Thinking about H is for Hawk and nonfiction in general

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Thinking about H is for Hawk and nonfiction in general

2/9/2016

We’ve spent quite a fair amount of time with the genre of nonfiction. In reading your ICRNs from last week, one thing that surprised me was what surprised many of you about the genre. If we had met for class, I would have had us finalize a list of qualities of the genre that reflected what you’d learned and to think about how they appear (the same and differently) in H. I’ll dispense with teasing out the genre characteristics. Instead I list them here:

Nonfiction has a narrative arc. In other words, it typically has some manner of plot. It might and often does have multiple narratives working together in service to a larger narrative.
Nonfiction is true, but it is not always factual. It uses truth in the service of its larger point
And it has a larger point. When you talk about what an essay is about, you are not really asking about a summary of plot. You are asking about what the essay is trying to accomplish thematically.
Nonfiction borrows from fiction in the telling of the story the essay is concerned with: the development of character, the use of setting, the handling of time.
Nonfiction demonstrates knowledge/research/expertise beyond the personal.

There are other things I might write about here, but I think that these four points are the most central to understanding the genre. In roughly 500 words, please identify the ways the H is for Hawk embodies these four points. Be specific and thoughtful.

Please post your initial thoughts no later than noon on Thursday by simply hitting the "comments" button at the top or bottom of this page or the "leave a reply" link below.

After the class has posted, please read what your colleagues have to say. Please respond either to a specific post or to what you notice people are talking about generally.

Completion of these two posts will serve as your ICRN for memoir and will serve as the majority of your class discussion as well.

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful and serious attention to this discussion.

32 Comments

Ben Pond

2/10/2016 07:33:00 am

H is for Hawk without a doubt embodies these five points for the rules of the nonfiction genre. The first point being that nonfiction has a narrative arc, which can be first seen when the narrator goes and see’s the Goshawks for the first time in the book. The audience is introduced to a back story about why she enjoys hawks so much, which in itself has a plot of what caused this want for interaction with hawks. Then the narrators father dies and another arc is created of how the author will deal with this loss and how much of an impact the father had on the narrators life. Then two other arcs are given, one about White and his hawk Gos and their story, and the narrators own story with training her hawk. The second point is that nonfiction is true but not always factual, and I believe that this can be taken from the way that Mabel is portrayed with her kills. The author makes the hawk feel and seem childish, learning it's way in the world and personifies it to show human emotions. This personification is mostly used only for positive moments with the hawk however, and not when the hawk is confused, like when the narrator covers up the kill with grass and the hawk just gives up. The third rule of nonfiction is that it has a point that it is trying to get across. This can be seen in the undertone of the narrator going through the different stages of grief from her fathers death. The narrator goes through the stages of grief almost in sync with the Hawks learning development with her falconer. The fourth rule is that nonfiction borrows from fiction. This can be seen in the setting of many of many places where the hawk is being trained. The first walk with Mabel for example had a very strong setting of dark, where the trees were, and other things that the narrator and her hawk passed. This was important for the reader to get a visual image in their head of what Mabel was seeing and why she would have freaked out from seeing these things. The last rule is nonfiction demonstrates knowledge outside of the personal experience of the author. This rule can be seen in two different places, when the disease of the rabbits is talked about and Whites experiences that weren't put into his book. The narrator had to do research for both of these to signify to the reader there importance.

2/11/2016 06:58:57 am

I read the postscript to the memoir--I'm not clear if others did. At first I thought it was not an actual part of the memoir, but, actually, it really is. And in it she identifies two aspects of her research on White beyond simply reading his text The Goshawk. First, she spent time with his papers at UT Austin, but, feeling like this was inadequate, she actually goes to White's house in England and looks at the land. There is a moment there where she sees a person and muses about it being White and not being White. It turns out to be a meditation on the limitations of what we understand about the present by knowing the past--and about how well we can know the past, which, actually, is one of the many themes that she develops in the memoir.

Caitlin Rose Bradley

2/11/2016 01:09:28 pm

I like the point you made about different arcs. It is the little anecdotes that she tells throughout the memoir within the arcs you mentioned that captured my interest, and while they may not be entirely factual, as we have stated, they are all true. These smaller arcs added together make up the larger arcs, which combine to feed into the purpose of her story. I think this factor is at work in all the creative nonfiction pieces we have read, and perhaps it is a characteristic of the genre, though I'm sure it is not applicable to all pieces, it certainly rears its head frequently. The theme, it appears, is informed by the intersection of the various arcs.

