What Blackbird is: a view into my own experience of childhood at a time when all I could do was be a first person, present tense witness. I wrote Blackbird from a place of longing to love and be loved as well as to speak to what I saw, lived, felt and questioned about that time. I was digging into the question of mother--as it was time in my life to become a mother. I wanted know my mother--not realizing that I was truly longing for the mother who gave me life. My only memory was of the mother who adopted me and then died after a long struggle with a complex form of tumor growth in her spine. So I began there--with Janet, Bud and then Bryan. I wrote our life and told the story of events that continued to unfold--going from bad to worse and yet--as all dissolved around me--how I continued to move forward and step into each day.
Blackbird is a tiny testimony about survival and what we, as humans and as forms of greatness, can endure and transcend. It was not the end though, it was the beginning. The story that came next was Still Waters.