The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary

February 22, 2022
272 pages | ISBN 978-1-989496-42-8

**Shortlisted for the 2023 Alberta Literary Award for Memoir**

"Nearly sixty years of life, with all of its diversities and social pleasure, its joys and sorrows, successes and failures, a whole changing theatre cast of characters, some still loved and on the stage, others long since slipped into the darkened wings, and I remain most entranced by the simple glories of a fruit tree and a songbird. Why should it be so?"

In this lush collection of essays Tim Bowling picks up the common questions, and beauties, of life and examines them closely. From questions of love and money, to the search for solitude in a clamouring world, to poetry and the place of art today, Bowling writes beautifully and thoughtfully on what it means to be alive now. And in the end, we come back to the moon, the trees, the salmon that swim to the sea and the call of the red-winged blackbird, which his mother imitated to call him inside at night, as a child. 

Reviews

The Call of the Lonely Moon (Kenneth Wilson, Canadian Literature, 22/11/2023)
"In these essays, Bowling unerringly finds the ways that the extraordinary and the commonplace are welded together."

1625 Fraser River waterways (Valerie Green, The British Columbia Review, 11/16/2022)
"His writing is beautiful and very poignant, so readers will no doubt take away their own impressions from these moving passages."

Solitary Bird (John Allemang, the Literary Review of Canada, September 2022)
“Good essayists recognize that their art is, in large part, one of dexterity.”

The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary (Angie Abdou, AlbertaViews, July/August 2022)
"These essays are filled with quiet wisdom, hard-won insights about everyday life, a stirring love of the natural world, a poignant passion for life heightened by clear-sighted awareness of its brevity, and a rare intimacy and candour, as if Bowling is confiding these stories and thoughts to his closest loved one."

The Call of the Red-winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary by Tim Bowling is truly extraordinary (Brenda Schmidt, Alone on a Windy Ridge, 24/01/2022)
"Serious readers of personal essays know how hard it is to keep just a few matters in the air, let alone all this. I kept bracing for the break-up and crash, but to my astonishment the essay lands perfectly. I gasped audibly with surprise and delight for the first time in my reading life."

Articles

Face Out: Our Favourite Book Covers of 2022 (Hamilton Review of Books, 19/12/2022)
Tim's book makes this roundup of great book covers of 2022.

Book Marks: Studies in solitude, design, and a pandemic plus new offerings from the EPL (Justin Bell, Edmonton Journal, 16/02/2022)
A nice write-up about Tim's new collection of essays.

Wrap Up 2021 with an Excerpt from Tim Bowling's Meditative Book of Essays, The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird (Tim Bowling, Open Book, 22/12/2021)
Tim shares an excerpt from his essay collection with Open Book.

What We're Reading: Editors' Picks, Fall 2021 (James Cairns, Hamilton Review of Books, 13/09/2021)
Tim's essay collection makes the HRB's list of most anticipated titles this fall.

57 works of Canadian nonfiction coming out in fall 2021 (CBC Books, 19/08/2021)
Tim Bowling's essay collection has made it onto the CBC non-fiction list.

Excerpt

Click here to read an excerpt from The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird.

About the Author

Tim Bowling is the author of twenty-one works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including two Edmonton Artist Trust Fund Awards, five Alberta Book Awards, two Writers Trust of Canada nominations, two Governor General’s Award nominations and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Other Titles by this Author

In the Capital City of Autumn (2024)

The Marvels of Youth (2023)

The Dark Set: New Tenderman Poems (2019)

The Heavy Bear (2017)