Caitlin Westgate

2/10/2016 03:18:02 pm

What immediately struck me when I began reading was the way the author uses space on the page to organize the various narrative elements. In the very first chapter, we are given an introduction to the author's expertise regarding hawks and falconry. We see her memories with her father in relation to this activity, and then, at the very end of the chapter, in one or two lines, we learn that her father has died. While dedicating that little space to an event that is obviously integral to the piece in a shorter piece of nonfiction would be ill-advised, I think it works extremely well for a book-length piece. We know she is going to to go into more detail about her father's death and its affect on her, but we also know that we are going to learn more about her relationship with falconry and how the two tie together. She accomplishes this by weaving the biographical narrative of White's experience with his own hawk throughout her journey with Mabel as well as her battle with depression after her father's death. In this way, I think the book holds true to the idea that nonfiction is true but not always factual. Did Macdonald really feel the ghost of White by her side when training her hawk? Did she spend a lot of time thinking about his early childhood and struggles with homosexuality while she grieved for her father? Maybe she gave it a passing thought, but it's obvious that a great deal of research and analysis went into her chapters on White. The places where her story and White's seem to coincide or, more often, contrast, may not have been apparent to the author until she had done all of her research and plotted the organization of her story, yet it all seems to flow seamlessly together. I think that is a quality of good nonfiction. The research that Macdonald uses to flesh out White's story goes beyond the personal. She uses her childhood experience of reading his book as a jumping off point for a kind of psychoanalysis of White's relationship with his hawk that transfers onto her own relationship with Mabel. Macdonald uses setting to shape the narrative very often throughout the book. The vast landscapes where she flies her hawk are described in great detail. The moments when she loses the hawk and becomes disoriented in the woods reflect on the instability of her own mental health, especially in the way she reacts and interacts with the varying landscapes. The setting described at the end of the book is clear and new, like her life now that she has made steps to overcome her depression and grief. The many facets of the book work together to produce an authentic, interesting, at once unique and universal experience of life, death, and nature.

2/11/2016 07:04:16 am

Two points I'd want to make here. First off, god love you Caitlin for talking about space on the page. You know that's a favorite phrase of mine when talking about fiction or nonfiction. "Space on the Page" is how we as readers know what a writer wants us to pay attention to. And we see that at work in terms of both positive and negative space in H. We know that the text is centrally concerned with her working through her grief over her father and we know that by the single line on the page at the end of the introduction as you point out. Secondly, as you also point out, it is easy to identify only her research on White as central to the story, but we can't forget her vast--seriously vast--knowledge collected her about other literary influences. One of the most charming and powerful sections of the text for me is her litany of animals that die in the many children's and young adult books she's read. This brought back a powerful memory to me of not wanting to finish Black Beauty, a horse book, because I couldn't bear to read anymore about the abuse the horse took. I couldn't take it. Her writing about Charlotte's web brought the same emotion. It is absolutely worth noting that this memoir, as is really the case with all really good memoirs, is not just about the personal. The personal anchors it, but we, as readers, learn so much about the wider world through her text.

Brittanie McGovern

2/11/2016 06:53:57 pm

You make some really great points! I feel like it shows how much thought and effort really went in to the writing of this memoir by the way that everything fits so perfectly together. When she starts talking about White it never really brings me out of what I'm reading but instead makes me think more about what she is going through herself and how his life is, in some way, connected to hers. It makes me wonder if she had found his book at a later point in her life how it would have affected her. It seemed that by finding the book when she was so young and really only seeing it as a sort of how not to guide to training a hawk may have really helped her want to find out the good things that can be done. Also, with her going back to it when she was older and being able to look at it in a different way really showed how she had grown as a person in all of those years.

Becca Snow

2/10/2016 03:46:05 pm

In many ways, H is For Hawk embodies these five focal characteristics of the nonfiction genre. The first point, that nonfiction has a manner of plot, can be verified with the fact that the narrator explains her fascination with hawks through an in-depth explanation of why they are so important to her; this would be difficult to achieve without some sort of plot. With that being said, the story that is being told may be true, but it does not necessarily have to be factual, as any nonfiction piece may or may not be. There are several points in H is for Hawk where the narrator exaggerates. Arguably, these exaggerations may not be completely factual, but they contribute to the larger point that she is trying to make. For example, the theme of patience is relayed throughout the story. In order to do this, the narrator finds moss, which reminds her of the patience that her father taught her, because the moss must be patient to survive certain conditions. While this may have been a true event that occurred, this scene is exaggerated to fit into the theme that patience is vital. Additionally, this theme is one of the larger points that is being conveyed. In accordance with another focal characteristic of the nonfiction genre, the larger point is conveyed through the development of characters, the use of setting, and the handling of time. This is done throughout H is for Hawk, as the narrator recalls lessons that her dad taught her, the struggle she faced after his death, and the revelations that she made throughout the process. While these things occurred over time, the setting of the story is also crucial to the development of the plot. Throughout the book, the narrator relays that she does not feel connected to humans. Instead, she spends most of her time among the wild, with her Hawk, Mabel. Her reliability on nature could not be conveyed if the majority of this story was to take place in a busy city street. As the narrator is intensely interested in Hawks, this demonstrates knowledge, research, and expertise of the author. This is true for any nonfiction work, for you cannot write about something you do not know anything about; a nonfiction author should have a significant amount of information to support the claims that they are making.

