Writers at the Well

Novelist Carrie Birde on Writing as an Act of Grace

• Tess Callahan • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Join debut novelist Carrie Birde author of A Small Tale of Uncommon Grace  (Blydyn Square Books) as she discusses her creative process, her road to publication, and the unique spiritual and artistic practices that help her transmute suffering—her own and the world’s—into daily acts of beauty. A literary fairy tale, her novel explores themes of community, connection, and communication. Carrie shares her personal rituals, including yoga, Qigong, and creating paper cranes, which help her manage anxiety and connect with her environment. She offers advice for aspiring writers to stay true to their heart and maintain a sense of aliveness in their creativity.

Carrie is a poet, fiction writer, artist, and amateur photographer. Like many characters in those stories, she has personal friendships with wild animals, especially birds, who know her by face. 

I also interviewed Carrie in written format on Substack where she further explored these topics. I hope you enjoy this heartfelt interview about things ordinary and extraordinary. 

Attend Carrie’s virtual book launch Friday, September 19, 2025, 7:00pm via Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84707033106. Attend her live event at the Boonton Coffee House Saturday, Octboer 11, 2025 at 7pm. Learn more about her work at CarrieBirde.com. Follow her on Instagram.

Tess Callahan is the author of the novels APRIL & OLIVER and DAWNLAND. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and is a certified Mindfulness Meditation teacher taught by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. She offers author interviews on her Substack: https://tesscallahan.substack.com/publish/home, and guided meditations on her sister podcast Heart Haven Meditations, available on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere.

By tapping "like" and "follow" you help others find the show. Thank you for listening!

Host: Tess Callahan
Substack: Writers at the Well
Guided Meditation Podcast: Heart Haven Meditations
Meditations on Insight...

Tess Callahan:

Welcome to Writers at the well, a podcast that offers intimate conversations with authors about how they draw words and images up from the depths of their inner well, how do they move into a flow state? Do they meditate? Walk in nature? Do they do cartwheels? Let's find out. I'm your host. Tess Callahan, author of the novels April and Oliver and Dawn land. I hope you enjoy this deep dive into the inner workings of the creative process. Today, my guest is author, Carrie bird. Carrie is a poet, artist, amateur photographer, and author of The debut novel, a small tale of uncommon grace, published by Blyden square books. She reads a wide range of genres, including mythology, folk tales and fairy tales. Like many characters in those stories, she has personal friendships with wild animals and birds who know her by face, Carrie practices, yoga, Qigong, forest, bathing and a variety of art forms, all of which fuel her writing life. She lives with her husband and son in Boonton, New Jersey, a place she affectionately calls her Boonton bubble. Welcome Carrie. Thank you. Hello. Delighted to have you here. I'm happy to be here. Can you tell us a little bit about a small tale of uncommon grace?

Carrie Birde:

Well, I like to think of this story as a literary fairy tale. Its main themes are community, connection and communication. In it, I have a world where it's sort of like several steps left from ours, but without any sort of industrialization. It's a very agrarian culture, and occasionally an odd thing might happen. In this case with my main story, main character grace, for no reason that is ever explained. So don't look for one. She gains the ability of communication with everything she can communicate with soil and trees and birds the elements, and with this gift comes consequences and opportunities. I liked to think of this as a way of looking at people who might be otherwise considered marginalized or pushed to the fringes, instead of taking that sort of viewpoint having my main character in a situation where she is embraced by her community for these Unusual or uncommon gifts that she acquires

Tess Callahan:

lovely so we know from the introduction that you yourself have a special connection with animals and birds in particular. So it seems like that's something you have in common with grace. And can you talk a little bit about that and that, how that lives in you, and how that manifested in the character of grace.

