On a Might morning I’m strolling with Sarah T. Dubb into Tucson’s Sweetwater Wetlands Park, a stunning oasis simply off I-10 and a key waypoint on the writer’s journey as a birder. We’ve come to see the wildlife that helped encourage her new romance novel, Birding With Benefits. However earlier than we even get began, a harried man with binoculars walks as much as us, gesticulating at a close-by cottonwood.
“If a Cooper’s Hawk hits you on the top, don’t be stunned!” he warns. The raptor is guarding a nest and apparently didn’t just like the look of this fellow. “Thanks for the heads up!” says Dubb, her chunky cactus earrings swaying as she falls gamely right into a chat. Her pun was unintentional, and it seems to be an enthralling behavior: Not two minutes later, I comment on the jaw-dropping array of animals round us, and he or she says, “It’s wild!” with out a trace of irony.
Dubb’s debut ebook shares this unaffected openness, significantly to the concept birding and romance are good bedfellows. Sure, birds have lengthy been related to love—the poet Enheduanna, the first named author, wrote greater than 4,000 years in the past {that a} Sumerian love goddess was “like a hen.” However Dubb takes issues to a brand new pitch. There’s actually, actually, birding in the midst of a intercourse scene.
“I at all times considered birding as doubtlessly attractive as a result of a lot of it’s about paying consideration,” she says. To Dubb, there is a related sense of revelation when one thing—or somebody—catches your fancy. “In spite of everything,” as Dubb writes in her writer’s word, “what’s love if not the fun of discovery, the willingness to study one thing new, and the will to search out magic on this planet round us?”
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irding With Advantages follows Celeste, a lately divorced 40-something. Within the throes of a “say sure” interval, Celeste jumps on the alternative to participate in a high-stakes birding contest—and a faux relationship together with her teammate, the also-newly-single John. By no means thoughts that he’s an knowledgeable birder, whereas she’s by no means recognized a lot as a Home Sparrow. Each protagonists are unmoored and toting heavy baggage as they struggle to determine what’s subsequent. Earlier than lengthy, the tri-fold stakes are set. Will they discover birds? Will they discover themselves? And can they, regardless of their shared disillusionment, discover love?
As Celeste and John race to win the fictional six-week-long “Hen Binge” round Tucson—pit in opposition to different birders who embody his two-timing ex-girlfriend—the sense of place is acute. They hear the mockingbird’s cheerful music, monitor pink-throated hummingbirds, and meditate on courting cardinals as they navigate golden grasslands, twisting mesquites, and blue waters collected in crimson canyons.
Dubb’s ties to the Sonoran Desert stretch again to her childhood, when her father would level out birds and vegetation on their hikes exterior of Tucson. Whereas younger Dubb was like, “Okay, certain,” to her dad’s enthusiasm, when she attended faculty in Washington, D.C., she realized how a lot she wanted the expansive skies and stalwart cacti. She returned to Arizona however didn’t develop into a birder till she took a category on the native college about poetry and birds, finishing assignments like rearranging phrases from native uncommon hen alerts into authentic verse. Some days the scholars would go birding round Tucson after which sit down to jot down quietly within the subject.
“One thing I really like about birding is it offers you this actually particular lens,” she says. Dubb discovered birding to be a “good portal”—a method to discover the fabulous within the mundane that, by definition, is throughout us. Take, as an illustration, the White-crowned Sparrow, a typical desert denizen that Dubb has tattooed on her left arm. “There are like one million sparrows,” she says, “however this one has this placing head.” When the hen seems exterior her window every fall, she sees it because the herald of winter.
Dubb discovered birding to be a “good portal”—a method to discover the fabulous within the mundane.
Her curiosity in romance writing got here later. Whereas Dubb remembers skimming by her mother’s huge assortment of romance novels as a child (on the lookout for the juicy elements, she says), she solely caught the fever as a 30-something. By then she was a mom herself and had been assigned to learn a romance novel at school, the place she was coaching to develop into a librarian. Because the COVID pandemic closed off her world, isolating her at house together with her husband and three youngsters, Dubb leaned into the joyful world of romance novels for reduction, and in Might 2020, she determined to strive penning one herself.
For a style that tends to favor youthful protagonists, a novel that facilities birding and a 42-year-old whose solely baby is about to complete highschool may look like a little bit of a danger. However Dubb wasn’t interested by marketability—she was interested by her personal life. On the time, she was 39 and on the cusp of an empty nest herself. So she needed to jot down a narrative during which a personality barely forward of her found out the way to navigate the years she was dealing with down.
“I used to be within the stage of my life the place I used to be watching mates emerge from marriages and begin once more,” she says. “It’s only a actually, actually fruitful time of life, and I used to be excited to point out a lady who was desperate to study and discover herself.” 4 years later, the ensuing romp is an affirmation, each of life’s difficulties and the potential for overcoming these challenges, significantly with an honest humorousness and some good mates.
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ubb first visited Sweetwater Wetlands together with her poetry class. Right this moment, after watching—from a protected distance—the Cooper’s Hawk rigidly guarding its nest like some sort of beautiful gargoyle, I ask Dubb if we’re on the lookout for something particularly. Not likely, she says. She doesn’t hen with an agenda. However it could be poetic to see a Yellow Warbler. “It was the primary hen I ever recognized alone,” she says. It’s additionally on the duvet of her ebook.
As we do a loop, the sport of recognizing creatures feels nearly like Whac-A-Mole, they’re so plentiful. Collared lizards do push-ups beside the path. Cottontails sniff round blooming palo verdes. Turtles solar themselves by the water. And the birds are ubiquitous, their calls drowning out the semi-trucks that barrel down the close by interstate, oblivious to the lushness we’re exploring. Inside an hour, we’ve seen doves, geese, woodpeckers, Pink-winged Blackbirds, quails, towhees, and an electric-red Summer season Tanager. However no warblers.
Then, simply as we circle again to the doorway and that perilous cottonwood, there’s a flash of yellow. “There it’s!” Dubb calls. I’m not a birder, and it’s smaller than I count on, miniature subsequent to the close by hawk. It might be a lot simpler to overlook it than to identify it. I really feel the fun and am grateful her ebook introduced me right here.
It nearly didn’t. After getting 17 rejections, Dubb and her agent had been about to tug the manuscript from submission when she obtained the decision {that a} division of Simon & Schuster was . She finally landed a two-book deal, and lately signed a contract to jot down a 3rd. However, on today, Dubb nonetheless has the air of somebody mystified by her luck. So what, on this thrilling and susceptible second, are her hopes for her debut?
“I might love for folk to complete the ebook and be curious,” she says. Possibly Birding With Advantages introduces romance readers to birding. Possibly it introduces birders to studying romance. “Simply be curious,” she repeats, “about something.”
Birding With Advantages, by Sarah T. Dubb, 336 pages, $18.99. Out there here from Gallery Books.
