Like all fiction, This is the Bird, is a college of memories, facts and inventions. One week when it felt like I had NO ideas I began looking through old volumes of my writing journal. One entry caught my eye and imagination. I had gone to a giant flea market the year before and wondered what the objects for sale had meant to their original owners. Many old objects in my family hold memories of relatives and events in their lives. But the flea market objects had no one to remember their stories.

The cumulative story line of “The House That Jack Built” seemed a perfect match for a story about an old family object that adds new stories with each generation. Why the Kansas prairie? I grew up there. Why a bird? My library has a little stone carving of a bird that I love to look at. Why wood? On the treeless prairie wood was rare and valued. And, where did the stories come from? One is partly about an aunt who was deaf and mute. One is an event in my mother’s life. One is me and positive-how I felt at home when I visited the Arctic prairie in Alaska. One is me and negative—being too afraid to ever go off the high dive. So by the end of This is the Bird I have the girl be as brave as I wish I had been. And, her bravery becomes the next story added to the bird.