from Eileen Levinson. Does Amy grow California native plants, i.e. shrubs bearing berries to attract and support birds and other wildlife? And if so, do you have any tips for particular plants or two that are beneficial to attracting birds in the Bay Area?

Tan: We built this house 13 years ago, and the mandate to the landscape architect was we wanted plants. We wanted a landscape that was for pollinators, birds, bees, and butterflies. And so, everything in our yard is also the things that we wanted in our yard are natives. There were some other vegetation there that had been there already. But when we added the new plants and the new landscaping, it was all for that as well as being plants that required less water. We live in a drought environment, so everything is drought tolerant and is seasonal.

We have an old fuchsia tree that's been there for probably 100 years that is a favorite of the hummingbirds. We have plants for hummingbirds, and yet they also come to the feeders. I will say that I think that, yes, birds can certainly take their food sources from natural plants that are out there. But what those feeders do is gives, I think, I believe it gives those fledglings a little bit of an edge in surviving those first three weeks. 40% of the birds who die in the first year, 40% of that 75% die in the first three weeks of fledging. And that's because they're not good hunters. They don't know how to protect themselves. They're just naive.

And so, on a rainy day when they're not able to get any food because the insects have gone into hiding, the flowers have closed down, the feeders give them a fighting chance. They have to eat within a day or two or otherwise, they'll die. And that's why I like the feeders, especially in cold months, in winter months, if you have snow on the ground, feeders give them a chance. If you can warm your water, then they have a water source. All of these things are hard to find.

And so, yes, natural food sources are great, but there's nothing wrong with feeders. Every conservationist I know, every ornithologist I know they have feeders. You do have the responsibility of taking care of them and cleaning them and making sure that you take them down if you see any sign of disease or hear that there's some outbreak going on in your vicinity.

Freeman: Yeah. There's sections of this book in which you deal with conjunctivitis and salmonella outbreak among another kind of bird. Judy McKinley writes in and says, I appreciated what you said, Amy, about wrangling with ethics along the way. Do you feel you've now committed to feeling the birds come to you for life, or do you navigate the commitment relationship that you've embraced?

Tan: I'm committed to the birds forever. I find myself though, looking at life forms, any living creature, humans included through that lens of saying, "Let's pay attention a little more closely." Because oftentimes the things that we just think, "Oh, this person and I have nothing in common." But indeed, if you pay attention, if you just spend more time, if you notice then that you see the commonalities. And again, that's important for a fiction writer. You can't have characters who all are the same, the same values, the same circumstances. So, that's an important dimension to my life.

Freeman: Laura Budenone writes, why did Amy decide to publish the journal? She said it was not intended to be published. Is it authored by Dan Halpern?

Tan: Yeah. My editor, who's a dear, dear friend of mine, he said, "Hey, how's that novel going?" "Well, I was derailed by things going on in 2016, and I just could not write that book. The feeling for it was gone. My feeling for writing was gone." And so, when he said later on, he knew what I'd been doing instead, that I'd been keeping this journal and looking at birds every now and then, I'd send him these pictures, these drawings. And so, he said, "Oh, no novel." He says, "Well, why don't we publish the journal instead?"

And I said, "Oh, no, no, no. The journal is a mess. The journal has misspellings. It's silly. It's crazy. It has little anthropomorphic musings. The drawings are smudged. I have wine stains on the pages, coffee stains." And his answer was "Perfect. This is editor gold." He said, "That's authentic. That's what we want." And I thought, "This is great. He wants the mess." And I don't think editors want to keep all of the mess when they're dealing with a book. But authenticity is definitely what editors look for, what readers look for. They want to know that it's believable, that it's real, that it comes from a source that's authentic and real.

So, yes, he said that, and I thought he presented it to the people at Knopf, and I thought, "Oh, they're never going to go for this. This is such a weird little book." There are books on birds out there, certainly, and Dumbest Birds of the World was out there, but this was weird, and they went for it. It was surprising. It was gratifying to now, not so much. I was glad it was a successful book for Dan. But I was gratified that so many people were into nature. So many people were into birds.

Because when you love birds, you naturally reach a point where you want to save them. And I think how great is that to have 90 million people in the United States interested in birds at some level, and that that can lead to people wanting to save birds.

Freeman: That's a beautiful fact. Derek Lu writes, not a question, but a compliment. Amy, as an Asian-American millennial who grew up in the '90s, never seeing himself represented in popular culture. Reading Joy Luck Club was revelatory. Thank you for inspiring so many generations of writers, AAPI and beyond.

Tan: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. It's been astonishing to me to see how many people actually found that book to resonate with their lives. I'm an older person, and I thought that the discomfort that people felt about their ethnicity or their race had dissipated somewhat. But no, it's still very much there and in waves, there are times where the discomfort increases dramatically depending on what's going on in the world.

Freeman: Well, thank you for giving us this extraordinarily beautiful example of what you can do sometimes with that discomfort as a person who's feeling vulnerable, and you've invited so many people into this joyful practice of yours. You've introduced so much of us, so many of us to John Muir Laws whose work I think people are going to come out and get. But I also think this is one of the most pleasurable books I've read in the last couple years is just on every page, there's the wonder of existence and having the ability to be near something wild and wonderful. So, thank you, Amy for that.

Tan: I just like to close by saying that what I discovered, I started to do this as a result of feeling stressed and to feeling very much in despair. And I found that a place of peace and calm and an ability to move forward and to be active then and the things that I need to be active in, including activism and things that I think are right. But I will say that anybody can get that, be out in nature for 10 minutes. Take that time and if you feel the despair, because a lot of people I know are feeling despair, you can go out there and restore yourself.

There is scientific evidence that, yes, your cortisol levels will go down. Those are associated with stress and your oxytocin, your dopamine, your serotonin, those levels of hormones will go up and they've actually measured it. So, try it. It's like the most joyful therapy you can give yourself, self-therapy, it's right out there. Just go outside, spend 10 minutes in nature.

Freeman: Wow. That is a beautiful way to end. Blaise, I think you're going to come on here now and tell people where they can download this chat in the future and where to subscribe.

Thank you so much, Amy, for joining us on the California Book Club. This was a dream of ours for five years to get you and I remember when you were still just putting this book together. We were like, "We're going to have you on at some point," and I'm so glad it happened.

Tan: Thank you. Thank you so much.•