Where Blackbirds Fly

A novel in five novellas, Where Blackbirds Fly offers a prismatic deep dive into the human heart through fierce narratives of intimacy both lovely and heartbreaking. Countering social upheavals, Shann Ray affirms the power of empathy, the wisdom of wilderness, and the felt presence of divine mystery echoed in the recurring appearances of blackbirds, as if etching flight patterns of mercy over the landscapes of human life. John Sender and Samantha Valeria Arrarás seek love in the financial industry, their initial attraction leading to unforeseen perils that will echo in those who enter and exit their lives. The characters of this novel form a compelling cross section of humanity met with revelation, suffering, and possibility. With spare and muscular prose, luminosity, and psychological grace, Ray weaves a tapestry as multihued as America in a vision of love’s transgressive power.

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“With its large cast of wounded, complex, and ethnically diverse characters, all yearning for love, Where Blackbirds Fly creates a world that looks very much like America. That it does so with rich lyricism and polymathic learning is a testament to the love Shann Ray himself has for humankind. Read this novel for the perception-altering poetry in Ray’s prose, the vividly and sympathetically drawn characters, the precise attention to detail, and the expansive spirit that courses through this elegantly rendered story. Beauty, care, and wisdom sing from these pages!”

—Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award

“A breathtaking narrative of the unspoken histories of couples. How do we find a way to love when there are multigenerational wounds? That struggle informsWhere Blackbirds Fly as each pairing carries different burdens and different intimacies. The blackbirds’ appearance is subtle but prophetic, and as with the tricolored blackbird, the startle of its color in flight, their path echoes the uncommon strength of this narrative. Over the years each interwoven life takes on power and poetic significance as we question if love will triumph over loneliness, over loss. We come to care deeply about the people here, their trials and vicissitudes. We celebrate with them, and grieve with them, and when the novel is complete, we don’t want to leave them.”

—Mary Jane Nealon, author of Beautiful Unbroken, winner of the Bakeless Prize

“In Shann Ray’s kaleidoscopic and cinematic novel we bear witness to characters grappling to kindle and keep love. Characters yearn, strive, and soften for a transcendent wholeness, a healing they glimpse tenderly in each other. Where no redemption seems isolated or linear, this hard and lovely work urges us to consider the healing strength of love and how we can just as easily ruin each other. The precise telling resists reveling in love’s sweetness. Around each corner another couple rises into view, scuffed and scarred with trying. We mourn the inevitable damage they cause and rejoice in the moments they are able to break loose from personal and collective pain, able to be available and steady for each other. Ray articulates a vital and palpable interconnectedness of humanity.”—Natalie J. Graham, author of Begin with a Failed Body, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize

“The language, sharp. The story, riveting. The love, physical. Where Blackbirds Fly left me breathless as I caught the thread of Divine Mystery woven in its pages.”

—Drew Jackson, author of Touch the Earth

“There is a spirit in the American West—a spirit calling out—and Shann Ray envisions it beautifully. Vivid. Grounding. In imagery of skies, wildlife, and mountainscapes, Ray immerses readers in a story deeply personal and boundless. Thoughtful with the complexities of identity, heritage, and connection, he evokes the timeless bond between land, heart, and the shared human experience.”

—CooXooEii Black, author of The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky, winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize

“Shann Ray’s prose defies limitations and boundaries. In Where Blackbirds Fly the world he creates is a brutal one where empathy only glows brighter. His sentences stipple the page with such grace and beauty we’re left not with just a book or a story but a true work of art.”

—Dane Bahr, author of Stag

SHINING LIGHT

“I’m in awe of the way Shann Ray takes readers to some very dark places–always shining light, always asserting hope and humanity–and yet there’s a lightness of touch that approaches poetry.

The novel reminds me of William Carlos Williams’ masterpiece, Paterson. There’s a wonderful specificity of place, an unsparing diagnosis of what ails us individually and collectively, and a deep appreciation of the redemptive qualities to be found in even the most damaged lives.

Shann Ray’s departures from conventional narrative techniques make the novel move swiftly and underscore elements of character and plot. They give the novel a certain rhythm that echoes the gospel music Gabriel and Angelica perform and rejoice in, or the beat of the music to which Elias American Horse fancy dances. I loved and responded to the authority this novel’s voice claims as it ties together ideas, themes, perspectives, and lives… all in the service of truth.

