Guest post written by author Ashley Schumacher
Ashley Schumacher is the author of Amelia Unabridged and Full Flight and has a degree in creative writing from the University of North Texas. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s either singing Disney songs, finding new and exciting ways to pester her family, or trying to find her inside voice, which has been sadly missing since birth. She lives in a small town north of Dallas with her husband, son, and more books than is strictly necessary. Full Flight releases on February 22nd 2022.
I stole a bird.
Not a physical bird—it would be quite the feat to steal a member of a likely-extinct species—but the idea of a bird.
I should explain.
It’s September 2019. The world is blissfully unaware of the impending global pandemic, I am, perhaps less blissfully, avoiding a looming deadline, and John Green—citizen of the internet, YA author—has just released another episode of his essay-style podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed. I’m listening to it in the kitchen of the one-bedroom apartment I share with my husband, convinced that I can justify the writing break if I scrub every nook and cranny of the countertops while I listen.
It should be noted that I was in the middle of drafting my sophomore novel, working title Full Flight, the autobiographical book I had been wrestling with in one form or another for nearly a decade. It’s done now, the book—there are advanced reader copies lined up on the shelf behind me as I write, now—so I should be able to look back on the writing of it with misremembered fondness, but I can’t. I remember all too well how the writing of it left me wrung out, how I repeated some version of the Hemingway quote, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” to myself as I fell into bed, anemic from deciding which memories I should twist into fiction and which I should allow to leak on the page fully realized.
I had been particularly distressed—and adamant—that I find a way to justify the books’ title. I had already been warned it could change, and it’s personal—so personal—that title, but my editor was concerned that sales and marketing would reject it and we should think of alternatives, just in case. (Because Full Flight could refer to the status of seats on a commercial airliner or an eagle soaring above mountains, but less obviously to a story about two misfits in high school marching band.)
Enter the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, the subject of episode twenty of John Green’s podcast.
In his essay, Green talks about the facts of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō’s—how it was prized for its sleek, yellow feathers, how its call is a duet between mates, how the last pair known to exist was spotted in the early eighties and then, after a terrible hurricane, how the lone remaining Kauaʻi ʻōʻō’s song was recorded in 1986, never to be seen or heard again—but he also discusses the not-quite-facts, the in-betweens of reality and humanity’s tendency to personify things around us. Green talks about how the last bird of its kind, when it heard the ornithologist play the recording he had just taken of the one-sided duet, came flying back as if to say, “Do I know you? Do you know me?”
He was talking about this last pair of rare birds, but to me, all I could hear were Anna and Weston, the two main characters of my novel who spend all their page time looking for a safe place, a safe person, while perfecting the duet they share in marching band.
When I listened to Green’s essay, I had already written the line, “You must be able to play the duet as if you’re the only one playing. You need to be able to play around the silences.” It’s advice I was given in high school when I was learning my own duet and had argued with my band director that I could play just fine when I was playing with my partner.
But it took on a new meaning, the depth of playing and living around something, when the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō entered the picture. To conclude the episode, Green plays the only recording of the single Kauaʻi ʻōʻō before saying, “That’s the song. It’s supposed to be a duet. You can hear the silences, where the ʻōʻō still waits for a reply.”
And it was like a puzzle piece slid into place, listening to this recording of a bird lost to time. With the help of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō , I, too, could play around the silences of my novel. I had a context, an aid in the form of a bird that may or may not be totally extinct. (The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was thought extinct once before it’s rediscovery in the eighties.) I, too, could keep playing my half of the duet, even if I wasn’t sure anyone was listening. I included the bird in my novel, a fantastical version that follows my characters around, flitting from chapter to chapter. It seemed too important to leave the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō out of the narrative.
Green has talked at length about how his collection of essays is the most personal work from him yet, and I now know from the bone-dry experience of writing Full Flight how challenging it can be, leaving so much of yourself on the page.
But the relationship between writer and reader isn’t so different from the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō and its duet. We sing, writers. We sing and sing our part, hoping that somewhere, somehow, a reader will hear and know the other half.
Sometimes, writing the deeply personal is writing into somebody else’s silences when they aren’t able.
So I stole the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō.
Because John Green wrote into my silences.
Because I’m desperately trying to write into others.
Because I’m singing and hoping that I’ll hear a reply.
I got to keep the title, by the way. Nearly a year after completing the draft, the final cover design landed in my inbox, and there he was: My stolen Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, illustrated wings stretched wide as he took to the sky in full flight.