Carrie Birde:

Yeah, well, I think, like a lot of people, when I was young, I really connected with animals. I wanted them to know that I was safe, that they could trust me. I wanted to be able somehow to magically reach across this barrier that prevents us from connecting. So the story is a love note to that girl that I was, the young woman that I was and that I still carry with me. And yes, I've had some very fortunate accidents happen, where, if you look in my book, it's dedicated to my son and my husband and cat bird. And cat birds, for anyone who does not know them, it's actually a gray Catbird. They are beautiful, sleek little birds that scurry around in the shrubbery in the shadows. They are very flicky little tails and movements. They're alert and they're curious, and they've got a beautiful song. Most of the time we hear their call where they just sort of sound like they're mewing, but they have a beautiful, improvisational call that they build year after year. And about, I guess it was like 15 years ago. I had been digging in our side yard, and I realized that there was a bird watching me, and it was this cat bird, and it was very interested in how I was disturbing the soil. And I realized it was because there were grubs there. So I began throwing the grubs to it. This bird came and took them. He would follow me around, and as I was digging, and he would eat the grubs. And when I ran out, I went into the house to get raisins, and the bird waited for me. And this, this is a very condensed version of the initial relationship, but this cat bird visited our family for 1011, years, to the point where all three of us were involved, Adam and Aaron and I, and we were everybody was on duty all the time for a cat bird. Oh, you're the cat bird. Get the raisins. It was really beautiful. And they are migratory and seasonal, and I could almost set the calendar by when they would come back. It was always between April 30 and may 3 that they would show up. He would show up and eventually know his children, his family, but he's no longer with us, and they have stopped coming, but still, it was a precious experience and relationship,

Tess Callahan:

yeah, that's, that's what I would call magic, magic in the real world, and a Magic that was created by you, beginning with throwing a grub.

Carrie Birde:

I think the first of it was noticing, like being aware of my environment, because I could have just kept my head down and dug and never have seen him. And I think that's something we often do, something I do

Tess Callahan:

head down. Can you talk more about noticing? Because obviously your book is so beautiful and so richly detailed in the peculiarities of this landscape and nature and all. It's very sensual with the sound and taste and touch, and that can only come from a writer who is deeply noticing the physical world. And I wonder how that practice has come to be in you. Has that been an intentional thing that you have cultured is it? Do you practice meditation? Are there ways that it has deepened in you and then led you into writing?

Carrie Birde:

Wow, I don't think there's any short answer to that. The long answer is fine, okay. I think that I've always been keenly aware of my environment. From childhood, I've been extremely hyper vigilant. So not always a good thing, but the good side of it is being very aware of where sounds are coming from, what might be making them and curiosity, like, what is doing that? Why is this happening? What is this hole in the ground from, you know, and finding out? Well, it's a wallow where the sparrows are taking their dust baths. So I think that it came naturally, but my need for it, for connection, really urged it on. And there was a point in my younger life, like 20s 30s, where it felt like I needed to notice things because I was concerned that other people weren't. So there's a desperation, like, I need to see this. I need to witness this. I need to pay attention to this. I need to let this creature, this thing, this tree, this thing, happen. I need to let it know that it's being seen. And if I can get somebody else to pay attention also, because we take care of what we pay attention to. And I've I've relaxed in that a little bit now I can observe things and not feel the need to force other people to look at them also. I can just sort of do that on my own, which is a big internal development for me. I don't need to force other people. I can just do this on my own. It's definitely helps with my writing. Sometimes I over. Right to the point where I just I have to take a lot out, and then I save all those other pieces for other things. I think I answered the question

Tess Callahan:

That's a beautiful answer, and I'm noticing that in your keen observation of the world, and concern for its individuals, like trees and birds and cat birds, is also a great curiosity. It seems like it's born of curiosity, like, who dug that hole? Yeah. And these are also key elements of meditation, right? Meditation as an act of curiosity, really not an act of self pacifying. So I'm really struck by that, and I see that in your character grace, she is also a very curious person, and I wonder if that's why this particular gift comes to her.

