“H is for Hawk” is currently causing an uproar in the British literary world, achieving mountains of acclaim from critics and fellow writers on both sides of the pond. I first found out about it through BrainPickings, a weekly digest of assembled blog posts that thematically explores famous thinkers and works through the use of quotes, relevant artwork, and a lot of cross-posting. I have an on-again off-again relationship with BrainPickings, which I find by turns astonishingly profound and helpful, and by turns trite and repetitive. But Maria Popova’s praise for “H is for Hawk” caught my eye. She writes of the book:

“Every once in a while — perhaps thrice a lifetime, if one is lucky — a book comes along so immensely and intricately insightful, so overwhelming in beauty, that it renders one incapable of articulating what it’s about without contracting its expansive complexity, flattening its dimensional richness, and stripping it of its splendor.”

High praise! Naturally, I set about finding a copy.

The cover features a quote from the Economist, which describes the book as “one part memoir, one part gorgeous evocation of the natural world, and one part literary meditation.” It’s really impossible to see the book as anything other than a three-fold exploration. Ostensibly, the book’s beginning is the death of Macdonald’s father, a journalist and photographer. Certainly that is where the conflict begins: Macdonald falls into a deep depression, and finds herself inexorably drawn to the wildness and wilderness involved in training a young goshawk.

But in some sense, the book began long before that. Macdonald writes of her childhood fascination with falconry of all kinds. She obsessed over falconry the way I obsessed over horses: learning everything there was to know about bird anatomy, caring for and training the creatures, hunting with falcons, and the history of falconry as told through myriad British men through the ages.

One such man happened to be T.H. White, famed author of The Once And Future King. He wrote other books, of course, one of which happened to be a narrative about his own retreat into nature via an ill-fated attempt at taming a goshawk. A young Macdonald obsessed over this book. And when her father died and her internal world was abruptly thrown into chaos, she felt some connection with White, and was drawn to his story.

And so the book is a three-part tale: Macdonald’s trauma and her attempt to use the goshawk – Mabel is her name – to heal herself; Macdonald’s insights, both intuitive and laden with scholarly precision, into the world of hawks and falconry, from historical and etymological information to detailed notes on how hawks perceive and relate to the world; and finally, White’s relationship with his own hawk, Gos, and why White’s journey inspired, and ultimately diverged from, Helen’s.

I think in part BrainPickings set me up for failure: the book was excellent, but it was five-star excellent, not seven-star excellent, not once-in-a-lifetime excellent. The book is never boring, but I did not race through it as other reviewers said they did. I walked through, stolidly, enjoying the moments of light and of cheer, the moments when Helen describes playing catch with Mabel, surprised and delighted at her hawk’s playful side, and pausing at the darkness and moments of weight, the passages when she cries herself to sleep on the couch and cannot seem to speak to other human beings. Astonishingly unsentimental for a book that is, essentially, a meditation about life and death, it was an introspective book, not one to be rushed through, not a page turner. And while there are countless moments of quiet beauty, and Macdonald’s descriptions of the English countryside she and her hawk hunt and train in are exquisite, it never quite lifted me into the transcendental, the tactile connection between man and earth that other authors have achieved.

One thing I loved was the author’s impressive command of vocabulary. I admired this in the same distant way I admire Cormac McCarthy for the same ability, and Hemingway for his spare prose. Her use of uncommon words never felt overbearing or verbose for the sake of it. She also uses words in new ways – as descriptions I never would have thought of – and they fit perfectly, never detracting from the flow.

This summer lunch feels deeply unreal. Shadows of damask and silver, a photogravure in an album, something from Agatha Christine, from Evelyn Waugh, from another time. But the wasps are real. They are here, and they are present. So is the hawk, the sun at their centre. And me? I do not know. I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within. (130)

Her scholarly background and childish imagination also gives her an approach to the history of falconry that connects us to a larger tradition, an expanse far greater than just her and Mabel and White and Gos.

I had, as a child, bought into that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers, where death was visceral and ever-present and hedged with ceremonial formalities. When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence.

I loved these lines of connection, lines Macdonald brings to light effortlessly throughout the book, partly because of the obvious symbolism in falconry: her hawk is literally bound to her by creances, lines like leashes that keep the hawk close at hand in the early stages of training, if I’ve got it right. Lines that Macdonald illustrates by drawing parallels between hawks and war planes in the World Wars, by talking about falconry in America and Kazakhstan and Arabia. Lines she illuminates by noting the etymology of the word game as in game bird, and poaching, and comparing her love of hawks to her father’s love of airplanes. In everything there are lines of connection, if only you remember to look – a theme that runs throughout the book and is perfectly encapsulated in a moment when she and a friend are flying Mabel, and he points out the lines of gossamer threads in the grass at their feet, which Helen has neglected because she is blind to everything but the hawk.

But the connections are always there, even when we ignore them or cannot see them.

