A writer's search for inspiration, beauty and solace leads her to birds in this intimate and exuberant meditation on creativity and life-a field guide to things small and significant.
For Vladimir Nabokov, it was butterflies. For John Cage, it was mushrooms. For Sylvia Plath, it was bees. Each of these artists took time away from their work to become observers of natural phenomena. In 2012, Kyo Maclear met a local Toronto musician with an equally captivating side passion-he had recently lost his heart to birds. Curious about what prompted this young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature, Kyo decides to follow him for a year and find out.
A distilled, crystal-like companion to H Is for Hawk, this memoir celebrates the particular madness of loving and chasing after birds in a big city. Intimate and philosophical, moving with ease between the granular and the grand view, it celebrates the creative and liberating effects of keeping your eyes and ears wide open, and explores what happens when you apply the core lessons of birding to other aspects of life. In one sense, this is a book about disconnection-how our passions can buckle under the demands and emotions of daily life-and about reconnection: how the act of seeking passion and beauty in small ways can lead us to discover our most satisfying life. On a deeper level, it takes up the questions of how we are shaped and nurtured by our parallel passions, and how we might come to cherish not only the world's pristine natural places but also the blemished urban spaces where most of us live.
Birds Art Life follows two artists on a yearlong adventure that is at once a meditation on the nature of creativity and a quest for a good and meaningful life. #1 National Bestseller
Winner of the 2018 Trillium Book Award
Winner of The Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada
Shortlisted for the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Gold Winner of 2017 Nautilus Award for Lyrical Prose
A Globe and Mail Best Book
A National Post Best Book
A CBC Best Book
A NOW Magazine Best Book
An Entropy Best Book
"Birds Art Life feels like a passionate defence of the things we so consistently overlook-the tiny, the invisible, the seemingly inconsequential, the precious... The memoir's structure is a lot like a tidy cupboard brimming with beautiful objects-each one taken from a shelf, examined for a short time and returned, to allow another to reveal its wisdom... I often found myself flipping backward, revisiting underlined passages, relishing the insight offered on everything from health and aging to introversion and extroversion, familial and romantic love to success and failure, courage and fear. Birds are indeed the narrative thread, but a love for them, or even an interest in them, is not necessary to appreciate what Maclear has accomplished. What it means to be human is the overarching subject, and readers will find a universality in Maclear's experiences, along with countless passages worthy of returning to time and time again." -The Globe and Mail
"A wondrous little book about 'being a little lost.” -The New York Times
"An incandescent exploration of beauty, inspiration, art, family and freedom that seems to leave no topic out of its binocular scope." -Toronto Star
"In an age in which bombastic noise often triumphs over quiet contemplation, Maclear offers a lyrical ode to the beauty of smallness, of quiet, of seeing the unique in the ordinary." -Maclean's
"Every now and then you read a book that changes the way you see the world. For me, Birds Art Life is one such book. The writing is marvelously pure and honest and light. At the same time, magically, it is erudite, generous and brimming with meaning and event. It is a book I know I will return to again and again for inspiration and solace." -Barbara Gowdy, author of The White Bone and We So Seldom Look on Love