Carrie Birde:

I don't know that there is externally a reason for it other than I wanted to write this in this way, and I wanted to explore the idea of accepting something unexpected. I think that the story exists elsewhere. I mean, people are always writing. We're always writing about characters or imagining characters. Dream of them where things are happening to them that are different or unexpected, and often, too often, they are exiled from their communities for being different. And I think we can see evidence of that happening in our waking world, beyond pages, beyond dreaming. And it's very important to me to present another view, where what would this be like if we accepted people when they're even when they're different or don't quite fit our expectations? I know it's a challenge. I struggle with it also. But it used to be, I don't know how long ago, but a long, long time ago, that the person who didn't fit the community was generally considered the Oracle. Yeah, they were considered the seer, the guider of the Spirit. So I guess the idea exists. I just wanted to explore it from a different angle and more intimately through the character of Grace and her connection with nature.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah. We certainly see that now that we are not honoring the outside person in our society as the giver of the gift. It's quite the opposite, and that's a great loss for us culturally. And so your book brings forth a great truth that we've forgotten. I think

Carrie Birde:

it's just a timely happenstance, because I began the book quite a while ago, and its publication is just happening at this time by accident, so it's not necessarily a comment, but it does highlight the difference that we're experiencing culturally at the moment.

Tess Callahan:

Yes, and of course, grace is not accepted by everyone. There in comes the story, right? And without giving anything away, can you talk about what that calls up in grace, when she when she realizes there are people who are opposed to her gift or threatened by her gift, if that brings forth a new dimension of her that she didn't know was there,

Carrie Birde:

I think that grace is her community is very small. It's very supportive. Everybody knows, everybody else, everybody's in, everybody else's business. She doesn't get a thrill out of doing like helping everyone. When she's called upon to, well, you know, could you get my goose to, you know, lay more eggs. Because this is I need this, when that doesn't satisfy her necessarily. But she, she does do this, she will help. But once she steps outside of her close knit community, and is exposed to a wider world with people who have other expectations. That's when things get a little dicey for her. That's when she comes face to face with the fact that her gift is not necessarily something everybody appreciates, even though she is called to call from her home for a specific purpose, to discover the root of another town's problem, the individual who is causing the problem. Problem, does not want to see their responsibility. Instead, this individual decides to blame grace, who uncovered the root of the problem. And this is also, again, something that too often we do as humans, instead of looking into ourselves and seeing how we can adapt or change or how we have different choices, it can, in the short term, be easier to blame someone else, and that's what happens. Grace becomes the recipient of blame for having uncovered something, and though her family tries to shield her from the truth of this, she does learn about it, and it's upsetting to her to feel that there's someone, some unknown person, who wishes to do her harm because she spoke the truth.

Tess Callahan:

How relevant is that

Carrie Birde:

stories are great myths and fairy tales are great through them, other realities are much more digestible and accessible because there's a little bit of personal distance.

Tess Callahan:

It's easier to see the truth through fiction. Is my belief. Yeah, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about your other practices? I know you do yoga and Qigong, as well as a variety of art forms, and I wonder how these interface and if they have some connection to your writing or to this general quality of awareness and curiosity that feeds your writing.

Carrie Birde:

