A Note From David's Daughter
B roken Wing, my father's most recent book, is the ultimate culmination of his legacy—encouraging all of us to slow down, to notice, to contemplate, to honor, to engage, to love and mourn and be fully alive. Primarily a poet and playwright, this is my father’s second novel. It weaves together all the things he was passionate about: music, race, social justice, poetry, birds, gardening, living a remote yet engaged life, and contemplation of life’s big questions.
Broken Wing, the book, is fictional. However the story of one particular bird named “Broken Wing”—and the other bird stories in this book—are all true experiences of my father’s. A passionate observer of birds, my father lived with deep attunement to the world around him and had a gift for capturing that world in writing. It took him over 20 years to write Broken Wing . . . the story grew as my father’s experiences on his own remote mountainside in Vermont unfolded. While my mother and I both worked on the final edits of the manuscript with him before his death, sadly he did not live to see Broken Wing published. It has been a bittersweet joy to shepherd this book into the world—one of many enduring gifts left by the remarkable man who was David Budbill.
Nadine Budbill
Literary Executor, The Estate of David Budbill
“A rusty blackbird and The Man Who Lives Alone In The Mountains are both signature characters from the hermit-obsessed mind and heart of David Budbill. All of his life, David Budbill paid homage to the iconic poet recluses of China by importing their philosophical dignity, eccentricity, and spiritual probity into his beloved north country. Broken Wing is both a continuation of that project—and an autonomously haunting allegory. A prolific and passionate writer, a beautiful story.”
– Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
“This is a fine capping work to a lifetime of writing that asked the brave questions and accepted life’s deep mystery. You need not be a bird lover or watcher to enjoy this book, but there’s a good chance you will love both birds and life more by its end.”
– Larry Smith, New York Journal of Books
“Like a parable from the New Testament, Broken Wing takes everyday events that all of us witness, and makes them a prism through which we can appreciate the richness and mystery of our lives.”
– William Chafe, historian at Duke University, and author of Hillary and Bill: The Politics of the Personal, as well as numerous other books on modern America, civil rights, and feminism.
Writer’s bio
D AVID BUDBILL was born in 1940 in Cleveland, Ohio to a streetcar driver and a minister’s daughter. In 1969 he and his wife, Lois Eby, moved from New York City to Northern Vermont where they lived together for 47 years until his death in 2016. David’s colorful life included being a track star in high school, attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City, teaching at Lincoln University (a historically Black college in Pennsylvania), laboring on a Christmas tree farm, playing myriad musical instruments, working for racial and economic justice, tending a large vegetable garden, cutting his own wood, riding a mountain bike, and writing a staggering amount of creative material. David had a gift with the written word, with storytelling, and with striking the heart of the matter with astonishing clarity and simplicity.
What Issa Heard
Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds
singing sutras to this suffering world.
I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,
since we will always have a suffering world,
we must also always have a song.
-From Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse, Copper Canyon Press, 1999.
Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
Listen to Erik Neilson (composer and long-time collaborator of David's) sing this poem: