Sometimes as a writer it’s productive to pick up a long-neglected notebook. It might surprise you, or better yet, re-energize you. Three years ago, I was enthralled with Lucy Audubon as a possible subject. I read two biographies of John James, one of her, and did some preliminary research. However, I kept asking myself: do I want to spend years with this material?

Hers was a difficult life, one of repeated abandonment by her husband and of constant financial struggles caused by both the ineptitude and neglect of that husband. Loneliness, poverty, and grievance are difficult themes.

Well, a couple of days ago some scribbled scenes from years back got me reconsidering. In both workshops this week, I spit out new passages even though I hardly remember enough factual background to do so.

I know from writing The Weight of Cloth that it’s helpful, maybe even necessary, to occasionally write in one’s own voice about what you are learning. I call these passages novel adjacent. Maybe this is unique to writing historic fiction where you have to absorb all kinds of information about another age — and not just intellectually but emotionally and viscerally too.

Anyway, here is a NOVEL ADJACENT passage from July 2023.

The travel options were few in those days – boat, horseback, wagon, or foot. We often hear about what a striking figure Audubon was — tall, handsome, with a thick mane of hair — but it is also notable that he had huge feet. Our famous birder could walk five miles an hour, no trouble. If it seems amazing to paddle down two-thirds the length of the Mississippi and back several times in a single lifetime, imagine walking 100’s of miles – something Audubon did routinely.

Also try to imagine riding on horseback with your two-year-old on your saddle and your wife on her own horse by your side FOR 800 MILES from Louisville to Pennsylvania, in the winter no less. Now image such a trek through dense woods with no real roads.

John James Audubon lived his life as if success was assured. Forget the failed businesses, the shifting accounts to avoid debt collectors, the 200 drawings destroyed by rats, the uphill battle to find an engraver worthy of his work. In between every misguided attempt to start a business, he was drawing. Birth of two sons. Drawing. Almost killed in a knife fight. Drawing. Loss of a daughter in infancy. More drawing.

When it came time to produce a work for sale, he stuck to his guns. No, he insisted to the printers, do not make them smaller. The birds must be near to life-sized. Portfolios measuring in feet rather than inches were a harder sell but Audubon was adamant, sure somehow that his vision for Birds of America would succeed. He bucked scientific illustration standards of the day too by including vegetation and sometimes even hills and towns in the distance. It’s hard to appreciate now but depicting birds with flora and not suspended in empty space, isolated, was a novel idea then.

Letters from England back to Lucy show less confidence. She waited and waited for him to make himself plain, for him to make the simple ask: “Come to England. I need you.” Instead he deferred to her wishes in a way that came across as cold and detached. He told her to write about poverty less, making clear that he was reading her letters in the drawing rooms of wealthy men. The affront of that! She, the breadwinner, was not to mention money? No wonder she relied so heavily on her sons in those years, grown men by then. No wonder one of those sons refused to speak to his father for half a decade.

Mid-read of one Audubon biography, I was charged with checking in on my neighbor’s dog. My neighbors were three years into a what seemed an endless kitchen revamp and hence the dining room was stacked with boxes of pots and pans and food stuff. I had to walk through the room carefully, twisting sideways at times, to get to the dog’s bowl.

It was a real mess. A temporary mess with a purpose, but still a mess. But hold on! There I was mid-twist, when I looked at the walls. There hung not one or two, not three or four, but seven Audubon prints! They are huge. They are stunning. They silence me with their beauty. They turn a room shit-heaped with clutter into a museum. Or a shrine.

The birder-husband was long gone by then, but the prints remained. What better testament to the staying power of art?

Having recently read about the complicated etching process, I brought my nose right up to the glass on one print to really take a look. It astonished me then and now how a series of scratch marks on metal, acid baths, and rolled-on inks can produce such artistic and life-like renderings.

This is what Audubon risked everything for. This is what made him insufficiently attentive to Lucy. This is what drove him into the woods, alone, time and time again. It’s a legacy that turns his many failed businesses into mere footnotes, or even gateways, for had one of those ventures succeeded it might have consumed his energies and prevented the necessary devotion to birds, the notebooks filled with drawings.

And what of Lucy? Late in life, she wrote in a letter: You might not recognize me. I’ve grown thin, turned grey, and have lost all of my teeth. The absences were long and punishing. She had to work to survive, sometimes as a governess to plantation owners’ children, sometimes as a lone teacher in a town school. She offered piano lessons. It’s not a stretch to assume that she resented her husband – his singular and motivating purpose dragging him off either into the wilderness to draw or to England to schmooze for patrons and oversee the printing process. Imagine the long months going by without a letter and when finally one arrived, being on tenterhooks, motivated to pack and sail if only he would ask and instead reading, “Do what you want.”

*. *. *.

Here are a couple of other relevant posts.

Lucy Sketches (April 2025)

Focus and Restrictions (May 2023)

Fly to Lah (October 2021)