Rise: A Collection Inspired by Lift

By Rebecca K. O'Connor

LIFT, Rebecca K. O’Connor’s arresting memoir of love, loss, relationships and one impossible peregrine falcon is further illuminated with this collection of writings on the world of falconry. The opening short story, “A Good Falconer Lets Go,” about a teenage boy and his red-tailed hawk is a classic coming-of-age tale with a falconry twist. If you are a dog lover, “Heart to Tear” and “About a Dog”, essays which read like O’Connor’s love songs to the dogs of falconry will resonate with you, if not evoke a few tears. In short essays such as “The Knife” and “Storytelling” O’Connor explores early moments in falconry in the icy-clear voice readers grew to love in LIFT. The collection also includes a glossary on falconry and a bonus excerpt of her novel in progress, a post-apocalyptic wilderness adventure. If you have read LIFT and loved it, this short collection will add to your experience. If you’ve yet to read O’Connor’s writing, RISE may encourage you to read more.

Praise for LIFT:

Novelist and nature reference author O’Connor (Falcon’s Return) crafts a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between humans and birds in this memoir of the excruciating, transformative process of training a peregrine falcon: “Falconry is a religion, a way of thinking, a means of experiencing life.” Indeed, readers will find almost as much spiritual content as natural. Despite O’Connor’s icy-clear voice, her descriptions of training a young male falcon are fascinating for bird lovers and civilians alike: “when the falcon connects a high-speed dive... the duck remains a piece of the sky and only its body careens to earth.” Surprisingly, periodic flashbacks to a troubled childhood—an abusive stepfather, an absentee mother—bolster her story rather than distract, turning a falcon’s “serious and unmerciful” eye back on her own life, and discovering inexplicable wells of generosity and forgiveness for the family who wronged her. O’Connor packs a lot of intelligence, poise and feeling into a few pages, making this a consistently rewarding read. ~ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

O'Connor's love of the hawks infuses the story with an addictive, violent intensity.
~Library Journal

Seeing through O’Connor’s eyes, we are elated. In Lift, a true picture takes shape as she trains her falcon “to trust me and then to set him free again.” Like Anakin, both reader and author begin to recognize the strength in her heart. ~Rain Taxi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebecca K. O'Connor
• Release date: Jun 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458007605

Rebecca K. O'Connor

Rebecca K. O’Connor is the author of the award-winning memoir Lift published by Red Hen Press in 2009. She has published essays and short stories in South Dakota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Los Angeles Times Magazine, West, divide, The Coachella Review, Phantom Seed and Prime Number Magazine. Her novel, Falcon’s Return was a Holt Medallion Finalist for best first novel and she has published numerous reference books on the natural world.

Book preview

Rise: A Collection Inspired by Lift

By Rebecca K. O’Connor

Copyright 2011 by Rebecca K. O’Connor

Cover Art Copyright 2011 by Raymond Swanland

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 978-1-4580-0760-5

Cover design by Raymond Swanland

Turning Tide was previously published in divide Issue 5, Spring 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the copyright owner except for brief quotations used in critical articles or review

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Life Lessons of Falconry

A Good Falconer Lets Go

Storytelling

The Moment that Makes You

Heart to Tear

The Knife

Turning Tide

A Falconer’s Pigeons

About a Dog

When Confronted

Yarak

Falconry Glossary

Falconer’s Prayer

Rewilding

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

When I was writing Lift much of the work happened outside of writing the actual manuscript. When my imagery seemed flat, I wrote poetry. When it seemed I couldn’t get out of my skin enough to find my actual feelings and motivations, I wrote fiction. I took photos to try to refocus. I spent hours driving or on the treadmill or took a long shower when I couldn’t get past a blank page. If that didn’t work I treated my blog as a confessional. And of course on good days and bad I found inspiration in the field with my hawks.

This process left me with a few essays, short stories and poems that added to the narrative of Lift, but didn’t fit. Or perhaps, they could have fit, but asked questions I wasn’t ready to answer. My favorite memoirists write to explain the world to themselves, not to explain themselves to the world. All the same, what you discover about the world always includes some uncomfortable truths about yourself. I hope these pieces make you ask questions about yourself and the world as well.

You may notice that everything is written in first person. Perhaps that is the result of spending so much time thinking in the form of essays and memoir. Even when pieces are not about me, I am happier writing directly from the protagonist’s head. I like it there. It’s much more uncomfortable putting yourself in someone else’s head than in their shoes. I write best when I’m squirming.

I’ve been urged to place A Good Falconer Lets Go, a fictional short story, first because it introduces some of the basic ideas of falconry as the main character discovers them and every piece in this collection deals with an aspect of falconry. The collection ends with an excerpt from the novel I’m currently working on. Oddly, it is a novel I thought I was writing to escape all of the questions and truths I wasn’t ready to address after writing Lift. What I found is that I am still asking and digging deeper. I’ve just added the question, What if?

I hope you will not only read my work, but let me know what you think. If you are intrigued about falconry or wondering what I else you might read, ask me. Writing is a lonely business. I love to hear from readers. You can find me at www.rebeccakoconnor.com.

Fly High!

Rebecca K. O’Connor

June 2011

The Life Lessons of Falconry

1. Life is simple, as simple as a glorious sunrise and a good hunt.

2. Honesty is the foundation of every great relationship.

3. Trust is delicate and requires constant care.

4. The living creatures we love the most do not belong to us.

5. The best meals are fought for and toasted.

6. Grace, style and precision are a combination often dismissed as luck. If you work hard, you will always be lucky.

7. Magic comes in moments of desperation. So don’t give up.

8. Anything is possible. So keep your eyes open.

9. Sometimes life requires having a little faith in something that is too high above you to see.

10. The things you discover while looking into the skies are worth the occasional stumbling. So keep looking up

A Good Falconer Lets Go

This is a short story about a boy, nearly a man, and his hawk. It’s not about me or anyone I know, but a composite of the people I met and the terrain that I hunted on while I lived in Florida, training birds for Disney’s Animal Kingdom. This story ties together the falconry I left in the California hills to the falconry I found hunting in the swamps. And maybe it also echoes my own leap of faith as it tries to illuminate the way the first year of falconry can begin to mold the falconer into something new.

~~

In the dark he dreams of a fire that laps away all the Florida moisture, cracking the air with its bellows, swallowing even the night. He tells me this when I bring him cold cans of Pepsi and Hershey bars from my freezer. We sit outside his trailer while he cools his hands on the gentle bend of the aluminum can. Then he says that fire is why he moved from California to Florida, to the edge of the swamp water. He won’t talk about his past. Whenever he seems about to, the words catch and he sighs and he only says that the nightmares get worse in the summer. Then he calms himself by reminding me that in Florida it rains every afternoon and that’s why there’s plenty of swamp water and not many fires. I’ve never understood this talk of