What was your original impetus for writing “American Goshawk”?
I was at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. For many years a female North American goshawk nested on the property, near one of the studios. Goshawks aren’t the largest birds in the sky by any means, but they are among the fiercest, and that summer it attacked a number of the artists in residence whose studios were on that lane, bloodying some. Dinner conversation each night often turned on who had seen it, and/or been attacked by it.
After a few days of this, all I could think of was that