'Is that too big'? Amy Tan hopes her unintentional new book will help people love birds
OAK HARBOR ― Author Amy Tan arrives as a keynote speaker for the Black Swamp Bird Observatory’s Biggest Week in American Birding astonished that her latest book, "The Backyard Bird Chronicles," is climbing bestseller lists.
“It’s my nature journal, and I don’t know how people are going to classify that in other places. The intention was not to write anything specific. It was my personal, private nature journal,” Tan said in an interview with the Port Clinton News Herald and Fremont News-Messenger.
Tan is the featured speaker Wednesday for a Biggest Week gala benefitting the American Bird Conservancy at the Maumee Bay Lodge and Conference Center in Oregon, Ohio. The event is sold out, organizers posted on the Biggest Week website.
Flocking to Northwest Ohio? Here's what's new at the 2024 Biggest Week in American Birding
Tan learned during the interview that "Backyard Birding," published April 23 by Knopf, had topped the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestsellers list.
It's hardly the first time Tan has been atop bestseller lists. She is author of 1989's "The Joy Luck Club," a modern classic that was made into an award-winning movie in 1993. She’s often credited with introducing the Chinese-American life to the world through her fiction. Over four decades she has written and published broadly including essays, novels and children’s books. USA TODAY in 2020 named her one of its Women of the Century.
"Backyard" almost immediately became the Amazon.com bestseller in the Birding Field Guide category ― and was out of stock as of Friday ― which made Tan laugh.
“That’s funny. It’s really funny. It’s not a bird guide. Nobody should use that as a resource for information of any official sort,” she said. “I’m not an expert on birds. My book is full of guesses and questions. I don’t know why they put it there.”
"Backyard" is the compiled highlights of a dozen sketchbooks and nine volumes of nature journals, much of which originated in Tan's backyard in Sausalito, California, and during birding in Central Park in New York City, where she also lives. Many of the journal and sketchbook pages are reproduced in full color.
'We get a lot of birds': Flyways bring migratory birds to every corner of Ohio in spring
Tan, 64, began her journaling with classes from John Muir Laws. Her backyard now has a visiting bird list that includes 65 species and two rare vagrants.
Her editor suggested she publish the journaling.
She initially disagreed, calling it unpublishable.
“It’s a mess. It’s just my own personal thoughts as I looked at these bird dramas in my yard, as I learned to sketch, and that’s what my book is. People who have bird books say that there’s nothing like this out there,” Tan said.
"The birds that inhabit Amy Tan’s backyard seem a lot like the characters in her novels," ornithologist, author and illustrator David Allen Sibley writes in the foreword to Tan's book.
Part of her speech will include a slide presentation that includes her bird sketches.
“It’s really nature journaling. It’s really about how to look at birds in the backyard and how to observe and watch them, and make guesses as to what they are doing, and then continuing to watch them to see more and more, whether you see patterns, continued behavior, something surprising, so that’s definitely not a guide,” Tan said. “There’s probably information there that’s incorrect, so it would be terrible if people used it as any kind of authority on information that is official in any way.”
It was her Chinese-American heritage that in part led her to embrace birding.
“When I started writing these journals I was very naive, I knew of three birds in my yard and I didn’t even have the correct names for them. So I am really coming from the very beginning level,” Tan said. “Now I’m paying attention to them, and the reason why is that in 2016 there was all this divisiveness, including racism, and some of it was directed toward me, and it was very depressing. I needed to get out of my head. So, I decided I would go out into nature and I would do nature journaling. I would combine writing down observations and sketching.”
Tan says her books are not meant to preach, but she does hope "Backyard Birding" has an impact.
“I usually never have any intentions for people to learn anything,” she said of her writing. “Now that it’s out there, my hope is that people fall in love with birds and watching birds. When people love birds they will want to save birds, so that the message, the desire, would be a conservation one.
“I’m on the American Bird Conservancy board. There are large elements of what they do, in terms of habitat, but there on the individual level, what can people do? Whether it relates to cats, or window collisions, which are mentioned in this book, or whether they simply want to donate to a wildlife conservation kind of fund, it’s a conservation type of hope that I have. Is that too big? Is that too big, to want people to fall in love with birds who never really notice birds?”
She said she’s thrilled and honored to speak during Biggest Week, which is known to draw around 90,000 birders from across the world to Northwest Ohio each year. “I can’t believe it, because you are talking to someone who’s really a beginning birder, or bird watcher, who started buying real, true bird guides, like Sibley’s bird guides, and to be there among all these people, it’s astonishing to me.”
The keynote lineup for The Biggest Week In American Birding includes other bestselling authors, some of whom are Tan’s friends. The full list: Christian Cooper, Tammah Watts, Kevin Karlson, Peter Kaestner, Kenn Kaufman, Jerry Berrier and Jennifer Ackerman. Tickets remain for many of the speakers' events.
419-332-2674
This article originally appeared on Fremont News-Messenger: Amy Tan's 'The Backyard Bird Chronicles' can’t be pigeonholed