Yes, I think it's the latter, all of these different things feed my writing. They're all complimentary. I'm not a natural meditator. I have a hard time sitting still. I always have. I close my eyes, and everybody does, but I see the lights and I see movement, and I can sit and do a traditional meditation. I have found that Qigong is that's my jam. I find that utterly meditative because my body is involved in the repetitive movements and and the thought that we're given for these movements, I really love it. It helps even though it's there's movement, it helps me to relax. I have a lot of anxiety, and that's part of being hyper vigilant. It's just I'm always sort of anxious, and this gives me something to do in a repetitive pattern that is incredibly soothing. Yoga is great, too. Yoga is essential for the it's essential for the movement, for my mobility, to keep me mobile. I have different issues, and this has kept me in a good space. My other practices, I have a lot of them, and they're almost all born out of anxiety. I I fold paper cranes, you know, for I have a little little tree in our yard, and if I or someone else, or some world event or a friend is experiencing something beautiful, something tragic, something that they can't let Go of, I write the person's name and I do a small sketch, like a thumbnail of the wish, whether it's sometimes. I make a door if someone needs to pass through one life change to another, if someone has died, I draw a little heart, and I give it wings so that they can speed off to where they need to be. I've gotten pretty good at doing a little sketch of the what is it? Is it Asclepius, the the rod and the wings of medicine? I've gotten pretty good with the snakes. I've gotten pretty good at that. And then I do this little the name and the symbol, and I fold it up into a paper crane, and I hang it from the tree. Because for me, a worry or joy that has a physical aspect to it that I can see has it. It takes some of the worry inside me and externalizes it. I think that's part of the is anybody looking at this, somebody needs to look at this. Somebody other than me needs to see this. So it's sort of honors that part of me that wants others to. Notice, even if they don't know what it is. I started because the news has been so terrible. I was really good for the first, I'd say, the first eight to 10 weeks, and then I had a complete meltdown, and I didn't know what to do about the news, which I tried desperately not to look at, because it's so far beyond me, and it is so soul sucking to me, not saying other people can't and shouldn't do things, just I'm not built like that. So I began to take the front page of The New York Times, and I cut the date out of it, I put that aside, and then I shred it and pulp it with water, and put my it's very violent when you think of it, shredding and pulping. And then I take my the immersion blender and blend the whole thing so it's like mush. And then I drain the water out of it, and I shape it into a heart on cloth, just by hand. I don't have a form or anything, and I just shape it and blot it and put it outside to dry. And when it's dry, then I decorate it, and usually with a word and some images of whatever I happen to be drawn to that particular day. And they're accumulating in the dining room because I'm hanging them from silk thread, and they're against in between the windows I think I have, like, I don't know, 26 of them now, I'm gonna run out of room soon, but this is very helpful. Again, it's like it's taking an internal anxiety and externalizing it, which is helpful to me.

Tess Callahan:

It's really beautiful Carrie. And I just wanna say I absolutely believe in the efficacy of these things, that it's not just some kind of self comforting thing for you, but the cranes in your tree remind me very much of Tibetan prayer flags you know, that carry the prayers on the wind, and it's an act of compassion, both self compassion and for whoever you're making the crane for, or whatever event in the news you are ingesting, digesting, pulping, metabolizing and recreating into something new. That's that's that's profound inner work. I think that's the ultimate thinking of Carl Jung's teachings on Shadow Work, and he always said to his analysis when they would bring in a dream that they needed to do something in the physical world with the dream, something like what you're doing, like, you know, making a crane, or just placing a rock somewhere, or lighting a candle, even some manifestation in the physical world, to honor the dream. And it seems to me that there's a connection between that and what you're doing in the case of the dream, it's for the individual, but you're also doing these things for the collective, literally taking the date out of the newspaper and the horrors of the newspaper, and creating them into beauty, literally creating them into beauty. And I believe that is a powerful act. Imagine if we all, in our own way, were finding our way into those gestures and not that they would be the same. You've found these for yourself. These are absolutely unique to you, but I feel inspired, you know, like, what would that look like for me? So thank you so much for sharing that that is art. That's art right there.

Carrie Birde:

Yeah, and the with the with the newspaper and the hearts, it's literally, I see it literally as putting more heart into the world.

Tess Callahan:

Beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for sharing that amazing. So I I'm taking a guess that you with it like the personal quality of your creations, both these cranes and paper creations and the book itself, all very personal and intimate to you, and you've put them out into the world in small ways, on your tree And now a big way in your book. And I wonder if you thought this would never happen, the publication of a beautiful I mean, the beauty part, obviously, was always there, but the publication would never happen. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the experience of publishing your book. I know you're. Just in the midst of it right now, but that's a big life event, and I wonder if you could share anything for other writers out there or anyone with any creative dreams.

