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

OF LOVE AND HOPE

“My favorite books are unflinching in how they examine some of the worst crises we face as human beings, while also somehow leading readers into a place of love, hope, and potential change. Ray is one of these writers, and this novel is sheer poetry. I love the floating paragraph form and the white space that allows us to process, and breathe, between each lyrical passage.”

—Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra 

POETIC, CINEMATIC

“Where Blackbirds Fly is compelling, poetic, tragic, and very cinematic. The story is told in 5 novellas with connecting stories and the repeating presence of blackbirds. Each story is deeply human and explores love, relationships, and grief. I appreciated the symbolism in this novel and I loved how diverse all of the characters are. By adding historical context to the story, Ray leaves the reader with more understanding of the characters and the decisions they make. This book gives a realistic look at how trauma, racism, and sexism shape intimacy and relationships. The ending is not what I expected and I’m still processing it! I love when a book has you so hooked you think about it for days.” 

—August Corppetts, winner of The Women’s and Gender Studies Founders’ Award for Excellence in Activism, Gonzaga University

A HISTORY OF LOVE AND FRACTURE

“Shann Ray’s novel Where Blackbirds Fly (Bison Books, 2025) is a braided set of five novellas, each a tenderly told and brutally honest investigation into the nature of relationships and what it means to love. As with his previous work, Ray provides a metaphor-rich writing style that doesn’t shy away from intimacy or hard truths. There are heartbreaks and infidelities here, there is love and joy, as well as a broad sense of spirituality. But what is most rewarding is that even when writing about the darkest corners of the soul, light and grace shine from every page of this finely constructed novel.

Where Blackbirds Fly revolves around John Sender, an investment banker in Seattle and four couples that come into his orbit, all with ties to Montana in one way or another. We meet Elias American Horse, an Oglala Lakota and Assiniboine/Nakota with a PhD pulling in almost $500k a year who wears fitted suits and cowboy boots by day and Armani at night. We meet the opium addicted couple Phillip McBane and Alberta Amah who leave junk food out for their 8-year-old daughter as they float away on the poppy tea they mix. Coming from a variety of economic and cultural backgrounds, this cast of characters is richly complex and unapologetically diverse, and under Ray’s hand, each and every one of them deserving of love and compassion.

7 Questions on Love and Loneliness

Charles Finn: Part of your childhood was spent on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeast Montana. How did that experience shape you toward love? And how does it shape your writing? In particular, how did your upbringing play a role in the writing of this novel?

Shann Ray: The Cheyenne people were referred to as ‘the beautiful people’ during the Indian wars of the late 1800s. They are also known to be among the most fierce of the high plains nations. My dear friends Lafe Haugen, Russell Tall White Man, Blake Walks Nice, and many of my basketball heroes, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Cree, or otherwise, such as Elvis Old Bull, Mike Chavez, Stanford Rides Horse, Juneau Plenty Hawk, Timothy Falls Down, Mark and Luke Spotted Bear, the Kills Night family, the Pretty Horse family, and Dana Goes Ahead, influenced my life and my conception of love beyond measure. Their way of life was reverberant with my own history in many ways, which is Czech, along with a mix of other countries. Basketball, like art, like life, is made of mountains and plains, rivers and sky, birds, wildlife of all forms, the human and the more than human, the spirit world, and reverence for God, as little as we know of God, the Great Spirit, or Maheo in Cheyenne. The entangled relationship between Catholicism and traditional Native beliefs carries shadow and light. Living in a place of ferocity helped shape who I am as an artist. This novel is met with both Cheyenne and Czech influence, where life is circular and cruciform, forgiveness is stronger than blood, and love is cultural resilience.

CF: Stylistically, this is a highly crafted set of novellas, but it is the individual sentences and careful construction of pacing that bring the real joy. Sparse yet lyrical, your prose pays attention to form as much as plot and narrative. Undoubtedly, this comes from your background as a poet, and it shows, the novel unspooling like a lyric poem, punctuated with sharp, crisp imagery and a startling amount of finely tuned and carefully chosen detail. Throughout the book, individual chapters work like stanzas, many have only one or two short sentences as you employ contemplative space in the same manner a poet does. Such intention—and attention—creates nuance and an opening of the relationship with the reader. There is nothing fanciful or gratuitous. There is listening, and in the silence is the mystery. How does your background as a poet play a role and influence this novel?

