By Abby Braithwaite
For some reason, whenever I hear mention of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” my brain hears “Carrier Pigeon” instead. And since my brain loves nothing more than a tangent, I decided to dive into some surface-level internet research about carrier pigeons, wondering if this could bring me closer to an explanation for my compulsion to share my guts on the printed page.
All our
letters are in shoeboxes in the basement now,
intermingled with four-by-six-inch photographs of
past lives, other loves, back-to-back with crumpled
matchbooks and long-forgotten phone numbers.
First, let’s catch up on a few basic carrier pigeon facts:
- For the purpose of this essay, the term “carrier pigeon” is interchangeable with “messenger pigeon” or “homing pigeon”.
- Actual “Carriers” or “English Carriers” are show birds that have had the homing instinct bred right out of them. They have absurdly long necks with iridescent purple and green feathers, bright orange eyes, and hard wattles that look like brain tissue encompassing their beaks. They are not what we are talking about here.
- We are also not talking about American “Passenger Pigeons” which were hunted into extinction by European colonizers on the North American continent and were never domesticated. (The “passenger” in their name derives from their migratory habits, not from the fact they carried elfin passengers on their backs, as a child with an overactive imagination might have once presumed.)
- People have been exploiting the homing instincts of a variety of domesticated rock dove species for nearly as long as we have records of written communication. From ancient Egypt to ancient Greece to 21st Century India—where in 2002, the Police Pigeon Service retired 800 pigeons from active duty relaying information during natural disasters and other emergencies—the magnificent birds have been carrying messages across as many as 7,200 miles at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour since 3,000 BCE.
- Most famous—and most decorated (32 of the 54 Dickin Medals awarded to animals of valor by the British Armed Forces in World War II were given to pigeons)—for their wartime efforts, carrier pigeons also: warned of floods on the river Nile in ancient Egypt; carried word of the first Olympic athletes’ victories home to their villages in ancient Greece; provided the first airmail service, between New Zealand and the Great Barrier Island; delivered news for the fledgling Reuters News Service when telegraph service was still spotty; took some of the first arial photographs while delivering medications for a pharmacist at the turn of the 20th century; and, when needed for nothing else, were trained to race, so providing low-stakes gambling opportunities for the merchant class in the latter years of the 19thcentury.
- While their instincts—a mystifying meld of vision, hearing, magnetic reckoning, and smell—take pigeons home, with deliberate effort and the right foods they have been on occasion trained to make round trip deliveries.
The proof is there, tucked in
with expired passports and
dogeared address books,
of our falling in love
postage stamp by
postage stamp—
And now, the theory.
You may be familiar with Ursula Le Guin’s masterful essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Part anthropology, part literary analysis, Le Guin’s theory is all genius. It’s about the shape we give our stories, and the shape our stories give to us. It’s about collection and collectivism and not about striving and spearing and winning. And it’s beautiful. But as a writer of—mostly—memoir, I never quite know how to incorporate fiction-based theory into the work I do. While the shape of story is as integral to non-fiction and memoir as it is to fiction—and while fiction is without question about more than story—I believe that those of us who are compelled to put our most secret inner workings (and unworkings) on the page without the scrim of an imagined world are driven by story and by something else. Something different than the something else that drives fiction writers. And this something is a thing I have never been able to nail down.
For some reason, whenever I hear mention of the Carrier Bag theory, my brain hears Carrier Pigeon instead. And since my brain loves nothing more than a tangent, I decided to dive into some surface-level internet research about carrier pigeons, wondering if this could bring me closer to an explanation for my compulsion to share my guts on the printed page. In my somewhat haphazard investigation into the place of carrier pigeons in the human history of communication, I stumbled upon the beginnings of an answer, feeling tremendous resonance between the attributes and role of messenger pigeons, and those of the memoirist. And so was born Braithwaite’s Carrier Pigeon Theory of Memoir. Here are some of the fundamentals of this nascent explanation of why we write our insides out:
- Communication: Writers in general, and perhaps memoir writers in particular, are driven by a compulsion to carry a story or an idea from heart to heart. We dig deep into ourselves, investigate our lives and actions not simply for the sake of inquiry, self-pity, or self-congratulations—our words would go no farther than our dusty diaries if that was all. No, we dig deep, put our souls on a page, and send them out into the world in an attempt to connect with other minds, other hearts. Our words carry messages from point A to point B. We write to inquire. We publish to convey. We are, like those small grey birds with capsules strapped their ankles, messengers.
in letters hurled across the continent,
passing in midair over Des Moines or
Kalamazoo, so he’d ask me
what I’d ended up eating
for dinner on Thursday
- Haphazardry (or so it would seem): For many of us purveyors of personal stories, we have no idea where we are heading when we pick up the pen—or start clacking the keyboard. Something—a smell, a song, how we feel our mother’s body in the way we hold our head—triggers a memory and we are compelled to capture a scene from our past before it slips away into the morass of forgotten moments that makes up so many lives. We have stacks of notebooks and scribbled-on receipts and smoothed out gum wrappers and text messages to ourselves that capture every present we have lived through—the way the light through the trees casts a shadow as vivid as metaphor, the way the drunk old man propping himself up drunk on the lamppost on the street corner could be our father, in another telling. We contain in our mind’s eye a kaleidoscope of seemingly unrelated imagery waiting for the moment we weave it into story.
