Author Amy Tan ‘chronicles’ path of finding hope in birds, nature journaling

In a world of divisiveness, author Amy Tan found solace and inspiration in the fluttering wings and melodic chirps of backyard birds. Tan, who first spoke at Chautauqua Institution in 2008, returned to the grounds during a week of “Wonder and Awe — A Celebration of Chautauqua’s Sesquicentennial,” to speak Tuesday morning in the Amphitheater, on the day of the sesquicentennial itself.

With conversation partner Kwame Alexander, the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Chautauqua, Tan used her latest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, to lend her perspective of wonder and awe in the natural world to the week’s programming. Her Chautauqua appearance, programmed with the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown,  coincided with the exhibition “Amy Tan’s Backyard Birds” — a collection of her nature journals and sketches on display at RTPI through Aug. 25. 

Tan is the author of numerous books, but perhaps the most celebrated is The Joy Luck Club, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She’s also been honored with the 2021 Carl Sandburg Literary Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Award of Distinguished Service, and the National Humanities Medal from President Joe Biden.

The conversation between Tan and Alexander began — “as most things that are beautiful and wonderful do,” Alexander said — with a poem.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul -,” Alexander quoted Emily Dickinson. Tan’s latest book, he noted — “of which you spent six years of your life journaling and documenting and drawing the many different types of birds that visit your backyard feeders and baths in different behaviors, reads as if it was born from hope.”

Tan’s foray into nature journaling began in 2016 as a reaction to the divisive and racist rhetoric she was seeing in the United States. 

“I never intended this to be a book. I never intended to draw,” she said. “… I was in a state of despair, because the rhetoric going on in the country was largely divisive. It was constant.”

It was a different kind of racism than that of the past. It was overt — not just toward Tan, but “so many others.” The experiences were dehumanizing, and Tan said she understood then what Black Americans, Latinos and Muslims were facing.

“I could feel it,” she said. “It made me more compassionate, but also depressed. I needed to go from ugliness to some kind of place that would be an antidote.”

She decided to start nature journaling, which she described as a combination of writing observations and sketching. Alexander said his niece likes to say that most authors are either skilled, or naturally talented at writing, but very few — like Tan — are both. In Tan’s illustrations, Alexander said, she captures “something really life-like … that demonstrates your love for and attention to them.”

The Backyard Bird Chronicles, she said, represents a great deal of practice — what’s called “pencil miles.”

“Talent is overrated,” Tan said. “… I had to learn how to draw, practice everyday, for hours a day. So when you look at these drawings, please keep that in mind: This is something you could do if you did the practice.”  

She credited John Muir Laws’ online videos for teaching her not just to see the shapes of birds, but to “feel the life force of the bird.” If you take it a step further, as in fiction writing, you have to “be the bird,” she said, in the same way she does with her characters. It’s an exercise in compassion, in many ways.

“The strength of imagination, to me, is the practice of compassion,” Tan said.

In a digital age where cameras can capture nature’s perfection, Tan had to let go of her “perfection syndrome,” and found value in the imperfections of her sketches. Her nature journaling was less about achieving perfect representations and more about capturing moments and emotions. Her sketches now are “simply spontaneous.”

“I had to capture moments … the moment before it takes off, the moment when it turns to look at me to eat something,” she explained. “… I needed to capture it like a diary, so that when I went back, I could remember that day and what I was feeling — not what I was doing, but what I was feeling at the time.”

Alexander asked Tan to talk about what a typical day might look like during the course of writing what became The Backyard Bird Chronicles.

“It sounds like this journey that you were on was filling you with a little bit of beauty in the face of ugliness,” he said, “giving you a little bit of triumph in the midst of tragedy or trauma.”

A typical day, Tan said, would be coffee. Then, literally, “10 hours of looking at birds,” from dawn to dusk. Over time, sitting at her dining room window, observing and documenting the birds that visited her feeders, she identified 67 different species, each bringing a unique sense of joy and peace to her life.

“One thing that I learned over the years, not just with birds, but with the death of friends and my mother … is this concept that I also found with the birds,” Tan said, “and that is that love, peace and joy are the same thing. You need all three — you need to have peace,  you need to have joy and love at the same time. That’s what I felt when I was with the birds.”

Paying attention, she learned from John Muir Laws, is love. It’s also an act of intentional curiosity.

“It is never enough to just look at something and think that you have seen it all,” Tan said. “You have to keep asking the questions. That sense of curiosity, to me, leads to the wonderment that is also love. Everything about the birds was going to this place where instantly I had the antidote to the regrets and worries of the past and worries and anxieties about the future. I was there in the moment.” 

Initially, Tan’s nature journals were a private endeavor, never meant for public eyes. However, her editor saw their potential and convinced her to share them with the world. 

“My editor said, ‘How is that novel going?’ — that horrible question,” she said. 

When she shared her bird sketches, complete with wine stains and misspellings, her editor declared them “authentic” — “If you ever have a messy house or you look terrible, you say you are authentic, you know,” she said. “I love that word.”

Tan didn’t know if anyone would want to read it, but The Backyard Bird Chronicles became an instant bestseller — 100 million copies so far.

“That is so encouraging to me, that people love birds,” she said. “We are looking for commonality in this world, instead of divisiveness.” 

Tan’s avian observations were not limited to peaceful scenes, and she watched birds in order to the see “the story unfolding in front of me.” She witnessed the dramatic lives of birds: territorial disputes, courtship behaviors, and the challenges of fledglings learning to fend for themselves. 

“I was drawn to the drama and wanted to not just draw them, but attract more of them,” she said, sharing her efforts to provide the best food for her feathered guests, including purchasing live mealworms by the thousands. Tens of thousands, actually.

Through all of this, one most profound parts of Tan’s journey was her exploration of birds’ emotions. To her, one of the most intriguing birds is the hummingbird; she purchased a feeder that fit onto her hand and — rather quickly, in fact — a hummingbird “came and landed on my hand and started to drink. I could feel the little scratchy feet on my palm. It was so magical,” she said.

The raspberry head, the iridescent feathers neatly articulated, the way the eye connects to the bill: “I’m just saying this to myself,” Tan said. “Then I say to the hummingbird, ‘You’re so beautiful.’ It would look up at me with these dark black eyes, beady eyes, and then go back to drinking. How could you not fall in love with a bird that does that?”

Her dedication extended to conservation efforts. After a pine siskin infected with salmonellosis threatened the safety of the larger backyard bird community she had built, Tan took her bird feeders down and thought, never again.

“I can’t stand the idea that these birds are going to die. I kept the feeder down for four months, and then I eventually went back to it. I needed that. I needed the birds in my life,” she said. “I decided that instead, when you’re distressed about something, is there something you can do?  I decided to get into conservation. And today I’m on the board of American Bird Conservancy.”

Before the close of the conversation, and a reading from The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Alexander asked Tan to play a rapid-fire game of fill-in-the-blank — think like a poet, he said, when Tan said that, as a novelist, she doesn’t do well with going short.

Writing —

“Writing is my way of finding meaning in life.”

Birds are —

“Love, and peace, and joy, a meaning in life now.”

A word you love —

“Jostle,” and the idea that things are moving about, she said, and then settle.

Alexander’s final prompt: “I came back to Chautauqua because …”

“Because,” Tan said, “I was going to be able to talk about something that I absolutely love, that has been part of my life: awe and wonder.”

Besides, she said, “look at this place. (I came back) because of the community, because of the ideas. Because I could be here with Dacher (Keltner, Monday’s speaker) and with you and like-minded people. We can be different in many ways, but there is so much more of a commonality here — more sharing of ideas and permeations of ideas, and not conflict.”