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Profiled: Jim Paul (Harcourt Books, Orlando, Florida, 2003, 805 pp, ISBN: 0-15-100495-1 U.S. $24.00 h/c) It is often
said fact is stranger than fiction. If that is
the case, if you want to write good, riveting fiction, it stands to reason
drawing on some real life facts can make for a rather fascinating story. That’s
what Jim Paul did when he wrote the book, Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots. The book
tells the tale of poet David Huntington and his search for meaning and
fulfillment In weaving
the story, Paul - who has never lived with a parrot himself - drew partly on his
own experiences as a poet as well as on those of a friend who went through a
parrot experience similar to the one the Huntington character undergoes in the
book. “I got to
know the conure of a friend of mine fairly well,” says Paul. “I think it may
be one of those birds that eventually ended up on Telegraph Hill.” At the time,
his friend, like Huntington, was living alone with the conure and a dog,
following a divorce. Paul was trying to help him “return to life, bring him
back into the world.” “My friend
Harry was living in a house in San Francisco with the bird, which had become
very territorial and would attack any new person in the house. I suggested it
might be better to let the bird go, and with some trepidation, we opened the
window one day, and released the bird. It flew away directly as if it knew where
it was going. “The scene
described in the book is pretty much the way it happened in real life.” Years went
by, and although not what he would call a “parrot person,” Paul became
interested in parrot lore, wondering (a little guiltily) if a parrot could
survive in the habitat in which they’d released it. A friend of his told him
about the wild parrots at Telegraph Hill, he went to see them for himself, and
met Mark Bittner, (pre-book and movie) who was very helpful in telling Paul all
about the flock. That formed
the germ of the idea for the book, and he was off and writing. He began the
story as a non-fiction book, but it eventually morphed into fiction. During the
course of writing and researching the book, Paul traveled on a boat to
Ecuador’s mangrove much as Huntington does in the story. “I was
well into the research for the book, and I went down specifically to try to find
the home ground of those birds,” he says. “With my other books, I’ve
always taken the seed of an idea then gone on the road with it. “I hiked
around a bit in Ecuador and did see at least one flock of that species of
Aratinga conure.” In addition
to his on-site research in San Francisco and Ecuador, Paul studied several books
and publications about parrots intensely. “Parrots
of the World became my bible,” he says. “It really has everything.” To further
his knowledge even more, Paul also made a trip to visit Dr. Irene Pepperberg,
and met Alex, the African grey parrot, one of the main subjects in her studies
about communication and cognitive abilities in parrots. One idea
that helped feed his creative muse was the thought of the pre-Columbian New
World, in particular, the Caribbean. “The
flocks of parrots that lived then were astonishing,” he says. “To think
about that huge, ancient life that we only get glimpses of now was one of the
things I wanted to capture for David, to let him have a feeling of all that, so
that I could convey my sense that these birds were a look at something wonderful
and ancient – which is the main point of the book, I think.” One of the
unique pleasures Paul took from the whole process was a new understanding, a new
point-of-view about parrots and birds in general. “They’re
very cognizant of themselves, they’re not doing a rote, instinctual thing in
their environment. Not being a parrot-person, I came to that realization as I
worked on this book. “To me,
that was the thrill of the book.” While he
found the whole two-year process of researching and writing Elsewhere to be
educational and enjoyable, don’t look for another book about parrots anytime
soon. His next book is about runes and Norse lore. “It
(another parrot book) could happen, but I generally like to deal with one
subject then, move on,” he says. “For me to start a book, it has to have a
thread a connection to my life at the moment, something that comes along that I
think about, and read about, and I start taking notes, then the book happens.
Writing a book is a really organic process. (This story originally appeared in the September 2006 issue of Parrots Magazine. I retain all rights to its publication.) |
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General Information About African Greys Fiction
Non-Fiction
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in a world that seems to be closing in on him, cutting him off from any
meaningful human relationships. When a parrot given to him as a gift scares off
the first potential girlfriend he’s met in months, he throws the parrot out
the window. Guilty, he tries to find it, winding up at San Francisco’s
Telegraph Hill, famed for its wild parrot flocks. He winds up going to Ecuador
in search of an ancient flock of parrots purported to live in the mangrove
swamps. There, his fate intersects that of Fern Melartin’s, an American
scientist on her own ornithological quest.