SR: I’m reminded of so many lines of poetry that came to me as a boy… ‘arise, shine, for your light has come’; behold ‘the man of sorrows’; for you have been given ‘the garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair.’ I’m also reminded of the poets who have placed a form of metaphysical fusion into my life such as Robin Coste Lewis, Natalie Diaz, Wallace Stevens, and Vincent van Gogh, all of whom play a visceral role in Where Blackbirds Fly. They’ve made a claim on my inner life, the heart of hearts, as have so many poets, and in return I hope to give them an echo-resonance of adoration with this novel. Also, the poetry and novellas of Jim Harrison are important to me. I hoped to build a book that would give love to the novella, through five novellas encased in something that could be read as intimately as a novel. With regard to poetry specifically, lines from Diaz and Stevens have a cadence and an anchoring into light and love beyond every abyss. From Natalie Diaz: her hand upon the beloved’s chest, her yearning to ‘disappear, not into violence / but into love, / into church and darkness.’ From Wallace Stevens: ‘A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.’

CF: As much as it is a novel of the city, these five novellas are rooted in the mountains and plains of Montana and the restorative properties of nature and family. When you describe field dressing an elk, the reader knows it comes from experience. You also make certain not to promote cliched Western stereotypes, especially of Native Americans, and you certainly don’t shy away from the atrocities of history, particularly those committed against the Lakota at Wounded Knee or the Dakota in Mankato with the hanging of the 38 + 2. That said, by all accounts, this is a uniquely generous novel. All of your main characters in the five novellas it encompasses are flawed, some of them quite deeply so. Yet you write them with such compassion and understanding, unapologetic of their situation, but never as an excuse and always without judgement. Can you speak to that, where does that come from and why was it important to show these people as you did? In addition, does your experience teaching forgiveness studies play into this and how? And exactly what is forgiveness studies?

SR: Thank you for your kindness, Charles. When envisioning the people in this novel, I spent time thinking of varied environments I’ve lived or worked in ranging from the Americas to Europe and from Africa to Asia: the beautiful people I’ve known everywhere. My life as a clinical psychologist gives unique insights into the souls of others. I then turned to the notion that America in my view, from Native nations to African nations to every culture that walks this blood-drawn soil, forms a robust family met with both frailty and great fortitude. As a family, like all families, we are fraught, fractured, resilient, harmful, loving, healed, graceful, and as you mentioned, generous. I want to be touched and moved by the people around me, I want to be changed by them. I want to listen deeply to the dream of soul housed inside us and inside our families. The novel emerged from that desire, a place grounded in the relationships throughout my life and throughout what I envision as a united country interwoven with the nations of the world.

I’ve spent most of my life as a researcher of forgiveness and genocide. Having visited so many genocide sites here in the U.S. and globally, and having encountered such a bright trajectory of both restorative justice and forgiveness in these forlorn places, I’ve devoted myself with others to the process of asking forgiveness, building bridges of atonement and restoration, and seeing things whole again. Likely a surprise to many, the research on forgiveness is staggering: those with higher forgiveness capacity experience significantly less anxiety, depression, and anger than their less forgiving counterparts. People with higher forgiveness capacity also experience greater overall wellbeing, less heart disease, and stronger pathways toward more robust immune systems. For these reasons The Mayo Clinic uses forgiveness treatment with their patients. Beyond science though, the freedom, awareness, and truth each of us finds in authentically forgiving and being forgiven is irrefutable.