This will certainly draw comparisons to Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. Both memoirs by women in a largely male-dominated field, both born out of grief and trauma and depression, both taking place on the knife’s edge of the line drawn between man and animal, man and wild, man and earth. I haven’t read Wild yet, but it’s soon up on my list. I’ll let you know my thoughts.

I am not usually a reader of memoirs, but this one might have turned me to the genre. Usually I find my stories in more vivid, hallucinatory, imaginary worlds, but this one is clearly drawn enough to bring you into England’s ancient forests and dark mythologies, while rooted firmly in this century. The way each personality interweaves through the narrative – Gos, White, Mabel, Helen, and, towards the end, Helen’s father, too – has reminded me of the power of real life stories as well as fictional ones.

Recommended for: anyone who enjoys great writing, anyone who enjoys memoirs, anyone fascinated by the crossroads of wildness and humanness.

Get your copy here:
Amazon Kindle
Amazon UK
Hardback

In August of 2015 I had the pleasure of meeting novelist Kristen Harnisch at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City. I was introduced to her first novel, The Vintner’s Daughter, a historical fiction novel about a young French woman, Sara Thibault, who grows up making wine with her father, a winemaker in the Loire Valley. Forced to flee to America, she naturally makes her way west to California, where a fledgling wine industry is growing in Napa Valley. Naturally, I loved it. As a female winemaker-cum-writer with a love of history, I was pretty much the ideal audience for The Vintner’s Daughter.

The California Wife is the continuation of Sara’s story, now Sara Lemieux – to no one’s surprise, she has found love in California with a vintner, also French, who coincidentally hails from the same small region that she does. (There is a lot more to this coincidence than I’m letting on.) The California Wife takes place over the course of several years, and depicts in rich detail a number of important historical events, including the 1900 Paris World Fair and the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The California Wife is a continuation of Sara’s story, and it is, at heart, hers to tell, but there are so many new characters at play that at times – particularly towards the end – the story slips away from her. To my surprise, this in no way detracted from the book. If anything, it revitalized a story that was, in some ways, beginning to grow stale.

The book begins in France, as Sara is preparing to marry Philippe Lemieux. They struggle to rebuild relationships – Philippe’s brother was quite a destructive personality – and to rebuild Sara’s ancestral home, which was destroyed in a fire as Sara fled. The first half of the book is mostly about Sara realizing that marriage isn’t always a picnic, as she and Philippe argue over money, children, how to manage the business, and more. The ups and downs of Sara’s marriage and her relationship with Philippe grow tiring at points, as it seems they’re constantly either finding something new to fight over or somehow resolving the fight. While the business aspect of managing an early 20th century winery was interesting to me, I imagine that has a lot to do with my love of winemaking. And even for me, that dragged at times.

Business aside, there were some fascinating moments in Sara and Philippe’s relationship. Their trip to the 1900 Paris World Fair was thrilling. I felt like I was really there, seeing the sights and experiencing the fair alongside them. It was a historical moment brought to life. Later, when Sara learns that Philippe has had a child out of wedlock – and before Sara was ever in the picture – she must decide how to handle the news. The evolution of Sara’s reaction was poignant and very real. And there is a devastating moment in the book that I can’t share for obvious reasons – spoilers! – that cast both characters in a different light.

But interestingly enough, for me, the best part of the book was not about Sara Lemieux, or winemaking at all. It was Marie’s story, who we met briefly in the first book as the midwife who delivers Sara’s sister’s baby boy, Luc, in New York City. Marie is also connected to Philippe’s family, by way of daughter fathered out of wedlock by Philippe’s brother Bastien. In this book, Marie is persuaded by Sara to come out to San Francisco to study to be a surgeon. Marie is the first female student to attend the medical school there, and much of the second half of The California Wife is devoted to Marie’s story. Marie’s studies give us a fascinating bit of insight into medical techniques at the beginning of the 20th century, as doctors were just beginning to perform advanced surgeries, and using anesthetics like chloroform and cocaine. If The Vintner’s Daughter felt firmly lodged in the past, The California Wife, with electricity, phone calls, and cars, feels almost modern. Nothing throws that contrast so sharply into light as Marie’s fledgling career as a surgeon.

Marie is every bit as captivating a heroine as Sara, and personally I’d almost like to see a prequel about her backstory as a midwife in New York. She, too, finds love on the West Coast, a developing romance with a wealthy doctor who also happens to be one of her teachers. (Scandalous!) Her struggles for legitimacy as the only woman in her class, along with her tenacity and love for her daughter, make her every bit as endearing a protagonist as Sara.

The book ends on a devastating – but hopeful – note, which makes me think Kristen Harnisch isn’t done with this cast of characters yet. With talk of the Kaiser raising an army and plenty of rebuilding to be done after the San Francisco earthquake, it seems history will always provide ample material for new stories. About halfway through this book, I was close to thinking the story was tapped out, languishing in marital discord and business trivialities. But now that I’ve finished, and it’s clear the extended Lemieux family has more in store, I’m hoping for a third in the series. (Or better yet, the aforementioned prequel!)

