Kickstart your writing with a book club

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I have never belonged to a book club, but I’m not sure why. It isn’t that I don’t discuss books. I often start listening to a book on Audible and recommend it to my mom so that we can compare notes. I love reading. I love talking about books. I also enjoy writing them. For the most part, I’ve just never really considered reading books as a social event. Now, I think I’ve been missing out, not just on a great way to connect with like minds, but on a wonderful way to get inspired.

COVID-19 has changed our lives dramatically and usually not for the better. However, there have been a few silver linings that I feel certain will carry forward and continue to enrich our lives. We have all gotten comfortable meeting in virtual settings and I think this will be something that continues, especially when it comes to meeting with far flung friends.

Bird Nerd Book Club logo designed by book club member Jennifer Campbell-Smith. (Courtesy of Rebecca K. O’Connor)

In August, my friend Lauren McGough found herself chatting with others about books that were focused on birds and looking for recommendations of others to read. I have an interesting group of friends and almost all of them are bird crazy. Most, like Lauren, are falconers, meaning we train and hunt with birds of prey. Many of us have known each other for decades, but only see one another every few years when we travel and meet up to hunt with our hawks, eagles, and falcons. None of us had seen one another since before the pandemic and we were all game to join the book club and get together on the screen.

Our first book was “A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey” by Jonathon Meiburg. We set up a chat on Discord and shared quotes and thoughts as we read. Most of us knew very little about the elusive caracara species that Meiburg researched, and we were excited to learn and compare his insights to birds more familiar to us.

When we gathered, the discussion was fascinating. More than just falconers, the group of us were also biologists, educators, professional animal trainers, authors, conservationists and an avian veterinarian. I didn’t just learn about caracaras. I heard stories of adventures my friends had pursued and discovered what a fantastic group of people they were. They added context to the book we read, offered a deeper dive into Meiburg’s insights by adding their own, and peppered the conversation with bird jokes.

As we talked about what worked best for us in the narratives, I found myself reflecting on my own work. I wanted to mirror the strengths in the books we were reading. I imagined organizing my own stories into my next project which I was now sure would be a book on red-tailed hawks which would blend science and memoir. Each book we read sparked ideas and got me excited about the possibilities for my own writing.

More than being inspired, I now knew who my first readers will be. Several of us began talking about the books that we wanted to write, promising to swap pages as we began working on them. Suddenly, this wasn’t just a book club. It was a tight circle of friends encouraging each other and lifting each other up through a shared passion.

We read “Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl,” by Jonathan Slaght, followed by “A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds,” by Scott Weidensaul. We also somehow managed to convince Meiburg and Slaght to come speak with us about their books, finding more encouragement and connection in our conversations with them.

It has been hard to work on art during the pandemic and I know many artists who are struggling to create and writers struggling to write. Whatever your passion, perhaps you should consider starting a book club that caters to it. You might find yourself inspired. More than that, while sharing ideas with like-minded peers, you might find yourself feeling more connected and building new and meaningful friendships.

Rebecca K. O’Connor is the development director for Rivers & Lands Conservancy, a falconer, an author, and has an MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts from UC Riverside.

She also writes the Foundation Spotlight feature for this publication.

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