I sincerely hope universities will design a “Fiction as Reparative Justice” course around Where Blackbirds Fly. The list of topics–gender violence, generational violence, political violence, genocide, racism, sexism, debt, money madness–the novel insightfully and sensitively covers makes for a first-rate education in our most elemental challenges.

However, at the end of the day, long after reading the novel, I’m still thinking about Ray’s five men from Seattle by way of Montana and their female and male partners. To me, the great achievement of this novel is its characters. They are real people when they could so easily have been mere stand-ins for topics, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. I was and remain so moved by the tender, fraught, sometimes misguided ways this wonderful cast of characters built their lives and their most intimate connections.”

—Rosemary Ahern, former Editor, Penguin Books and Simon & Schuster

BOOKS: READING  THE WEST

“Some themes may be too big for one story. Love, the overarching theme of Shann Ray’s Where Blackbirds Fly (University of Nebraska Press, $27.95), is explored throughout the five novellas that make this novel. This is because love, in Ray’s handling of it, contains much more than the Hallmark version of the concept. It includes all our attempts and failures to achieve it and our frailty and fear that lead to all of our cruelty and callousness. Yet, it also contains our capacity for forgiveness, our potential for empathy, and, most of all, our indebtedness to those who love us despite everything. 

The idea of this indebtedness resounds in the literal ways the characters of these novellas all connect. John Sender, the first we meet, is a loan officer at a large Seattle-based bank. The characters of the other novellas are mostly people to whom he’s given loans, offering them better-than-usual terms due to shared Montana origins in one way or another. In this predatory world where big banks control those in debt — sometimes rewarding and ofttimes destroying — Sender is the anomaly. He truly cares about the people who come to him for loans.

Each story in this complex novel is a mindfully wrought world of the human condition. The characters are people we know, people we yearn to be, and people we are terrified of becoming. Through it all is Ray’s ear for poetry, his love of Montana’s open spaces, and the almost mystical appearance of blackbirds arriving at poignant moments in all the characters’ lives.

The individual novellas eventually converge as the storylines become increasingly intertwined, revealing that, as in our disparate lives, we are truly one, and we are all seeking ways to find love, heal the past, and repay our debts.”

—Marc Beaudin, for Big Sky Journal

IN WHERE BLACKBIRDS FLY SHANN RAY SHOWS THE UNFORGIVING TRUTH OF MODERN LOVE STORIES

Love stories seem simple but end up messy.

They bring emotional baggage. They bring history. They bring love. They bring fear – both known and unknown. Everything that can go into a relationship can go into a relationship can drive a love story. They can end in happiness or death. Yet they are the timeless plot that drives literature. Even when it’s not the main story, there is inevitably a love interest, however superficial.

But there is nothing superficial about the deep search for love in Shann Ray’s Where the Blackbirds Fly. It is love in all its complexities, all its pain.

The Gonzaga University professor may teach forgiveness studies, but his study of love in this novel is unforgiving in its depth of discovery about the complexities of human relationships.

It is difficult to tell too much about what are really five different novellas rolled into one book. There are so many twists and surprises unfolding in these pages, I do not want to give away anything. When I am reviewing a book, I do not read the cover notes, or the news releases that accompany the advance review copies. I do not read what others have said. I want to open the book and experience it without preconceptions, and let the author’s words speak alone.

Where the Blackbirds Fly rewards such an approach. Ray’s writing is itself a joy to read. It has a rhythm to it that is musical, and a form that reminds me of a good jazz record the way it unfolds. It reminds me a lot of the first time I read Jack Kerouac.

The book opens with John Sender, a former rodeo cowboy from Montana who settled into the world of high finance in Seattle. But he is a socially awkward guy who has not succeeded in love as he has in the banking world, where he shepherds people through mortgage loans as the gatekeeper to the dreams of home ownership – once a right of adulthood, now reserved for only the most successful. He is deeply in love with Samantha but he is not sure how to pursue it. Because she has a secret, buried deep within her, within her family. It may be the same secret that lies with his own mother and father. All families have secrets.

Elias and Aurora are already married when we meet them, in and out of love, a path marriage sometimes follows. They harbor generational trauma buried deep within their Native upbringings, as they try to pay homage to their past while navigating the white present. They look successful on the outside, but struggle with what that says about them.

—Ron Sylvester, for The Spokesman Review