What the what? Artist statement for Read the Birds

Here’s how “Read the Birds” unfolded: A serendipitous yard sale find. A buyout at work. FunADay Pittsburgh 2016, as suggested (as are all good things) by my friend, Lisa.

Found the gorgeous “Birds of the Eastern Forest, Vols. I and II” featuring illustrations by James Fenwick Lansdowne and text by John Livingston at the Point Breeze yard sale for $4. Um. Yes! Only downside was lugging around the 2-ton hardcover book, but I guess that counted as exercise for the month of January.

Accepted a buyout from my newspaper job after 18 years, a total of 30 years in the biz -- meaning the only poetry I wrote for decades was headlines.

Intended to do some writing while looking for work. Opportunities are not abundant for 58-year-old female longtime news copy editors who don't want to relocate or work nights or for peanuts. Don't get me wrong, I do like peanuts.

Job-hunting takes time. Life takes time. The writing I'd planned to do daily turned into one measly hour a week during a writers group at a Southside coffee shop with too-young, too-loud music. 

So, when Lisa suggested FunADay Pittsburgh (do something creative and fun every day in January), I jumped at the chance to prioritize writing and research time every day.

Each day, I'd pick a random bird from the yard-sale treasure. I’d read Livingston’s description, then proceed to the interwebs, my favorite sites being the Cornell Ornithology lab’s allaboutbirds.com and Arthur Cleveland Bent’s “Life Histories of Familiar North American Birds.”

I soon joined the Cornell lab’s Project FeederWatch, in which so-called citizen scientists collect and submit data about birds who visit their feeders. I put up several kinds of feeding stations outside my home on the edge of the woods but haven’t felt comfortable enough with my identification skills yet to share “data.”

The randomness of my selection process soon fell away as I tried to vary the types of birds, or focus on ones I attracted to my feeders. The red-shouldered hawk of Day 27 was written about a red-tailed hawk, a fixture in my neighborhood, whom I happened to encounter on Day 27, but I didn’t have a Lansdowne illustration of a red-tail.

For most of the first half of my project, I wrote primarily free verse; then landed on the idea of experimenting with various poetic forms each day. I culled most of these poetic forms from Robert Lee Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog on the Writer’s Digest website here: http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/list-of-50-poetic-forms-for-poets.

I don't love all my poems. In fact, I hate many of them. I revised a little as I went along, but tried primarily to stick to the idea of a poem a day, one and done, each day a fresh slate.

That's my story. And I'm sticking to it.