Weaving These Threads Into A Nest
Publication day for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal
Dear friends, As of today, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal is out in the world, and should be available wherever you purchase your books. I dare say it’s a pleasure to hold in one’s hands – Essay Press did a beautiful job with the book, for which I’m grateful.
I’m taking it a little slow today, a brief pause in preparations for the Living Futures Saturday event this weekend. After that, I’ll be off to Kansas City for the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference and then a couple more events closer to home this month. I’m so looking forward to sharing this book with you all, and to the conversations I can be part of with you, and it.
Before I share more about and from the book, I want to acknowledge what you may have noticed — that the title of this newsletter has changed from “Bright Shards” to “Wilderment” overnight! I’ll say more about this in my next post, but wanted to mention it now to allay any confusion. For now, just know that this is the same publication, just re-christened.
Here is a little about the new book:
Designed as a turn of the century women’s magazine that combines memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal explores women’s complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. Originating in the bird-hat controversy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which coincided with both the women’s suffrage and budding American conservation movements, this polyvocal book moves in multiple directions as it examines cases of women and birds from across cultures and time periods, from the Virgin Mary, to Leda, Swan Lake, and Alexander McQueen. As its connective thread, Feathers also follows one woman’s enculturation into the world of bird-women and its inherent violence. What might we learn about gender from the birds?
This book is what the literary world calls “hybrid,” meaning that it melds more than one genre. In a way, the content of the book dictated this form. Magazines are already hybrid or multi-genre texts, since they combine journalism, image, advertisements, letters, and any other number of forms all in one place. They are also polyvocal, meaning that the various components of any issue are from different voices and perspectives, and that the overall identity or feel of the text arises from the combination of those voices. Since the women’s magazine of the 1880s-1920s was the locus of debate around bird hats, violence, and “natural beauty,” they became the inspiration and primary model for the book I wrote about these questions. I hope that the result is fun – if maybe a little unsettling – to read, as feminist theory about gender and violence is juxtaposed with fashion spreads, advertisements, and snippets of memoir. It might be a perfect gift for those in your life who love weird and beautiful texts or are interested in feminism and gender studies, birds, fashion, and conservation.
On this publication day, I thought I’d share an excerpt from the book with you all, the “Letter from the Editor” that introduces some central questions. I’d love to hear what you think.
These pages tell the story of a great migration. A time when birds left their wetlands, fields and forests, flying by the millions to pose, glass-eyed, atop ladies’ bonnets. Petrified, the birds and their feathers bobbed through dust-clouds on city streets, and Sundays filed into rows to nod in time with organ hymns. To slow this flock of bodies, some women protested, sparking what is known as the “bird-hat debate” at the turn of the twentieth century. Finding ways to identify with birds aside from wearing them, these women began piping up for their avian sisters around the time women were also demanding suffrage. To speak for themselves.
As you, dear readers, have surely experienced in your time, the concepts of Woman and Nature overlap. Woman as territory, as virginal, animal, needing to be tamed. Woman as mercurial, earthy. “What a lovely creature!” they remark when you or your sister enter the room. Soft and flighty, perhaps you fit comfortably in the palm of a hand. (And if your fur or feathers spill over, what then?) Man, in contrast, represents culture and reason. Man makes things orderly, brings them right. He must tame both Woman and Land.
For decades now, feminists have been sifting through the tangled tendrils where Woman and Nature blur. Scholar Stacy Alaimo observes how “the dual meanings of nature converge at the site of woman, fixing her in a vortex of circular arguments.” This vortex hides “the contradictory meanings of the term ‘nature,’ which is subordinate to Man, and yet contains Man’s Truths.”
In one moment, your perceived “closeness” to nature means you must be wild, corporeal, beastly and irrational, needing protection, confinement, and a firm hand. Your body is both an object of desire and an unpredictable mess. It shifts and changes yearly (in pregnancy), or monthly with the moon. It is a leaky sac of fluids, seeping milk and blood. It is sex and filth. In the next moment, your proximity to “natural laws” obliges you to serve as Man’s moral compass, to keep him wholesome and tethered to the good. And so, even more than earth angel, you are angel beast.
As with the wearing of luxury furs—beasts that swallow women’s tender shoulders—you will find, in these writings on feather fashions, a pairing of innocence and violence. This, dear readers, is how femininity becomes “monstrous.”
I have a number of events around the book happening in the next couple of months, and I hope you’ll join me. Note that the one on March 3 is online for those further afield. I’ll announce more events as they come up, and am happy to hear from you if you have ideas for other venues, appearances, or collaborations. Or if you just want to say hello!
AWP Kansas City, Missouri
Wed, 2/7 – Reading: “Wild Patience: A Poet-Mom Reading,” 6-8pm 21c Museum Hotel KC (w/ a gorgeous lineup!)
Thurs, 2/8 – Panel: “The Page Blinks Back: Image, Text & Screen,” 1:45-3pm, Room 2101 KC Convention Center (w/ Sarah Minor, Douglas Kearney, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Tisa Bryant)
Fri, 2/9 – Book Signing, 12-2pm Essay Press bookfair table #3108
Sat, 2/10 – Panel: “Building Bridges: Literature and Climate Justice,” 3:20-4:35pm, Room 2505AB KC Convention Center (w/ Roger Reeves, Jake Skeets, and Nadia Colburn)
Durham, North Carolina
Fri, 2/16 – Book Launch Event, 7-9pm, Night School Bar (Free: RSVP) There will be cake!
Thurs, 2/22 – Masterclass: “The Poet’s Toolbox,” 5-7pm, Washington Duke Inn (Free: RSVP)
Online
Sun, 3/3 – Essay Press Book Launch Reading, 3-4pm, Zoom (w/ Jade Lascelles and Aditi Natasha Kini), link forthcoming.
New Orleans, Louisiana
4/20-21 - Reading: “Poetry and the Afterlife,” New Orleans Poetry Festival, Time TBD (w/ Charlotte Pence, Marcela Sulak, Danielle Pieratti, Nicole Callihan, and Iris Jamahl Dunkle)