I would like to welcome William J. Cobb, author of The Bird Saviors to So Many Precious Books. William J. Cobb is the author a book of stories and two previous novels, including the critically acclaimed Goodnight, Texas.
His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and many other magazines. He has received numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, and the Sandstone Prize. He was raised in Texas and currently lives in Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the writing program at Penn State, and in Colorado. Welcome William!
As a writer in my twenties I moved from Texas to New York City, very much the country (or cactus) bumpkin, ready to get my rough edges polished, knowing Manhattan was where intellectuals went and what they wrote about. But it soon became apparent that the Big Apple had plenty of wannabe writers, and to stand out, you have to be distinct. After a while I realized that what I knew best and loved most was the West. But as subject matter, it’s a horse of a different color. One of the most striking things for me is . . . less people. Especially the Rocky Mountains and high desert area that I call home now, which is one of the most thinly populated areas of the U.S. In Custer County, Colorado there are literally more animals than people. And that’s affected my fiction, in that the landscape—plus the flora and fauna—is a great influence on the story. One scene in particular comes to mind: Early in The Bird Saviors the heroine, Ruby Cole, is escaping her fundamentalist father, fleeing to find her mother, and has to hike across the prairie to town. She passes a trio of horses who become excited at her presence, as a dust storm and snow storm collide, causing a pink snow to fall—a rare but not unheard of weather phenomenon. Here’s a brief quote from that passage:
“She thinks of the warmth and comfort she could find if she reaches the vet’s office where her mother works, if she reaches someone to listen to her sobs, to hold her up. To keep her from falling. To keep her safe. To return her to her baby girl, to squire them both away from Lord God and all his righteous rants and ravings.
“One is a palomino, a pale golden blur in the blizzard of red snowflakes. The others are chestnut and roan, shaggy manes and arched tails. Their eyes are bright and wild as they gallop past. One of the roans, a stallion, slows and whinnies, tossing his head up and down.
That scene was based on an early evening hike I took with my wife at Mesa Verde National Park. On an unused road behind the Farview Lodge, we decided to lie down in the middle of the road and watch the clouds. A trio of horses came upon us and were frightened, started neighing and prancing about, as if they were worried there was something wrong with us—that we were injured or ill or simply crazy. The excitement in their horse eyes was something to behold. That nearness to the animal world is what makes a difference to me in the West. (Like the black bear that showed up in my yard the other night.) I try to write about a natural world in which humans are a part, but not the only story.—William J. Cobb
Description of The Bird Saviors by William J. Cobb:
Ruby is a teenage mother with a fundamentalist preacher father and a mother who recently gave up and left. Now, before Ruby’s dad marries her off to an older man with two wives, she makes a break for it.
But this story is more than Ruby’s, though she is its heart.