2/11/2016 07:11:15 am

The point I take from what you've written here is that you noticed the role writing about the natural settings of both her experience with Mabel and White's experience with Gos (though, I must admit this post is a little light on details). You hit upon a point I would have liked to have spent time on in class. MacDonald is a naturalist by training and this text is a kind of nature writing as much as it is about memoir. Another significant theme in this text is the effect on the natural world that humans have. You see this in a number of places. Obviously, her constant descriptions of landscape and the animals that inhabit it (her knowledge of kinds of birds is dizzying). But, also, think about her experience at the gallery show when she talks about the bird under class, the extinction of certain species, the efforts to save species. Think about the story of the rabbit with the tumors on the side of the road--we come to learn about nature turning on itself here. Even the discussion of her fear as a child of nuclear war. Also central: as another one of your colleagues points out, MacDonald is often thinking about the emotional life of Mabel. She is imagining emotional responses, but she catches herself. In her descriptions of "yarak" for example, MacDonald must admit to the fact that this hawk is a wild thing--our desire is always to humanize our animals--but a professional worker with animals, as MacDonald is--reminds us that we do not have the relationships with animals that we imagine we have.

Paul Hines

2/10/2016 05:46:13 pm

H is for Hawk follows a clear narrative arc. The main storyline going on is focused on the narrator dealing with the death of her father. Interwoven into this narrative are the hawk-related experiences of both herself and White. These two plots get a lot of attention, but ultimately serve to forward the narrative about the narrator's distress over the loss of her father. In order for these narratives to really come to life, a few creative liberties need be taken. While the experiences described did in truth happen, they may not always be told in a totally factual way. Undoubtedly the writing of this work required a certain level of research into T.H. White's life, but it's unlikely that research would have turned up some of the more specific details of his relationship with Gos. The work also seems to go into Mabel's mind at times. Obviously Macdonald could not actually read the bird's mind or see through her eyes. These creative liberties may not be exact fact, but they help to paint a more vivid image of the events described. It almost feels like White, Gos, and Mabel function as characters in the work despite the author's inability to truly become or understand them. These characters exist in a world that is easy to forget is our own. Like with fiction, Macdonald is able to get readers invested in these characters' journeys over time. Being able to hook readers into the storylines about training birds helps to keep the audience interested enough to keep going and understand the work's larger themes without having them shoved down their throats. The theme of the work deals with working through loss. That is at the core of H is for Hawk and Macdonald's detailed descriptions of hawk-training ultimately serve to highlight her personal journey. The only "character" who actually factually develops is Macdonald herself. The underlying story is about her journey and the detailed tellings of the other stories help to ensure that readers can understand her emotional journey in a more concrete and engaging manner.

2/11/2016 07:17:16 am

I think this is the post I was referring to when I replied to Becca's post. I think that ONE theme of this memoir is managing loss, but there is a great deal more going on--our effect on the natural world being one of them. And, as I refer to in my reaction to Ben's post above, one of the ways she knew about White's reactions to his bird is by reading not only the book but by reading his diaries and letters that contributed to the writing of the text--found and read during her time at UT Austin. But, certainly, she takes liberties with how she writes about White's experience with Gos. She often writes in present tense when describing a scene of White trying to train Gos. I must say I found these scenes terribly difficult to read. White's stupidity when it came to how to treat that animal infuriated me. It was cruel and selfish. The scene, near the end, where White is trying to lure Gos back by offering him a pigeon--a pigeon White had essentially trapped and trained and taught to trust him--was heart breaking. I don't know if he really came to the realization that what he was doing was cruel to that poor, poor, desperate bird, but it certainly was, and the way MacDonald writes about it here, informed by her research as it was, was dramatically powerful to make the point. it is a clear example of the text being true but not necessarily factual. That scene. So hard to get over. I hated white. And I don't even like birds.

