WE SHOULD ALL BE BIRDS

A charming and moving debut memoir about how a man with a mysterious illness saves a pigeon, and how the pigeon saves the man.

On a spring evening in Montana, Brian Buckbee encounters an injured baby pigeon. Heartbroken after the loss of the love of his life and increasingly isolated by a mysterious illness that overtook him while trekking through Asia, Brian is unaware that this birdwho he names Two-Stepwill change his life. Brian takes in Two-Step, and more injured birds, eventually transforming his home into a madcap bird rehabilitation and rescue center. As Brian and Two-Step grow closer, an unexpected kinship forms. But their paths won't converge forever: as Two-Step heals and finds love, Brian's condition worsens, and with his friend's release back into the world looming closer, Brian must decide where this story leaves him. WE SHOULD ALL BE BIRDS follows Brian, unable to read or write due to a never-ending headache, as he dictates the end of his old lifeas an adventurer, an iconoclastic university instructor, and endurance athletethrough his relationship with a pigeon that comes to define his present. Limited to dictation to communicate his story, Brian works with an editor, Carol Ann Fitzgerald, who channels the details of his personal history to the pages. Raw and perceptive, delirious and devastating, This is an unflinching exploration of chronic illness, grief, connection, and the spectacular beauty of the natural worldand the humble pigeon. The surprising, heartwarming relationship between man and bird provides insight into what it means to love, to suffer, and to "never forget, even for a second, how big it all is." Brian Buckbee lives in Missoula, Montana. He is co-founder of The 406 Writers' Workshop. His stories have appeared in The Sun, The Georgia Review, The Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Carol Ann Fitzgerald is a former editor at The Sun and The Oxford American. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Sun, The Book of Great Music Writing, and elsewhere. She lives in Chapel Hill.