All in all, another vivid work of historical fiction with a compelling cast of characters. Highly recommended!

Back in 2014, I started doing a series of author interviews called #WriterWednesday, in which I brought new and innovative authors onto my website in an attempt to connect my readership with the wealth of diverse indie authors out there in the world. Although the interview series fell off, I am pleased to revive it now, beginning with an inaugural interview with Tarah Benner, author of the Fringe series and the Defectors series. Tarah’s obsession with dystopian literature began at the age of thirteen when she first read “Fahrenheit 451,” and she claims she’s been preparing for the apocalypse ever since. Tarah graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in Journalism and lives in Columbia, Missouri. Her books consistently sell well on Amazon and she writes prolifically. She enjoys reading, running, Krav Maga, kickboxing, and binge-watching on Netflix. You can connect with her on Twitter @TarahBenner.

Welcome, Tarah! You have written and self-published two book series, The Defectors and The Fringe, both of which are dystopian, post-apocalyptic novels. Why does the dystopian genre fascinate you?

I first started The Defectors because I loved reading dystopian books and wanted to try writing my own. Now that I’ve written several dystopian books, I realize that I love the genre because it allows me to express my fear and outrage at things that are going on in the real world.

On the surface, my books have all the trappings of a dystopian page-turner — a kick-ass heroine, a steamy romance, an evil government, lots of action, etc. — but I’ve worked hard to build the conflicts within the story around looming catastrophes from the real world.

One of the major conflicts in The Defectors is a corporate machine run amok and the domino effect of fuel shortages that would lead to food scarcity. The Fringe takes place after widespread nuclear devastation, but that’s just the beginning. In this new society, corruption, eugenics, and espionage create a host of new problems.

Your publishing journey has so far been brief but prolific: you put your first book (Book 1 of the Defectors series) out into the world just two and a half years ago, in September of 2013. Can you share with us how you’ve managed to put out eight books – soon to be nine – in such a brief time span? 

In a word: focus. I do write pretty fast, but that’s only a tiny part of it. The truth of the matter is that if you want to make a full-time living as an author these days and you don’t have a runaway bestseller, you need to be prolific. I knew that I wanted fiction to be my career, so I used to wake up hours before I had to be at my day job and write like a fiend on the weekends.

To get books out consistently, I also have to take off my sensitive artist hat and put on my business hat. I decided from day one that I wanted to follow startup principles by producing a minimum viable product — i.e., a manuscript that wasn’t ready for prime time yet — and get feedback very early on in the process. Then I would revise ruthlessly to get the book where it needed to be, send it to my editor, and publish. I’m constantly tweaking my process to be better and more efficient, and every book gets easier.

You chose to write The Fringe series from the perspective of a female and a male lead – Eli and Harper – which is the same thing we did for our Seeds series. What led to that decision? What made you feel that both Eli and Harper needed to tell their own stories? 

Eli and Harper are very different people and represented two polarities in society. In book one, Harper is gunning for an elite job as a computer programmer. She’s smart, but she’s also a little bit entitled. Eli has a very dangerous, low-level job going out into the radiation-soaked desert — sort of like the canary in the coal mine. He’s tough and cynical because he’s experienced so much death and loss. Harper and Eli have had very different life experiences, and part of the fun of book one is seeing the clash of their personalities and worldviews. 

Can you tell us about the themes of environmental devastation in your Fringe series, and what kind of research went into building these themes? 

Nuclear annihilation is one of my biggest fears, so it’s something that’s always been on my radar. I researched extensively to understand what the fallout would be and then imagined what the world would look like years after the bombs dropped.

The real fun was imagining how humans could survive. I first got the idea for the compounds after reading about Biosphere 2— the self-sustaining ecosystem in Arizona. The real-world experiment was a disaster, and it got me thinking about what would be necessary to build something like that on a larger scale. I considered everything from the minimum viable population for the ecosystem to the sort of food they would have to grow.

The final book in the Fringe series, Annihilation, is due out June 20. How does it feel to have wrapped up a five-book series? 

It’s extremely satisfying, but it’s also sad. I’ve lived with these characters for several years now, and they’ve grown so much that they almost feel like real people to me. I’ve had fun wrapping up the book and deciding their fates, but it will be tough to say goodbye.

You’re a successful self-published author who has built a small but legion following in just two and a half years. What wisdom would you offer to an author who is just beginning their journey to publication? 

My small tribe of devoted readers means everything to me. They’re how I survive. Breaking out in publishing is harder than it’s ever been, and getting the whole world to care about your book in our era of entertainment overload is an exercise in futility. But you don’t need the whole world to care about you. If you can find that core group of people who truly love your work, you can make it as an author.

Tarah, thank you so much for doing this. It’s always heartening to hear about other indie authors who are really making a living in this industry. For those of you who would like to learn more about Tarah’s work, check out her website or the Amazon page for Recon, the first book in the Fringe series.