Kurt Stilwell

2/11/2016 01:09:01 pm

You raise an important point with T.H. White and his gos. No matter how much research she did, which is evident from the amount of time we spend focusing on the two, there are sometimes when she will need to fill in the blanks, and she does so in a very believable way. We also get the treat of having the Hawk almost a character itself, getting into its thoughts that she would no way have access to. It makes the hawk interesting, as well as displays her expertise as a writer and and a falconer. She has a true understanding of hawk behavior, and after reading H is for Hawk the reader feels as if they understand too.

Ben Pond

2/11/2016 06:06:18 pm

Hey Paul, I agree that there is definitely a strong tone of the death of the narrators father. However, I think that it is just an undertone. There are a lot of different arcs writhing the text and this one usually seems to come up underneath it. While she is definitely going through different stages of grief it is usually only briefly talked about. Usually talks of Mabel or Gos are the major text points and while they may be symbolic for death, possibly anyway, one of the main themes is mastering nature. There are so many themes that I don't think there is an individual main one.

Brittanie McGovern

2/10/2016 07:07:14 pm

One thing that really stuck out to me in H is for Hawk was the detail that Helen Macdonald put not only in what went in to her training of Mabel, but all of the information on T.H. White. It’s clear to see that Macdonald had to do more than just read his one book to really get a sense for who he was as a person. She goes into more of why he might have done things the way that he did when he first got his hawk and it was interesting to see her look at what his hawk really meant for him. She is able to expand on the information and give the reader a better understanding of things that she may not have known when she first starting writing this memoir. There were times when I was reading that I forgot that I was actually reading a piece of nonfiction. There was always a clear description of who each person was in the story and what they had to do with her life. Along with that, the time within the memoir always felt like it was moving in the right direction to find some kind of resolution, even though it wasn’t clear to me from the beginning where the story was going to go in the end. This is something I like when looking at a fiction piece so it did bring me into this idea of nonfiction really looking at fiction to be able to tell a story in a more engaging way than just stating facts. The story that Macdonald tells does seem to follow a narrative arc in that each event works together to bring her to a specific point in her life. Each story that she tells brings the story, as a whole, forward in time but in a way that works. There is never a time where it is unclear of what a situation has done for her or where it has brought her. From the parts where she is brought to think about something that she hadn’t thought of before to even just moving her to want to get rid of Mabel and then realizing that it takes cooperation and work in order to get Mabel to really do what Macdonald wants her to. Macdonald does a good job of using real events that happened in her life in a way to bring about this larger idea about being able to find yourself when you feel that you are lost. She uses Mabel as a way to show that she, in her own sense, started to become more like the goshawk from spending so much time with her that in the end she needed to find a happy medium. She needed to realize that there needs to be a balance between the wild side and the human side of a person in order to really get a sense for who they are. If it weren’t for this idea of her becoming a form of goshawk herself she probably would have never been able to really look at herself from the outside and see how her life had changed in both the good and bad ways.

2/11/2016 07:53:56 am

I've sort of touched on a lot of what you've talked about here responding to other writers--she does do extensive research on White beyond just reading the Goshawk. The book has footnotes for a reason--and, again, the postscript describes her research process on White. You talk about the relationship between fiction and nonfiction and the use of narrative. But one thing that you talk about here that I want to point out is that you see that see that every element of the story fits where it is. That's not by accident. That is the writer at work. Like a novelist plots their story, so does the memoirist. There is a general forward motion to this text, but think of what we skip? All the millions of minutes of stuff we skip. Think about what we linger on. Do we imagine that the last scene, where she experiences the earthquake before dropping off Mabel, made her wake up and say, hmm, I'm going to write the book now. There is distance between these events and the telling of this story.The author puts them in a particular order, makes decisions about when to tell us what event, makes decisions about when to interject stories about White and Gos, when to interject long passages about hawking or the landscape, or the history of England (history and lineage is another thematic element of the piece--hawking is sort of a part of an English imagination). Memoir is not writing a diary, It is as purposeful and structured as any piece of fiction.

