Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation

"She does a really great job of bringing the city into her work. I should say that Kyo’s from Toronto, and I also lived in Toronto for many years; I grew up nearby. So part of me enjoys the book because the city is so alive in it. She seeks creative revival through nature; it’s around the time of her father becoming very ill and dying—death runs through a lot of these books in the background—and it’s an incredibly helpful book. One of the things that is really apparent in Kyo’s book that you don’t see very often is its playfulness. She’s a children’s author, and she speckles the book with these illustrations that are really quite sweet. There are doodles of birds, of the benches that she sits on to look for birds, of writers who like to write about birds. But there’s this moment near the beginning of the book when she talks about sitting in the middle of Toronto, just looking out at all of the things that are jostling for her attention: I looked across the street at the signs hanging on the discount store. DON’T JUST STAND THERE. BUY SOMETHING. THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOE BUSINESS. FREE 12-PACK OF RACOONS FOR EVERY VISITOR. This shop was a really famous Toronto institution called Honest Ed’s; it was recently closed and demolished, which was quite devastating for a lot of Toronto people. But she scatters this great nature book with these lovely observations that are so familiar, so everyday to city dwellers. That’s powerful because there’s a real sense of identification and relatability, a sense that ‘I could be looking for nature anywhere.’ And she does. She looks at birds in her garden. She looks at birds on the sidewalk. She goes down to the harbourfront and looks at birds; she goes to the park and looks at birds. Perhaps it goes back to what we talked about earlier about demystifying. Kyo goes into this not actually knowing anything about birds. She just meets a musician who’s really into birds, and he starts to teach her, and she becomes quite obsessed with it. So there’s that lightness of touch in it that I find really, really exciting. Kyo is Japanese-British-Canadian. She was born in the UK, her mom’s Japanese, I think her father’s British, and they moved to Canada . Again, it’s a particular interest of mine, but there’s this sense of negotiating her role and her identity as a mixed-race woman in a field that doesn’t typically represent her. So she really interrogates her belongingness among other birders and the nature writing crowd, which is quite interestingly done. She points it out and reflects her story and moves on quite nicely. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a short book, but it’s one of those books I haven’t stopped thinking about since I read it, and I read it four years ago. It really stayed with me, not only because the imagery is just so beautiful—the birds and her descriptions of the city—but also because of the really friendly tone that it takes. That comes across also in the mushrooms book, Long Litt Woon’s book—this friendliness, lightness, that is a breath of fresh air compared with more conventional nature writing tomes that are so dense, with so many words on the page, so many references and species and so many facts. These are more like going for a walk. It’s not like she needs to take weeks away. She’s got two young sons, and there’s a lot of talk of putting her sons to bed and listening for birds and finding those spare moments in between obligations: on her way to a coffee date with a friend, sitting and watching some sparrows. Those moments, I think, are incredibly powerful, and much more accessible to many readers. I hope she writes more books for adults. Her children’s books are also amazing. I have some and love them. I want her voice to stick around in this field. It’s super fun. You can read it so quickly. It’s beautifully done."