How is this like a carrier pigeon, you may ask. Enter Dr. Julius Neubronner and his patented pigeon camera, circa 1907. A German apothecary who used his well-trained pigeons to deliver medicine, Dr. Neubronner first conceived of the pigeon camera to document his birds’ flights when they were out on delivery, but quickly came to realize that the pictures were imbued with a distinct haphazard quality that told a story from an entirely new angle. (Of course, they technology was soon taken up for military purposes, but in this moment, let’s focus on the art, shall we?) For us writers, as for the pigeons, no matter the seeming randomness of our flights of recollection, the thing that binds the stories is that, as if by some inborn instinct, they are always pointing towards home. (See below for more on the homing instinct.)
before he got my description
of a warm-from-the-garden
tomato and basil salad, folded
around a poem torn rough-
edged from the Utne Reader
about falling in love
in the purple light of August,
- Fresh perspective: Like Dr. Neubronner’s pigeon photographers, the quest of a memoirist is to tell an old tale—life, love, pain, joy—from a perspective only that writer knows. Human flight was less than a decade old when Neubronner came up with the proto-drone, and for the first time, people could see the world from above without climbing a mountain. As noted by Andrea DenHoed in her New Yorker essay The Turn-of-the-Century Pigeons That Photographed Earth from Above, “…there’s also something a bit wild about the photos, precisely because they were taken by birds. Their framing is random and their angles are askew; sometimes a wing feather obscures the view. Pigeons are surely the most pedestrian of birds, but, looking at these oddly graceful photographs…they start to seem like heavenly creatures.” And so should even the most pedestrian memoirist never shy from putting her own awkward slant on her interpretation of the world. We are here, gifted with an eye designed to capture the mundane in a whole new way, flying, in our way, above the surface of the earth. And so should we let our pens record what only we can see, here on the edge of the atmosphere as we are.
He liked to send letters
with notes scrawled
on the back of the envelope
in tight red spirals,
- Danger: Memoir isn’t for the faint of heart, with danger lurking behind every character named, every event cast on paper from only one perspective, every fact mis-remembered. Like war-time messenger pigeons carrying military secrets from the front back to mission command, memoirists move through life without the protection of anonymity, at risk of offending, over-embellishing, getting it wrong, or, worse, getting it so damned right that we are written out of families. In wars across the ages, pigeons were heroes, arriving home scathed by bullets, buffeted by storms, but more often than not with the message still attached, so that they were recognized, with the above-mentioned Dickin Medals for all sorts of feats of derring-do. As Stephanie Graves writes in her Crimes Reads essay War Pigeons, “Resilient, adaptable and dependable, they were often the last hope of pilots, soldiers and agents when wireless communication was impossible.” While memoirists may not be so appreciated, the dangers we face are no less compelling, the power of our messages no less vital to the survival of our species.
so he could imagine me
hunched in the light of
my bedside lamp,
spinning the
paper in my
hands to
extract
every
last
bit
of
him
from his too-distant hand
- The homing instinct: This is where the theory really comes to roost, so to speak. For all their heroic and logic-defying feats, the fact of the matter is that carrier pigeons just want to get back home. According to Stephanie Graves, “A desire for home drives them, and it is thought that they use a combination of visual, auricular and olfactory clues to find their way.” And so it is with many a memoirist. Obsessed with travel, with gaining experience, with seeing the world—and conquering it—at the end of the proverbial day, many writers of memoir just want to get back home. And if we can’t get back there in our bodies, we write about the houses we lived in, the street corners we lingered on as desultory teens, the trees we climbed, the parents who made and maimed us. We aim ourselves, always and unerringly, back to our beginnings, bringing with us on our journey all the bits of life we’ve survived along the way. We get home dusty and bruised, carrying the weight of our knowledge and wisdom scrolled up tight in tubes lashed to our ankles.
We live, we write, we transmit, we return home. We risk bumps and bruises along the way, and are uniquely equipped for the role, thanks to an unerring sense of direction, acute vision, attention to detail, and the magnets in our minds that orient us, always, to the inner workings of the universe. In closing, and again, thank you to Stephanie Graves, carrier pigeons, “…despite the astounding feats that made them seem almost untouchable….were, quite simply, warm, living, breathing symbols of hope and home.”
Abby Braithwaite lives in Ridgefield, Washington, where she writes from a converted shipping container in the woods overlooking the family farm. She enjoys the soundscape of sandhill cranes, coyotes and freight trains trundling from Portland to Seattle underneath her bedroom window. Her essays on parenting, escape, and disability have been published in the Barton Chronicle, the Washington Post, The Manifest-Station and Hip Mama. Her chapbooks Contained (2019) and A Portrait of the Artists as a Crone Tree (2022), are collected musings on life, art, trees and the universe. She shares her home with her husband, two children, and a handful of furry creatures.
Abby Braithwaite lives in Ridgefield, Washington, where she writes from a converted shipping container in the woods overlooking the family farm. She enjoys the soundscape of sandhill cranes, coyotes and freight trains trundling from Portland to Seattle underneath her bedroom window. Her essays on parenting, escape, and disability have been published in The Barton Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Manifest-Station and Hip Mama. Her chapbooks, Contained (2019) and A Portrait of the Artists as a Crone Tree (2022), are collected musings on life, art, trees, and the universe. She shares her home with her husband, two children, and a handful of furry creatures.
