It was a cold and damp February afternoon at East Oxford when I arrived for a community creative writing workshop generously hosted at St Albans church off Iffley Road. Lorna Robinson runs creative, drop-in workshops open to the community there and this time we decided to join forces to celebrate the launch of her new book called The Birder with an immersive storytelling workshop. We chose a myth of transformation into birds as a fitting tribute to a novel about a community whose members are destined to change to an animal form at some point in their lives, which is the main premise of this intriguing book.
The Birder by Lorna Robinson
I had put aside some time in the run up to our workshop to read The Birder; I thought of it as part of the workshop prep as I wanted our storytelling experience for the community group to resonate with the world that Lorna had created. But the more I read, the more hooked into its world I got. It became the highlight of my day.
The story unfolds in modern day Oxford; its protagonists hold jobs in schools, administration of all kinds, research institutes, church communities just like real people around us. Its thoughtful and sensitive main character (main for me at least) is Merel, a research student in the Department of Music researching bird songs. We follow her in her studies, we watch as she spends time with her flatmates and when she hangs out with her friends. There is something wonderfully warm, kindly, and low key in this life where nurturing friendships hold everything together.
You get to really like and care for Merel, Jon, Daniel and the friends, students, colleagues, neighbours who populate their world. You
want to walk around with them, go to work with them and enjoy life at Oxford alongside them. And yet this attractive everydayness operates within an astonishing and surreal framework: humans all know that one day, more often later than earlier in their life, they will be changed into a bird or another animal. In this distant and yet ever-so-familiar universe, science has made strides towards managing Transformation; they can identify gradual changes and eventually, provide a date, almost always exact, thus enabling those who want to organise a ‘release’ ceremony – one of the most poignant features of the book for me. Scientific detachment and a kind of heart-breaking stoicism in the face of the inevitable goes hand in hand with raw angst and deep sorrow as communities, friends, and individuals attempt to prepare for this inexorable fate – and ultimately fail to keep an emotional distance because they care deeply for each other. It was an absorbing read and I was really pleased I came across it.
Humans and/as birds: contemporary re-imaginings of an ancient tale of transformation
My mind was full of The Birder when I turned to the design of our workshop. Despite her science firmly precluding it, the possibility of a connection between the human and animal forms agitated Merel throughout the novel. An accidental discovery of a copy of the Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid on the shelves of her local public library was supposed to have set Merel on an investigative journey beyond the limits of scientific awareness on the Transformation. So, it felt fitting to choose the story of King Ceyx and his wife Alcyone and their transformation into birds from Book 11 of the Ovidian epic for our creative writing workshop. I wanted to feed from Merel’s need to understand more about the transformed birds and invite us all to explore how it might feel to see, feel, think, act as a bird.
It was cold in the atmospheric, old church that hosted us and most of us kept our coats on. But if the space was a bit too large to be adequately heated on such a (rare) freezing day, we were rewarded with wonderful acoustics which encouraged us to enjoy all our voices. We set off with an effort to retell the tale as a story of emotions and connections; we warmed up modelling a string of appropriate/better/different/enjoyable words to express our views and respond to each other’s offerings.
Everyone felt confident to join in and, before long, I was able to distinguish the many different kinds of readers round the low square table: those who wanted to trust the story, keen to savour the affection they could detect in its heart; those interested in fleshing out the contradictions they could discern in the frame of the story; others focusing on the inadequacies of the relationship between Ceyx and Alcyone. We needed all the different readers to complement each other in this shared reimagining; to help each other tune into aspects of the tale they were not inclined to unpick on their own.
One thing I remember particularly vividly: despite our deep dive into that mythical universe, the actual transformation of Ceyx and Alcyone from human to animal form, when it came, was a clear challenge for all, triggering widespread surprise and understandable disbelief. It was fascinating for me to observe and absorb how strikingly strange classical myth is in our communities today; an unfamiliar force of nature (literally in this occasion!) that seems able to urge us to double check our settled beliefs and weigh our ability to ‘talk’ to strangers.
Inquisitive and collaborative wordplay gave impetus and legitimacy to alternative story lines and plot twists that started surfacing effortlessly as an empathetic approach to the story developed. After a short break and a hot cup of tea, we were ready for some creative/responsive writing to probe tacit messages, fill gaps, and ‘walk’ through half-opened windows of the story. Silence filled the space for a few minutes and then most of us were keen to share and a beautiful diversity of responses emerged: we had an imaginative backstory that sought to explain Ceyx’s flawed relationship with his brother, Daedalion; we witnessed Ceyx’ heartache during the last terrifying moments of his life; we heard Alcyone singing as a bird; and peered into a page of her diary as she is waiting for Ceyx’s return; we were offered a short reflective mapping of the entangled emotions underpinning the story and another reflection focusing on the mortal-divine tussle in the story; we were invited to see the perfection of the Ceyx-Alcyone couple as a show-biz ploy promoted by the press, and more.
A storytelling medley
Those who turned up for the event were a varied crew: we had two teenagers, a dad with his young son, a participant who told me that she has been writing poetry and has been wondering how to get it published, two older ladies who liked stories and often joined events together. I now wish we could have more time so I could get more about their hinterlands. I only realised that the dad is a physicist when we got talking in the break and he told me how the story of Ceyx and his brother – and, in fact, much of the widespread conflict around us today – made sense to him as similarly charged particles that naturally repel each other. Coming close triggers discord and competition, he said; so modelling and exploring the stories of others – as we were doing that afternoon – invites us to get into the minds of those repelled from us in the hope of stemming this centrifugal force that keeps us apart, he added. And to return to where this paragraph started: it was those distinct, if unknown to me, hinterlands that made each one in our small group indispensable to all the others; their thoughts, formed by their unique experiences, a reminder of the limitations of the imagination of each one of us.
Free as a bird? Words on Wings
I had hoped that at some point we would create a birdsong – have Ceyx or Alcyone speak, feel, see, experience as a bird. In the event, ample discussion and debate was had and some of it was decisively eco-critical, exposing the fragility of humans when faced with nature’s outburst. But time flew past and hot cups of tea, if welcome, could not shelter us from the cold for much longer. And yet, if we did not put together our characters’ full birdsong, we were able to blend ‘bird words’ – whether of Ceyx or Alcyone, or our own – into a colourful collage of worded wings and feathers: a fitting tribute to, and reflection of, the symbiosis we experienced in the course of the afternoon. The turning of Ceyx and Alcyone to birds ending a story of separation, sorrow and defeat had left a lasting impression on the group, and words did roll on the multi colour paper slips with abundance: some spoke in practical terms about ‘fish’, the ‘laying of the eggs’, and the mundanity of survival. Others conjured up of ‘soaring heights’, limitless movement, ‘swooping’, ‘wheeling’… And many seemed keen to join words and feathers to celebrate avian freedom, immediacy, elegance, the carefree life, the blessing of forgetting the tough stuff.
We were packing up when the first book launch guests started arriving. There was a smooth transition from workshop to reception. The collage bird was calling us from the corner. Some of the newcomers felt the urge to join our provisional gathering of storytellers, approaching the art table in their own time, to write their gifts of words, give them wings and feathers and add to the colourful (if not instantly recognisable!) bird, their gift to nature and to community.