Carrie Birde:

I did not ever think that I would publish. It's not necessarily that I thought I couldn't, although often I have and still have doubts about the whole thing, but I just didn't see myself in that capacity. So I wrote for myself when I happened to chance across some people who insisted, no, you can do this. I got a little bit braver, but it was still very hard to allow myself to to access that part of me and allow it to speak. I was very self protective. The very first draft of this book was half the size, maybe a third the size, and there was a great deal of distance between me as the author and the book, it was written like an old fashioned once upon a time, this happened lot of emotional distance, but the bones of the story were there, and a lot of it came to me accidentally, through awareness. I'd be walking the dog, and something would just go bloop, drop into my mind and like, Oh, absolutely, that belongs in here. I need to put that in here. As I developed my I don't want to say my emotional toughness, because I'm not emotionally tough at all. But as I developed more confidence in my writing and my being allowed to be thought of as a writer, the book grew and it deepened, and my very good friends were so full of encouragement that this was what I needed, to allow myself to see myself in a different way. And maybe not everybody does. Different people need different things. But for me, this was a watershed, because the writing of the book and bringing it to a place of being published has changed not only how I see myself and how I see myself in the world, but it's changed how I look at The world as well. I I feel like in a great many ways, my writing this book is is about my community, the people that I know and treasure, and the people that they have been able to connect me to that have opened up my opportunities. My book was rejected so many times I lost count. Most of the time I didn't get a letter. Every once in a while, I got this is very sweet, but it's not for us keep writing, which was kind of like a mixed for me. I took it as a very mixed message. I was incredibly sensitive about that. And I had, at that point, said, That's it. I'm not trying anymore, because it hurts too much. It hurts to be rejected based on 10 pages a chapter, not getting the opportunity to to really experience what I've written. And then I have a friend who said, here, I know someone in publishing, send it to Tara, who hooked me up with blind and square books. And the thing that's interesting about how Tara approaches publishing, she's been in the publishing world for 30 years. Used to be with bigger houses. Now she does her own it's a micro independent publishing house, so it's teeny, tiny, but it's growing. And she does blind submissions. She doesn't want to know who I am, she doesn't want to doesn't want to know my credentials. Barely wants to know my name or anyone's. She wants to know the work and to read the work and see if she responds to it, which I felt was freeing for me. It was very it was a foot in the door. I felt like, wow, this is kind of mirroring how the. York sense of Symphony Orchestra decided we're going to have blind auditions, and then all of a sudden, all these women started getting parts in orchestras which they had usually just been accidentally overlooked. No, no, no, we're going to take that guy instead. So sometimes not having to explain yourself, allows the book to speak to somebody, and that was that's how it happened for me. So I consider myself, again, very lucky, and this whole process like I know nothing about publishing or how to publish, and I am learning that I don't need to know everything, which is something I've struggled with all my life, like having to having this, I have to know what the answers are before I make this phone call, because they're going to ask me this, and I have to plan everything out. It's not a good way to engage with life, trusting that there are others that will help and that and have the answers is a huge, huge turning point for me. Did I answer the question?

Tess Callahan:

Yes, absolutely. That's a great story, and what a refreshing process they have at Blyden square books, it reminds me of glimmer train magazine, which was a wonderful lit mag that was around for many years, that had only blind submissions for exactly that reason. And it's yeah, lots of writers found their start that way. So good for her. And then may blydon Square books continue to publish. It's amazing. And can you tell us about what you're working on now?

Carrie Birde:

Well, I always in the middle of a couple of things at once. So I've got one book that is finished and that I'm editing, and I have a third book that I'm, I don't know, two thirds or three quarters of the way through that's been totally pushed to the back burner, but I still know where everybody is. I still know that she's in that hallway and someone is crying. The book that I'm editing takes place. They all take place in the same world, though. They are not serialized. They are separate, standalone books that take place in the Brightwood in this world. And I even have myself a little map that I drew. It's like, just like this little blob of pencil. And this is where Grace lives, and this is where Cole lives, and over across the Brightwood, over here, that's where Ren lives. So maybe they'll meet someday, I don't know, but this, the book that I'm editing is called a small tale of hard feelings and and that my main character is a young man who feels emotions so intensely so deeply. Does he do they embody him and fill him that he often doesn't know who this emotion belongs to. Is it his? Is it someone else's? Is it a mix? And he has a physical reaction to this, almost like somebody else might have kidney stones like he he has a physical reaction to being overwhelmed and subsumed by emotion and unlike grace, he's not too happy about this. It's made his life difficult. It hasn't been a whole lot of benefit to him personally. As he sees it, he's got a more, I guess, traditional worldview of inconvenience, but he spends a lot of time lost, and I think that that feelings, emotions, we can get very lost in them. So it makes sense for him to spend a lot of his time in search of himself. And I don't want to know how much I should give away about it.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, that's great. He sounds like a character that every Empath can absolutely relate to. And I love that these three books are connected by the world in which they are set. That's beautiful. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the next two.

