Birds Art Life

A memoir, not really about birds or art per se, but how the study and observation of small things can enrich your life. Exactly the kind of calm book I felt like reading right now.

I love most birding memoirs, but there is a subset that I cannot stand: the I've-discovered-birds-in-middle-age-and-need-to-tell-everyone-about-it memoir. They all take the same form: life has thrown them a curveball, they stumble on to birding, and birding teaches them lessons about life. They discover what every birder already knows (nature is miraculous), and try to convince the reader of this by using flowery prose in an attempt to convey this mundane profundity.

Birds Art Life falls into this subset of birding memoirs. I found myself annoyed or arguing with something on every page. From her being able to distinguish among the 3 swans usually found in North America on one of her first birding trips (not exceptionally difficult, but highly unlikely for a beginner), to the tired cliche of looking at caged birds and musing on the cages we put ourselves in (“The cage of habit. The cage of ego. The cage of ambition. The cage of materialism.”)

Throw in the obligatory climate change warnings, mix in anecdotes from life that remind her of the birds she's seen, then add a dash of the oft-told story of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and you've got the typical How I Discovered Birding in Middle Age memoir.

For a better birding memoir, I recommend Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman, and for a better year-in-the-life of nature type book, I highly recommend A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.

Exploring the nature of art, creativity and paying better attention to the world around you without expectation. It is about the perverse audacity of aiming tiny and giving yourself permission to be creative.

This is and isn't a woo-woo self-help book in the same way it is and it isn't an autobiography about the time immediately following the time her father suffered two strokes. It's a meandering, playful, chat with a curious mind.

It's Anne Lamont meets Cheryl Strayed with a distinctly Canadian sense of restraint. And it's just the sort of reassurance that any creative needs once in awhile.