Caitlin Rose Bradley

2/10/2016 08:30:36 pm

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald is a mostly true narrative with multiple story lines intertwining to tell the larger, overarching story. In Helen MacDonald's own life, she tells the story of how she coped with her father's death as well as her love for hawks and other birds of prey, and the training of her very own goshawk, Mabel. Additionally, she weaves the story of T.H. White's life and his book about his goshawk training experience into her own narrative. The events of the story are, presumably, true, but not necessarily factual due to the fact that MacDonald was most likely not recording verbatim what she and her friends said, or the actions of each day. If I were to write everything I have done for the past few weeks, a lot of it would be misremembered or false. In MacDonald's case, she may have invented some details to benefit her story(which is tied up in a neat little package as far as a narrative goes) or her main objectives, for example exactly what happened and when, and maybe a few of her hunting anecdotes as well, but, most likely, the important plot elements are true. Her father really did die and she trained a goshawk named Mabel to help her through her grief, and she found connections between T.H. White's real life and her own. Additionally, all the information about hawks is true; she gives real facts because she knows them, because she is a hawk expert, which is another point. Most people do not know that much about raising and training hawks, and she clearly researched T.H. White's life and read his book, The Goshawk, before writing, or at least before completing, her own book. All these storylines work together in order to get the author's point across. One theme she comes back to a lot is patience. Her father was patient with his photography, patient with bird watching, and Helen MacDonald has to be patient while gaining Mabel's trust and teaching her to leave the house and hunt outdoors. MacDonald is also communicating about loss and grief. She loses her father forever, and in the end she has to give up Mabel for the molting season. I'm struggling to pinpoint the exact purpose of her narrative, but I believe it has to do with relationships and grief; she talks about the bond she had with her father, her relationships with her friend, Christina, and her friend and goshawk mentor, Stuart, and most importantly her relationship with Mabel. These relationships are what pull her through her mourning period following her father's death. My original, personal interpretation of creative nonfiction as a genre was that it aimed to tell a story about what really happened by telling it in an interesting way. This was one of the most interesting books I have read in a while, and I was drawn into the story and really enjoyed it. This is an example of successful creative nonfiction in the form of a novel.

2/11/2016 07:41:14 am

It feels like a novel, but, remember, it's nonfiction. It's a memoir. I know I'm a pain in the ass about genre, but it's important for students at this level to see this. You write here about something that a lot of people wrote about last week--that it would be virtually impossible to know all the things that happened in the year that a writers is chronicling, or to remember things that happened when they are very young. Which is why I said that Nonfiction is true but not factual. I also appreciate that you point out the ongoing discussion of patience that is peppered through the book. And I also appreciate that you speak honestly about not being quite sure what the books is about thematically. For me, I understood more what she was doing thematically with her relationship to the hawk, to her relationship to nature. There was that whole thing about community versus isolation. That, it turned, out was the closing image of the piece--she leaves Mabel and turns to the company of other humans. But what she is actually saying about grief and her process of grief and where she is at with it at the end of memoir, I'm less sure. But that's OK. That's another aspect of nonfiction that it shares with fiction--it can still be interpreted.

Paul Hines

2/12/2016 07:40:04 am

I really like that you pointed out the theme of patience. I think that is a really prevalent and important one that I sort of overlooked. I also really like how you bring up memory and how it can change over time. I think that is an important thing to keep in mind when it comes to creative non-fiction. We should be aware of which elements are true but also be able to recognize which ones have been paraphrased or bent due to either the passage of time or working to assist the storyline in flowing better. I appreciate that you admit your struggle in finding the purpose because I had a similar problem. I think when we take a step back and analyze the big picture we can see that it is about many things. The loss of her father is at the center of it but the order of the natural world is also a major theme that plays into a big idea about loss of life (credit to Dr. Torda for helping me with this). The way I see it, the details of her relationships with all of those other people (and hawks) serve the bigger ideas at work.

Kurt Stilwell

2/11/2016 06:21:32 am

H is for Hawk is a memoir that shines as an example of creative non-fiction. It borrows tools from fictions narrative craft. The reader enjoys beautifully crafted scenes, such as when Helen is in the war scarred woods and sees her first goshawk, or when she travels to purchase on of her own and it emerges from its box for the first time. This memoir is not simply telling the reader the cold hard facts of what happened while she trained this goshawk, the reader goes along for the ride with her as the pages turn. We see glimpses into her life, in her childhood when she read various books on hawks, how T.H. White’s book effected her view on hawks, and how her fathers death left a void in her heart that she tried to fill by training her hawk. The book flows well, jumping back in time when the reader needs back-story but mostly staying with Helen and her Hawk. We become attached and invested with Helen because we get to know her on a deeper level then as the author of the book, but as a character that exists realistically within our minds. We get access to her thoughts. We feel with her as she writes “This is my Hawk,” “This is not my Hawk,” (Macdonald, 55). There may be times throughout the narrative that are not necessarily true, but this is done to add tension to the “plot” of the story and maintain the readers interest. What this memoir does is ground the reader in the world of reality, making it easier to suspend disbelief as the reader knows it to be true, but sets us off on an adventure the reader would normally never experience; falconry is not a very common practice in this day and age. The readers get to experience a new challenge with falconry for themselves because they are able to immerse themselves in the world of the story, as if they are in the room with Helen and her hawk. In this sense, it’s not Macdonald telling the readers how she trained a hawk, but gives the readers the opportunity to experience it themselves through literature. Even as a work of non-fiction, the book still works as a way to create a day dream to immerse the reader in the world the writer has created, whether that place that is real or not.