Carrie Birde:

Aa Milnes had the 100 Acre Wood. I have the bright wood.

Tess Callahan:

And is there anything that you'd like to share that we haven't covered, or is there any advice that you have for either aspiring writers or people looking to find their way spiritually in this chaotic world like you have found your ways and are finding your ways. So on either front Do you have any, any little pearls to leave for our listeners as we close up?

Carrie Birde:

Well for the one for the writing, I think one. Has worked best for me is writing what feels true to me and writing what I connect to. I think if we try to fit ourselves into a genre or what we think might be a best seller, that's kind of a dicey proposition, and often I think that we end up emulating or copying what we hope someone else will think, Oh, this is the next best thing. And I think that that takes us away from our heart. And I don't think we can write without heart. We can't sustain it. We might be able to do it for a short period of time, but in order to have a sustained practice of writing, it has to come from deep in us and what we believe in as to beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, spiritual practices. I think I can't say that one will fix it all. I have many, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. And then I add another one, I think, like so much of a life, a healing a healed heart, is a moving target. And as soon as we are committed to our spiritual practices and we're doing them, but as soon as we're doing them methodically, and out of a sense of this is what I do. This is I do this by rote. Then this spiritual, heart, healing aspect sort of slips

Tess Callahan:

away. This is so true, yes, right.

Carrie Birde:

So then we have to find something else, and finding something else bring because I don't think that it's necessarily just folding the cranes and making the heart. I think it's the aliveness of the action. So as soon as something loses a sense of aliveness, and we have to find something else. But it happens, and it happened. It's sneaky, all of a sudden we're like, oh, my heart is just still so heavy, and I'm so overwhelmed and the world hurts so much. What's wrong? I'm doing all the things, and I was like, Oh, I have to shake it up. So move on. Keep doing them all, but move on. Find another.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah, what a beautiful thing to leave us with that cultivating that sense of aliveness, noticing it has been a theme in this conversation and and cultivating it in the beautiful ways that you have through your your practices and your writing. So what a gift to talk to. And how can listeners find out more about your work through your website? Or what's the best way to find you?

Carrie Birde:

Well, I guess these days, yes, I think my website is best. I've been kind of less active on the various social medias. I don't really like to be on them. Instagram is probably the best place to find me. I try to check in there at least a couple of times a week. But although I'm not posting anymore, is Carrie bird your? Yes? Carrie bird with an E, with an E, yeah, and yeah, that's my website. Your

Tess Callahan:

website is also Carrie bird, so C, A, R, R, I, E, B, I r, d, e.com, Yeah, beautiful. Well, Carrie, thank you so much for this incredibly rich conversation and for sharing so generously of your own process and how this beautiful book came into the world, and thank you for the book itself. I highly recommend it to anyone who's listening. You will love being in this world with grace. Thank you so much. Thank you. Carrie bird,

Carrie Birde:

bye bye, bye bye. You.

Tess Callahan:

Foreign that's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please help spread the word. Follow us. Review us. Give us five stars on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to our writers at the well substack, where we offer short, written interviews with authors on similar topics. Huge thanks to Christopher Lloyd Clark for the intro and outro music, and to Eric Fisher for his ever patient and often miraculous audio engineering. And thank you for listening. See you next time

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