An Act of Discovery

by Creative Nonfiction contributor Adam Knight

Writing is an act of discovery. -- Natalie Goldberg

Discovery of what? Sometimes, writers plumb the depths of other people's thoughts and emotions. Sometimes, writers discover something about the world they did not previously understand. Sometimes they learn about themselves.

My essay "Little Bird" in Bacopa Literary Review 2021 is a vignette about a moment in my life so small that I doubt anyone else involved even remembers it. Yet it was a pivotal moment for me, one that confirmed something I had begun to suspect in adolescence. I was different from other boys. I was a misfit on my baseball team--inept, passive, and introverted. In the dugout I found a fledgling baby bird and vowed to save it from two teammates who were unlike me in every way.

Nick and Scott were best friends, and like me, were thirteen. Unlike me, they were very good ballplayers. Nick was a small, wiry, slap hitter who could turn singles into doubles. His father owned our town's biggest car dealership. Scott was tall and broad, a big bruiser of a kid who had set records crushing homeruns his last year of Little League. He had gained infamy in sixth grade by tasting a piece of the cow heart we were dissecting in science class. Today, he's a cop.

I failed. They found the bird and decided to take it to the high school field to "park it." For years, that incident proved to me that I was tender-hearted and virtuous. I never challenged the assertion; I built my identity around it. When I finally decided to write about it a few years ago, it started as an exercise in recollection. Gradually, my memory and imagination collaborated to the point where I could smell the wet grass and hear the scrape of aluminum bats on concrete dugout floors. But I kept writing, and as so often happens in writing, seeing the thing on the page took me places I did not expect.

That day on the baseball field was twenty-five years ago. When I relived it in my mind, I was always the hero. But when I wrote it as a narrative, I scrutinized my protagonist a  little more. His passivity was not a virtue, but was a flaw that allowed an innocent creature to die.

Still, many years later, I can hear the cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep of a helpless voice, cut short because I was too fearful of being mocked. Nick and Scott did not kill that bird alone. My silence was their accomplice.

The final lines of the essay were not just a surprise twist to the reader, they were a surprise to me. A surprise I discovered in myself through the revelatory power of writing.

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Adam Knight is a writer and teacher in northern New Jersey. His debut novel, At the Trough, was published in 2019 by NineStar Press and his fiction and essays have been published in a number of publications. His story "Hoping for Red" was published at Escape Pod in December 2018. He has recently completed a cosmic horror novel about the Titanic, The Fire Below the Waves.

 

A Well-Told Story of a Small, but Defining Moment

by Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin

Adam Knight's "Little Bird" in Bacopa Literary Review 2021 is a tender story of an adolescent boy who worries over a baby bird. In this piece, tension is woven through in just the right amounts. I can feel the vulnerability of both the bird and the narrator, in this dugout full of young teenage boys.

      A fluttering movement caught my eye. I looked down. What I had mistaken for some windblown leaves was a bird's nest, probably knocked down from the dugout roof in the previous night's storm. In it lay a baby bird with a bulbous head and wispy feathers. Its beak opened and shut, emitting the tiniest "cheep" that was only audible in the gaps of teenage conversation.

       Hello, I thought. Hello there.

 "Little Bird" is a tight, simple story that is also one of those small moments we build ourselves around, a nugget of self-realization.

      I felt like the bird and I were in a little, private world. He was my secret. I did not know if I could help him, but I could listen to him. You are not alone, I thought. I imagined what it must be like to be the bird, a tiny waif, perhaps days old, disoriented and scared, flailing and crying in a world full of creatures much larger and louder than he. I hear you, little bird. I see you.

The larger metaphor of this story works without being overwrought. I felt this boy, a small bird, trying not to be crushed by the growing expectations of the aggressive masculinity around him. The triumph of this piece, for me, is the exploration of this small defining moment in a life. The realization, "I am different than this."

      Something died that day. Not just a newly hatched sparrow on a high school baseball field, but also something in me. As a boy, I had played baseball on a team with other boys, and though we may have all had different temperaments, we all could play the game we loved. But that morning's events confirmed for me finally that I did not belong. Not on the team and not with other guys. My path to manhood, whatever it might look like, would not look like Nick and Scott's . . .

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Adam Knight is a writer and teacher in northern New Jersey. His debut novel, At the Trough, was published in 2019 by NineStar Press and his fiction and essays have been published in a number of publications, including "Hoping for Red" in Escape Pod, December 2018. He is currently revising a cosmic horror novel about the Titanic.