2/11/2016 08:01:09 am

You touch here on something I would have liked to have talked about in class: why this is a memoir that gets published. There are a lot of reasons, of course, MacDonald is an accomplished writer and scholar. I don't think this piece is necessarily representative of her other writing, but, my point is, she is a known writing commodity with a real pedigree--Cambridge University in England. Also, though, she's writing about falconry, and as a number of you point out, that's not a thing most people write about. This will sound heartless, but everybody's father dies but not everybody can or will write a memoir about it (or should), the story of her grief would not be a publishable story. I think a lot of students think that nonfiction is just a way to tell people about some tragedy or sadness in your life. But that's not the case. It is the fact that she has this other thing that makes her story one worth publishing. It's the way she uses falconry to tell this complicated story--not just of grieving for her father but of, again, as I've said, a relationship to land and to the history, both natural and man-made of the land. Of the good of a people and the bad (she spends a lot of time talking about how falconry and hawking is a hobby of the wealthy and the noble historically and thus connected to a very particular image of England, not always so very pretty--think of the people in the field counting the deer suddenly talking about how it's nice to see parts of old/real England in the face of, it's like they're Donald Trump, immigrants. So it's worth thinking about--how this piece is topical and inherently unique.

Catherine Macallister

2/12/2016 05:49:43 am

I think that the point that both Kurt and Dr. Torda bring up about the death of Helen's father is important. It is true that everyone's father dies and perhaps that is why her grieving process is so unclear to the reader. As pointed out in other posts, Helen's grief process seems like it plays a much bigger role in the text, when in reality it is only present in small snippets. For Helen to write this memoir I think she had to include her father's death as a way to describe some of her motivations and actions but her end goal was not to make it a tragic memoir about loss because the grieving process likely did not end when her piece was published. Helen, like most people, cannot offer any real advice for coping with the death of a loved one. But she is able to establish the importance of the things in her life-falconry, her connection to the land vs real world, and her father-and put all of them together in such a way that her own personal story and struggle comes through.

Catherine Macallister

2/11/2016 07:08:09 am

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk is a nonfiction essay that examines Helen’s life as she deals with her father’s death and learns to train a goshawk, Mabel. The story embodies the 5 key characteristics of nonfiction through careful story telling and outside research and information regarding other goshawk trainers including T.H White. This nonfiction work first serves as a means for Helen to share the loss of her father. The novel follows her life from the moment she finds out about her father death, to the services and her eventual ability to deal with loss. She also uses flashbacks to her childhood in order to give the reader a sense of what her father was like and how they shared a similar passion for nature and birds of prey. Helen weaves her father’s death and the training of Mabel together in order to show the bereavement process and how grief plays a role in how you live your everyday life. Helen was not only challenged by this grief but by the physical and emotional demands of training a goshawk. She uses TH White as a supporting narrative to her own story, incorporating him as someone she could look to for advice. While White is physically dead, Helen constructs her narrative in such a way that a reader may feel as though he is alive and giving the advice to her . She speaks candidly about him too, as though she knew him personally, and discusses details of his life in order to form a more complete idea about who he was a person. Both Helen’s story and White’s story are vastly different-except for the love of goshawks- and this is where the 4th element of nonfiction, “borrowing from fiction” comes into play. H is for Hawk almost reads as if it were a fiction novel at times because of the interactions that Helen creates with White, but also because of her interactions with Mabel. At one point Helen references the series His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman and compares Mabel to a daemon of sorts. While Mabel cannot express herself as a daemon would, Helen is able to show how deep the connection is between herself and Mabel despite not being able to communicate beyond gestures. It is clear that Helen Macdonald began writing this novel with a clear background in goshawks however, the reader learns right along with her in order to understand how training works. Macdonald is able to combine her own life and struggle to cope with death through the training of Mabel as well as the outside information she researched regarding TH White and the training of goshawks.

