opfmk.blogg.se

But she’d never wanted to fly a goshawk.Ĭolossal, psychopathic and brutal, it seems that goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble pussycats. It isn’t as bizarre as it sounds: as a keen falconer, Helen has flown hawks for many years. Then, curtains drawn, phone unplugged, she set about training her deadly bird of prey in her small Cambridge house. And so, after stuffing her freezer with hawk food (steak, day-old chicks, rabbit legs), the historian and nature writer drove up to Scotland, handed over £800 to a breeder, and headed home with her precious cargo - a baby goshawk named Mabel - in a box on the back seat. Anything to distract you from the white heat of grief.īut Helen Macdonald took this one step further.Ĭonsumed with sadness after her father’s sudden death, she felt compelled to do something extraordinary. When you lose somebody you love, throwing yourself into your work can be overwhelmingly tempting. I edited the hell out of most of the prose, but the sections about the hawk — what she was like, how she flew and hunted — they were written fast and hardly edited at all. Short sentences to capture her world as a series of fleeting, present moments lyrical passages to suggest the strangeness of the landscape through the eyes of a hawk. Back then I wanted to assume her rapturous, wordless, hawkish mind, and I tried, as I wrote, to match my style to that imagined subjectivity. Grief does strange things to the workings of memory.

Helen Macdonald: Writing about her was much easier than writing about my father's death, my family, or myself! I can recall my time with her that year with crystalline clarity. What was it like to write about her, years later, in such detail?

Julie Goldberg: Part of the magic of H is for Hawk is how alive your goshawk Mabel becomes—in her body and moods, in her power and playfulness. Julie Goldberg, on behalf of the Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Helen Macdonal about her book H Is for Hawk(Grove Press), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2015 NBCC Awards. Interview Helen Macdonald talks about her memoir H is for Hawk, the complicated relationship between instinct and training, dealing with grief, experiencing wilderness and much else.