CF: This novel in five parts is the work of a gifted writer unafraid to pull back the curtain of vulnerability. You do this by sharing your characters’ true goodness and innate flaws, their genuine friendships and the papercut (and larger) cruelties couples commit upon their partners, even while loving each other fiercely. In addition, there are fantastic metaphors, “He’d crossed the line when he’d shaken her shoulders but it was like shaking a bucket of rusted nails, the whole tangle solid with nothing breaking loose.” And a few lines later: “Like too many men, he’d physically harmed her… a porcelain bank he couldn’t empty.” The title is Where Blackbirds Fly, and there are references to blackbirds sprinkled throughout the book. Metaphor? Can you talk about the role blackbirds play in the novel, their importance, and why you chose to title it as you did?

SR: In noticing wilderness, in my own life and in the landscapes and cityscapes around me, I came to understand that birds always seem to calm me. I think they might be attuned to something like prayer, prayers of hope for my wife and daughters and for the world. I’ve been moved by the flight of birds, their pathways through the air, the great beauty of something so dreamlike as a mountain swift, a barn swallow, a mountain bluebird, or a red-winged blackbird. However, I didn’t know much else about them except that they had become vessels of beauty in my life. So I began researching their bone and body structure, their wing patterns, their diet, how they ward off predators, the nature of their refractive and often iridescent light, how they group together and the scale free correlation and syncopated patterns of their existence not only in flight but when sleeping at the base of trees or speaking to one another inside a line of willows, along the tips of cattails, or in the leafy covering of silver birch, aspens, maples, and alders. From that research they became a mirror of divine mystery inside the novel. They look upon humanity with a transcendent eye. The title emerged from spending a good deal of time with blackbirds.

CF: Where Blackbirds Fly is one of the most honest, tender, and understanding accounts of what it means to love another person. Seldom are characters so intimately and richly drawn. None of your characters are saints, all are tainted, some tremendously so, but never do you allow them to be less than completely human, each page revealing characters whose introspection and honesty are more fully described than any I have encountered in recent memory. What kind of additional research did you have to do in writing this novel and the detailed backstories that you provide? There are so many references to historical events, art, literature, and all manner of things: guns, particular coffee shops, mountain ranges. My guess is everything, every last detail, is accurate and true. Can you talk about what went into researching all this?

SR: I love novels that involve the intricacy and finesse surrounding the finer details of a given trade, or simply the holistic inside knowledge of people, their movements, and their vocations. I think of Edna O’Brien’s novels The Little Red Chairs and Girl, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. You’re right, I’ve tried to make sure every detail in the novel is accurate and true, whether the characters work in coffee shops or bank buildings, live in trailers or waterfront properties, hold a given philosophy or theology, know the architecture of mile-high skyscrapers, take a path through the mountains, or fall in love with astrophysics and the unique aspects of star fields. I find this lifelike patterning in a novel’s subtext delightful.

CF: As a writer and poet, I read for the beauty of the sentences and the flow of the words. I want to be swept away, transported, transfixed by the language—and I was. Perhaps that’s why I loved Where Blackbirds Fly so much. You give us beauty, but you give us more than that too. I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters, many of whom I’d probably cross the street to avoid. But by the end of novel, I had compassion for each of them. This, I feel, is the novel’s greatest achievement. You made me rethink my prejudices and examine my judgmental tendencies, and at this point in time, at this juncture of history, isn’t that exactly what all of us need to be doing? What do you hope people take away from this novel?

SR: Your graceful way as a reader is a gift, Charles; I cherish this conversation. I think Tina Turner said it best: What’s love got to do with it? How many complexities are there in our individual and collective humanity, and what’s love got to do with it? Perhaps everything. And perhaps our lives, our association with time and being, life and death and the encounters we all have beholding the face of the beloved are numberless and should go less named, more left to God and to the mystery of who we are together inside our shared wilderness here in the known and unknown universe. I hope people feel loved by this novel and feel better able to love others.

CF: What is the meaning of love?

SF: Humbly I believe no one knows the meaning of love, and humbly I believe everyone knows. By living toward a modest and reverent notion of love in the present day I hope to affirm something held sacred by my Czech grandmother Catherine, my mother Saundra Rae, my wife Jennifer, and my three daughters Natalya, Ariana, and Isabella: among the great embodiments—faith, hope, and love—the greatest of these is love.

