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A Bird in the Hand

“After Incus” came out of a coincidence of proximity: Martha was sitting with Incus. Rather, taxidermied examples of two extinct bird species, the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, both reside in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The specimens sit a few feet apart, stiff and dusty and uncannily calm, despite the little-kid chaos of the crowded exhibition hall. The label text explains that both creatures—the last of their species in captivity—lived, and died, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha passed away in 1914, Incus four years later.

That was enough to send my mind spinning: not just the coincidence of seeing both there, but that they had also perished at the same place, in the same cage, only four years apart! How devastating that must have been for the ornithology community in Cincinnati. But those years, of course, bookended World War I, and suddenly this minor catastrophe—as if extinction, even of a pigeon, could ever be minor—felt like a flutter in the face of Europe’s vast carnage. Before I knew it, I was trying to figure a character who would straddle these two crises, who cared deeply about birds but also felt imperiled by the instigating moments of one of the world’s major conflicts. Armin slowly came into being.

Let me be clear: I’ve never been to Bosnia, never to Cincinnati. But that’s the challenge and the joy of writing historical fiction: gleaning enough details from research that it sounds like the narrator has walked those cobblestoned streets, ridden those century-old rails across Pennsylvania. There are archival photos of the zoo’s elephant house, its aviary pagodas. There are maps of the neighborhood and historically minded writers from Ohio who can correct regional misconceptions (I grilled Bob Olmstead, on a bus trip from Lisbon to Sintra, about the holdings of the Ohio Historical Society). There are news clippings about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, articles about Mlada Bosna, photos of Vienna’s glorious zoo. There are readers who correct your kitchen (an early draft’s cans and refrigerators would have been anachronistic), readers who train you to spot your own historical errors and omissions. And there is the double elephant folio edition of The Birds of America—each page the size of a car door—which the local special-collections library brings out once a year. That book kept Martha and Incus fresh in my mind for years after I left Pittsburgh. When the librarian turned to the print of the passenger pigeon, I always leaned in close.

Researching and writing “After Incus” was a singular—and extended (seven year!)—experience, but it exemplifies a process that has come to be familiar, if not quite comfortable: the discovery of some inciting object (more often than not found in, or destined for, a museum), the slow percolation of a story line that fits the piece, the supplemental research that lends it authenticity. Then comes the tedium and joy of the craft, the rewritten scenes and sentences, the fussed-over dialogue and refocused narrative arc, the character development, the drafts upon drafts upon drafts. Looking back, it’s slightly wild that the five minutes I lingered before Martha and Incus could have spun into “After Incus,” but it also embodies how I see the world: one little object, no bigger than a bird that fits in the palm of your hand, can reveal a whole new universe.