Audubon Residency at Trail Wood
Birds feature in formative moments of my personal history, and they show up often in my creative work. I’ve always been intrigued by augury and by folklore about birds. In my twenties I stayed at a birding sanctuary in Ecuador and fell in love with the observational precision of birders and ornithologists. In my thirties I moved to Connecticut, a rich birding state. Sibley attended the elementary school down the road from where I live. Wild turkeys have a seasonal habit of circling our house. A few hours away in northeastern Connecticut lies Trail Wood, the former home of nature writer and birder Edwin Way Teale, now under the care of the Audubon Society.
Each year Trail Wood hosts a small group of artists to work in situ, staying in Teale’s home, exploring how the acres of trails that Teale established might inform their projects. In 2018 I was one of these artists. I showed up intending to work on a novel but ended up taking video and audio footage of the wildlife and landscape, reading the books in Teale’s library, and redrafting a short story about a woman whose world is both destroyed and remade by a new relationship with birds.
Trail Wood, for me, was sound: the morning choruses, midday chirrups, and evening chants; the giant catalpa tree in counsel with the afternoon wind; the delighted hiss of the dry-tipped meadow grass responding to the purple martin’s swoop. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between story and sound, the possibilities of translating audio into visual, the synesthetic intersections of the senses.