2/11/2016 08:09:46 am

I don't think I need to repeat all the stuff I've been saying to other folks about what MacDonald is doing here. But you do mention OTHER texts besides White's book. MacDonald knows those texts as well--which is why all those footnotes. There is real depth to her scholarship. Sometimes the text reads like a treatise on ancient texts about Hawks (I keep thinking about the section where she gets into issues of gender--I remember thinking is there a hot button issue she DOESN'T touch on. She's using old texts--some very, very old-- to demonstrate how misunderstandings about hawks arise from a misogyny written into descriptions of hawk--of any gender--by turning them into stereotypes of women). Then there is her knowledge of a literature. Whites other book The Once and Future King, a fiction that features a hawk prominently--and consider how the story of TOAFK is the story of traditional England, which, as I discuss elsewhere in this list, something she both explores, revels in, and condemns in the text. Don't under estimate the role serendipity plays in a piece like this--to make these connections that aren't there naturally--that's the writer's luck and talent at work.

Randi Moore

2/11/2016 07:32:35 am

The five points listed above for the rules of the nonfiction genre are shown without H is for Hawk. I think there are two narratives going on here. The first being the connection the narrator has with the hawks and how she is first introduced to the Goshawk that she wants to train. When meeting the Goshawk we learn how the narrator obsessed over hawks when she was growing up. Then we quickly shift to the narrator loosing her beloved father. She explains how much of a loss this is for her since she was very close to her dad. For the second point where nonfiction is true but not always factual is where I agree with Ben. He mentions how the hawk is personified. It seems that Mabel is difficult to tame. The way the narrator describes the hawk as “bigger, bloodier, deadlier, scarier” seems exaggerated. The third rule of nonfiction is how it has a point that is important for the reader to know. I think that the point the narrator is trying to make is the significance of Mable. As Mable is trained there are up’s and down’s in its progress. Just like the up’s and down’s of the narrator’s life grieving her father. There is a correlation between the two because they are both working hard to rebuild themselves. The narrator goes through the stages of grief as if she is training herself to be okay without her father. The fourth point connects to the setting throughout the narrative. The detailed landscapes paint a picture in the reader’s head, feeling the emotion the narrator feels. The reader feels the moments of panic in the woods just like the narrator when she looses the hawk. Lastly, the narrators knowledge about nature and especially the hawks is something the author would have had to do research on. Since the specific detail about how hawks learn and grown is not common knowledge.

2/11/2016 08:13:07 am

If we had really dug into this text in class, I would have challenged the class to locate places in the text where we see MacDonald learning to move past her grief for her father. Because I must admit that for me is the cloudiest part of the text. And probably for a reason--who really ever gets over that sort of a thing? If we were to code this memoir, I think we'd all be surprised to find how very little she actually talks about her father, his death, her grief, and her recovery. I would argue that only a fifth of the space on the page is actually taken up with that. I think I could easily list the significant moments. It's worthwhile to think about how little of the text is about her father and her grief.

Ben Pond

2/11/2016 06:19:50 pm

Dear Randi, I like how you talked about my response in your response, so thank you. I agree that the hawk is made to look more dealt or primal by the author. The adjectives you named were great examples of this, whil hawks and birds of preys are usually symbols of fierceness and freedom, they aren't just that. Mabel for example plays with the narrator which MacDonald doesn't even think is possible. This goes in to show that while she did a ton of research as a child she still continued to do so for this book.

Carley Taylor

2/11/2016 09:42:38 am

I believe H is for Hawk is absolutely a good representative of the nonfiction genre. Firstly, it certainly has a narrative arc. Helen weaves her story into the natural world and connects everything in an interesting perspective. We get a good sense of how she thinks and copes as the story takes us through her connection with hawks and grieving over the death of her father and how her love for hawks became a part of how she coped. Although the story speaks largely about her love of falconry, it really is about her surviving through the grieving process. I greatly enjoyed her writer's voice and the beautiful images she paints, particularly when she is in nature and describing her precious winged friends. This brings me to the second point: How much of her book is factual? For this particular text, I feel like this blends in with number five because she does seem reliable when it comes time to birds of prey. She quotes books and gives bits of reliable facts. She has experience with training them, yet a part of me does question how reliable she is of a narrator, largely because of how she writes about White and her goshawk Mabel. She writes about White as if he was there, not dead. This is where she becomes most unreliable I feel, since there is no way she can know what was in the mind of a dead man and his hawk. This transcends into the "borrowing from fiction" point, which is probably what I like most. I enjoyed that this read like fiction and enjoyed how she wrote about Mabel and other birds of prey as if there was this intimate connection, this link of understanding, and almost human aspect to the birds. All nonfiction also has a point to convey. I believe Helen's point is to convey her journey of recovery from her devastating loss and it flows in time with Mabel's transitions. It preserves many memories for her and expresses her emotions over her father's death. I was actually a bit surprised the first time it hinted that the narrator is female. She starts out writing almost gender fluidly with a leaning towards a male undertone, but once I find out she is a girl, her tomboy image fits perfectly with what I am reading and I almost feel connected to the story through that relation alone.