—Charles Finn, author of On a Benediction of Wind 

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

TO THOSE WHO LOVE 

“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

NO, LOVE ISN’T EASY. BUT SHANN RAY’S ‘WHERE BLACKBIRDS FLY‘ SHOWS THAT IT IS POSSIBLE

“As a clinical and systems psychologist, Shann Ray is well-versed in discussing the intricacies of romantic relationships. The 30-year Gonzaga University professor specializes in something called forgiveness studies: the idea that the act of forgiving can reap rewards for your well-being.

But Ray also knows true, mature love found in romantic relationships is extremely rare.

“We all suffer so much in love that it’s hard to believe that it actually exists,” Ray said.

However, Ray knows it does. And that’s why he wrote a book entirely devoted to it.

Through five novellas, “Where Blackbirds Fly” (released Oct. 1) dives deep into the lives of five couples and their commitment toward love, traversing generational trauma, genocide, infidelity, addiction, family patterns and psychological battles.

“I just wanted to get into our interior lives,” Ray said, “and notice that. Notice this desire for love and kind of follow people’s quest.”

Ray uses nature, often of the avian variety, to paint a landscape of feeling, where words may fall short. Ray centers his tales of restoration on the lives of Montana-born financial lender John Sender and his Puerto Rican partner Samantha Valeria Arrarás. The pair fight for love over the span of time and space, beginning and ending in the vast wilderness of Montana.

Inspired by the Beartooth Range and Yellowstone River near where Ray was raised, “Where Blackbirds Fly” depicts Montana’s high country, horseback riding, hunting and, as the title suggests, blackbirds. As a child, he often spotted red-winged blackbirds in flight and along the roadside.

“So that was an imprint, for sure, as a young person,” said Ray, who began spotting blackbirds multiple times a day in Spokane as he began researching for and writing the book.

“There is a great history of literary depth in Montana,” said the “American Copper” and “American Masculine” author, who found nature inspiration from Wallace Stegner, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, James Welch, Mildred Walker and Spokane Is Reading’s 2024 author Debra Magpie Earling, whom he calls a friend. “All of them do something unique and transcendent with wilderness as persona.”

The couples’ backgrounds and cultures are wildly diverse themselves, as are their religious beliefs. Many times, the couples’ commitment to one another falls short, but Ray offers them chances to come back together again and again.

“We all have a capacity for great failure and we also all have a capacity for great repair and restoration,” he said.

Beyond the novel’s touch on love and the wild, there are bad players at hand.

“As a psychologist, I’ve always also been fascinated with the full far end of the dark side of humanity, and I don’t ignore that, because I feel like that’s an expression of our humanity,” Ray said. “It’s sort of how the deepest part of the shadow of our humanity bites and kills. And since we hide our own shadow or ignore it or deny it, it rises up to harm us.”

The couples are faced with an antagonist and a cultural and political atmosphere not much different from our own: “The current atmosphere of money madness in America, media hatred, political sides in which it looks like it’s OK to completely try to dominate, yell at, degrade and even kill each other, are the wrong direction in life.”

But in the end, “no one’s free from harm,” Ray says. Yet he finds a way for his couples to find love through it all – even if it’s not a storybook ending.

“I want a work of art to point to love itself at the foundation of healing the age of enragement, the age of fracture, the age of fascism, which historically always cycles,” Ray said. “There will be healing from this age right now.”

How? Ray answers: “Radical revolutionary thought would say, sacrificial love is what changes the world.”

And Ray may know a thing or two, beyond his profession, about love and healing: Ray has been with his wife, Jenn, for 40 years. The pair raised daughters Natalya, Ariana and Isabella together, and he has written a book of poems devoted to her called “Sweetclover.””

—Lindsey Treffry, for The Spokesman Review

Northwest Passages will host Ray in conversation with Spokesman-Review managing editor Lindsey Treffry at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7, at the Bing Crosby Theater.

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