Inspired by true events, is a poignant fable about a
woman, her husband and a Catbird, set against the
backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Reflecting
on global conflicts and human resilience, the book
offers a universal message of hope and solidarity in
tumultuous times worldwide.
Catbird
By Julia Marie
Davis
Genre
Women’s
Fiction, Current Affairs
With
the immediacy of an op-ed and the narrative feel of a memoir, Catbird embodies
the visceral response—angst and exasperating sense of helplessness inflamed by
the distance between the will of the people and our national policy, and the
bewilderment we feel—to the barbaric violence and violations of human rights
happening in Ukraine. Set against the background of seasonal drama in the bird
world, it has the sense of a fable, while still holding all the anxiety of the
contemporary events we are living through, witnessing, mourning, and opposing.
Told in a series of micro-episodes, Davis channels the fears and fragility of the world order, mirroring the anxiety caused by a continual barrage of contemporary conflicts we are living through: witnessing, mourning, opposing. A simple and straightforward story on the surface, Catbird expresses untold angst and an exasperating sense of helplessness. This feeling is inflamed by the distance between the will of the people, evolving national policies, and the bewilderment we feel—to the barbaric violence and the violations of human rights unfolding not just in Ukraine but elsewhere around the world.
“Julia Davis’s Catbird is a lyric meditation on a wounded world, one where some of us are safe while horror and war ravage innocent women and children in a distant land. But are we safe? The narrator knows too keenly, and feels too sharply, to believe that we are. Davis writes viscerally and from the heart.”
—Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer
“Julia
Davis’s Catbird is an urgent, meaningful meditation on war, power, and fragility
of the world. It’s 2022 and the invasion of Ukraine has begun. From her place
of relative safety, Eve reads of the bombings, the fleeing families and
abandoned crops as she ponders the corrupt desire for absolute power and fears
she is witnessing the beginnings of World War III. Woven throughout this
witnessing are images of the birds she watches in the trees around her house,
making tangible the fragility we share in this time when the possibility of
invasion threatens us all.”
—Karen Osborn, author of Centerville, Patchwork (a New York Times Notable
Book of the Year), Between Earth and Sky, and The River Road
“As
a woman of color cheering for those who wish to survive any and all wars
against us I hope you read this book with the fear yet compassion it
shares."
—nikki giovanni, New York Times best selling and Emmy-award nominated author of Bicycles: Love Poems (2009), The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection (2004), and Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose (2020)
Amazon * Middle Creek Publishing * Bookbub * Goodreads
from Catbird, by Julia Marie Davis
Copyright Julia Marie Davis
March 12, 2022
Rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns ring in my ears and I shut off the morning news to sit on the porch, to check the weather, to soak in the early morning sun. I open the news app on my phone but try to limit myself to five minutes. Saturday morning. My husband is sleeping in.
According to a recent census, Russian is the native language of 29% of Ukrainians. Some of these people were bussed out of the area before the war, now barely being fed inside the invading country. My grandmother's parents were from Lomza, Poland, part of Russia in the 1880s, a crossroads, a multi-cultural place where various cultures and religions lived among one another. Why did they leave in 1900? I don't know. In 1944, the town was wiped out.
I know nothing of the Ukrainian past of my grandfather. I can feel the blood flow. That is all.
At the beginning of the war, the news chattered away about the sympathizers at the border. How many of them were packed up by Russia, taken from their homes and sent in busses to the mother country? As if they'd really asked for this.
No one talks about them now. The last thing we heard was they were given $120 in Russian money for food each week (or month) and housed somewhere.
Are they dead or alive? No one would know. They are inside. Banished to God-knows.
They are the ones, news reports say, who wanted to be part of Russia. As if they are to blame for this and not the social media propaganda run by Putin trolls.
I wonder what they think these months later as their houses are flattened by tanks, their land burned, ransacked. As they hear about crops and neighbors and relatives tortured, dying. As they watch their villages and towns fall to ash. Does it become personal, then?
An ad for light cotton sweaters floats across my phone screen, enticing me to click on Summer Linens. I am feckless—shopping online for white clothing, looking at lovely, quite clean-looking new dresses that I do not need—that I will later buy on sale for no occasion.
I am guilty of something.
Before my grandfather left to fight in World War II, he moved with my mother and her sister, and my grandmother moved every three months during the early days of the war. Training officers, my grandfather was a reservist who'd been called up, a thirty-eight-year-old Corporal.
I think of my mother now, making friends at ten years old, reinventing a new self every time she moved. An improved self, she told me later. Adapting a new accent. Feigning a new laugh. A new persona. Living in a motel cottage smaller than my bedroom. My mother hasn't forgotten this skill and sometimes I catch her being someone else, the memory seared into her cells. Her people, she says, were killed in the Holocaust. Not just Jews. Random Poles slaughtered just for helping, for being sympathetic, for hiding friends and neighbors.
Someone with my mother's genes is going to die today, is all I can think.
I look up at the pale sky, clouds float by and I can hear the surprise and the horror and the shells and see the bodies. I can feel their breath seeping out and trying to hold onto the air.
I see darkness in a lightened sky and wonder – when will it strike?
Are we next?
Julia Marie Davis is an American poet and novelist. Julia's writing has appeared in The Bangalore Review, The Dillydoun Review, New Note Poetry, Moonstone Arts Center's Nasty Women's Anthology , and TaintTaintTaint Literary Magazine. She holds a BA in English from Boston College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University.
Her novella, CATBIRD (2024, Middle Creek Publishing & Audio) weaves a fictional narrative with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, delivering a poignant lyrical message of hope and resilience in the face of global turmoil.
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