2/11/2016 10:08:06 am

Of course you understand that, as this is nonfiction, the narrator is the author, the woman Helen MacDonald. I'm so curious about why you thought the narrator/author was a man. First off, that the author would be one person and that the narrator would be another person. I also continue to be interested in how so many folks are caught up in the reliability of the author in nonfiction--are they telling the truth. Again, I go back to what I said--nofiction is true but not factual.

Andrew Ludwig

2/11/2016 02:10:30 pm

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald focuses on the storyline of her losing her father and how she copes with it, but it also follows another storyline of her training a goshawk, Mabel. Clearly, one of the main themes of this particular piece of non-fiction is dealing with loss. This particular piece of nonfiction serves as a way for Helen to tell the story of her father’s passing. The story has a very linear progression as it begins with her father’s death and moves through the services and her mourning. Macdonald illustrates the struggles of daily everyday life through the narrative of her father passing away and through her training of Mabel. The descriptive details she gives about all types of hawks and particularly about the means of training them is what really gives this story its legs. Without the details that she puts into it the story would be nothing, but that is one of the key components to creative non-fiction is extreme detail. Honing in on a tiny moment in time and being able to put the reader into that place and time is what makes creative nonfiction so interesting. Having knowing absolutely nothing about falconry this memoir took a little while to get used to because she was speaking about stuff that I had no experience in, but nevertheless it still grabbed my attention and I was able to focus in and follow along with Macdonald throughout the story. Macdonald has no problem getting a message across in this memoir, which is one of the rules of nonfiction. It must leave the reader with a message. She emphasizes the highs and lows that come with grieving and she is able to illustrate that through the training of her goshawk, Mable. It takes extreme patience to train a goshawk and it not something that is going to happen overnight, much like overcoming the death of a loved one. It is going to be a long and grueling process that is going to test the toughest people. H is for Hawk is a terrific example of a longer piece of nonfiction that truly grabs the readers attention.

2/11/2016 03:43:32 pm

Two points--I've made them elsewhere, but they bear mentioning here. First, I really challenge everyone to say more concretely what she actually says about loss and how we see her coping with her loss in the text. Secondly, I want to suggest that the reason the text is fascinating is because she writes about something we know and fear (death of a loved one) and because she writes about something we don't know anything about (falconry). One without the other would be a very different text.

Stephanie Starbard

2/12/2016 08:17:41 am

H is for Hawk was like many of the narratives that we have read in class previously as it had an additional story, which was talking about her hunting, along with the actual process of grieving over her father. This text could have easily been a story about her father or her experience with training Mabel, but she was able to intertwine both arcs to tell the full story in a big picture type setting. To be honest, I don’t think she would have been able to write just about hawks without having some sort of underlying explanation behind it. This gives readers the chance to sympathize with the author rather than just reading about how much she loves hawks. To bring a sense of fiction into a nonfiction setting, she gives her hawk, Mable, a personality. It is no question that an owner can pick up on the habits and quirks of their own pets, but it is not possible to completely understand them. I believe Helen’s observation on Mabel’s hunting abilities and whether or not if she was ready had a lot to do with assumption. She often talks about how frustrated Mabel got While Helen goes on to document her experience with the hawks, her overall message was how it made her cope with her father’s death. As mentioned previously, the two arcs combined to tell the bigger picture. What White was trying to get at was how everybody has their own way of grieving, and training and studying with Mabel was her own way. Both story lines worked hand and hand to send the message to the readers. Although White essentially wrote H is for Hawk to document her own story, it also fits right in with the plot line of a fictional piece. We are able to get to know White as a protagonist with her own struggles and accomplishments. I felt like the story had its own plot line which kept the story flowing. I think the climax would have to be when Helen was sent to therapy because it was a huge jump from her typical days working with the hawks. After that, we see her as a different person as she begins seeing more of her friends and finds a new place to live. Beyond her own story, Helen shares a lot of expert knowledge about hawks. In the beginning of the story, I often became confused since she would go into specific detail on the hawks’ behavior which drew away from the story line. However, I feel like it was necessary to discuss her knowledge so we know how passionate she is on the subject matter. It is unlikely that the readers will gain much knowledge about a hawk’s behavior from reading the novel, but it gives the author a chance to discuss why she is so interested.

Jerry link

1/7/2021 08:23:55 am

Grateful foor sharing this

Jerry link

1/11/2021 11:18:40 am

Hello, nice post

Thinking about H is for Hawk and nonfiction in general

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LT's Spring 2016 ENGL 489

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Thinking about H is for Hawk and nonfiction in general