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player ready...For author Helen Macdonald, a recent March morning in Miami brought her both sorrow and joy. March 20 marked the ninth anniversary of her father’s death, but on that day she also saw a swallow-tailed kite fly over her head, and exclaimed about its beauty while talking about the award-winning book she wrote that helped her deal with the grief of losing her father.
MacDonald will speak and sign copies of her New York Times best-selling book, “H is for Hawk,” on April 11 at Independence Grove in Libertyville. She’s been touring the world for more than a year meeting readers, who share the pain of their own losses, she said. She won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction award and others for the book she wrote after her father Alisdair Macdonald, a respected photojournalist in Great Britain, died.
“I was pretty much a hermit,” before the book was published in 2014, Macdonald said. But on tour, “I’ve discovered I’m a bit more of an extrovert than I thought I was. That’s been really humbling. Being a writer is a lonely experience. Suddenly I’m traveling around the world meeting readers. Many people have suffered great crises of their own. They’ve read the book and it’s been helpful in some ways. They’ll tell me about people they’ve lost and how it feels. Quite often, I’ll be having a cry or giving them a hug.”
When her father died, Macdonald started to think about training a goshawk, known by falconers to be one of the most difficult birds of prey to train. She had always loved birds, and as a youngster she spent time with her father outdoors.
She obtained a female goshawk which she named Mabel.
“That goshawk taught me a lot of things about life and death and that we’re only here for a short time,” she said.
For example, Macdonald writes in the book how she would have to kill the rabbits Mabel caught to put them out of their misery. “Goshawks aren’t very clean killers. That was a very hard important lesson, about how the way the world works, how we desperately cling to life.”
Training the goshawk involved many daily hours of working to gain its trust, she said. “It’s the most intensively meditative, difficult experience. At one time, I didn’t feel like a human any more. I felt like a bird.
The book also introduces the reader to T. H. White, author of “The Sword in the Stone,” who also was a falconer, and a not a very good one, Macdonald said. In the book, she tells of her horror when White overfed the bird he was training to the point the bird could barely fly.
“His story is very instructive — so many of the cruelties in the world are not founded on being evil. They’re founded on ignorance or not being given the tools to know how to love yourself or other people. I think that’s what happened with (White).”
Macdonald admitted sometimes there’s a division between those who watch birds of prey from a distance and falconers. Some people would like to see the bird fly free instead of being held in what they deem is captivity.
“I think falconry if it’s done well is one of the most enlightened relationships between people and wild animals,” she said. “People think it’s about domination. That’s really not what it is at all. It’s an interesting relationship of respect and trust on both sides. And if the bird doesn’t like you, it can fly away.”
Macdonald said she wrote the book not so much to have others read it.
“It seemed it was a story bigger than me. It was a story about life and death and loss. I felt I needed to write it. I didn’t think it would be cathartic, but of course I was wrong. When I finished the last paragraph and pressed the period button, I felt very dizzy and nauseated and realized it had been grief work. It was a proper goodbye to my father.”
She didn’t expect all the award or the book signings. She thought she’d tour for a couple of months. But that was in 2014 and she’s still touring. The book, published a year ago in the United States, landed on dozens of high profile best-of lists for 2015.
“I’m still pretty bewildered by it. I hope it hasn’t changed who I am,” she said.
Mabel has since died, and Macdonald now has a pet green-cheeked conure that behaves much differently from the goshawk, she said. Parrots are social creatures, she said, and yet “I have more scars from the parrot than I ever had with the hawk.”
Someday she would like to have another hawk, but now she is enjoying yet a new chapter in her life, meeting people from all over the world who want to know more about the author who worked through grief by training a hawk.
Book Talk: Helen Macdonald, author of ‘H is for Hawk’
When: 7 p.m. April 11
Where: Independence Grove, 16400 Buckley Road, Libertyville
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Tickets: $21-$26, includes copy of the book
Information: Register at 847-968-3308 or www.brushwoodcenter.org