An evening with Candida Meyrick

Join us for an in-person night diving into the lessons nature can teach us with Charlie Bingham, author of The Life Affirming Magic of Birds, in conversation with Candida Meyrick.

About Candida:

Be More Bird is Candida Meyrick’s first work of non-fiction. She has published six previous novels under the pen name Candida Clark and written journalism, short fiction and poetry. She has restored a five-acre historic walled garden and founded the award-winning botanical drinks business, Positive Potions, and the popular wellness destination, The Retreat, New Forest.

About Be More Bird:

2020: while the world is grounded, Bird arrives in the life of writer, Candida Meyrick, living with her young family on Anglesey. The twelve-week-old Harris Hawk, Sophia Houdini Whitewing – aka Bird – is trained over the following months by the author and her children to be most herself: a skilled hunter and dazzling aerial gymnast, whose flights enrapture the family and set the author on a deepening love affair with life on the wing. Working with her Harris Hawk over the following years reveals a new world: confronting mortality daily, moving through a liminal landscape, part sky-, part earth-bound. And every day’s hunting

brings a new life-lesson. Bird opens up a way of being that is everything the author most longs to be: courageous, compassionate, independent, full of joy – free as a bird.

Through daily adventures across field and woodland, through bog and briar, the author comes to realise that Bird is showing her the way, guiding her soul, revealing truths about her life that would otherwise have remained hidden. Be More Bird charts this deepening relationship between bird and woman, set in one of Britain’s wildest landscapes. It reveals the subtle dynamic possible between human and avian – the species most closely related to the dinosaurs – and in poetic prose illuminates the ancient, worldwide art of falconry and its urgent relevance for the modern mind: the importance of untethering our souls and belief-systems and re-establishing a connection with the wilder world.

Structured around a series of ‘life lessons’, this book, executed in lyrical and emotionally charged prose, will transport readers into the wildness hidden within themselves as it encourages us to think profoundly about our connections with nature and our lives.

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Host or Publisher The Reading Room, Grantham