by Tim Miller

      Birds in Fall, the amazing new novel from Brad Kessler, is a beautiful, profoundly moving story that explores a group of human beings who gather at the inn of a gay couple after a terrible crash of a passenger jet into the sea nearby. The book takes on the deepest mysteries of death and love and offers such a wise and rooted way of being with these ancient mysteries in all their splendor and sorrow. The emotional wallop of the loss sneaks up on us throughout the whole book as the gay men at the center of the inn, which has welcomed the loved ones of the passengers who died in the crash, are changed and challenged by the enormity of this event.
      I read Birds in Fall with that totally bonding, obsessed, feverish urgency that I seek out - where the world of the book becomes so compelling I can't stop being with the characters and the spaces they inhabit. The book deepened my sense of life and death and love. There is no higher praise I could imagine. I spoke with Brad Kessler recently at his home in Sandgate, Vermont, about his remarkable new novel.

TM: You begin your novel with an airplane disaster killing all on board - based on the 1998 crash of SwissAir flight #111 off the coast of Nova Scotia. This leads the family and loved ones of the lost passengers to the inn of a gay couple near the crash site. How did the real air tragedy inform your novel?

BK: I had a friend who died on that SwissAir flight. For months they searched the sea for him, until they found a fragment large enough for a positively identification. There was something terrible and haunting about that waiting period, that limbo state before they could officially pronounce him dead. A lot of people lived through that harrowing time. During it, everyone in Nova Scotia dropped what they were doing to help these families. That’s what partly inspired the novel, complete strangers assisting other strangers from around the world.

TM: Why choose to have a gay character/ couple at the center of the novel, the keepers of this charged space?

BK: It was never a conscious decision to have a gay protagonist. Kevin, the innkeeper, was initially a rather minor character. But as the novel evolved, he quickly became the pole star around which all the others orbited. His sexuality was never a big deal to me. The fact that he and Douglas were gay seemed secondary to who they were as people - straight or gay, or in between. That said, Kevin is an outsider; he's a philosopher; he gardens and he likes to cook. As such I identified with him. What Flaubert said of his Emma Bovary, I could say of Kevin Gearns - Kevin c'est moi.

TM: But you are a straight man married to a woman.

BK: Yes. And I wouldn't pretend to be anything otherwise. But how stifling these categories can be! How they narrow us to near nothing! The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that, if you are honest enough, and empathetic enough, you can slip into the skins of people who are not you.

TM: And yet there are things that Kevin Gearns knows because he is a gay man.

BK: That's true. My Kevin lived through the AIDS epidemic in the 80s in New York City and many of his friends died alone in rooms, shunned by the larger culture. The reason he’s moved to this isolated island off Nova Scotia is partly to forget all the death he’s experienced. And yet, death follows him in the guise of this plane crash. So as a gay man who cared for the dying, he knows first of all how to care for people. He knows how to deal with tragic death; he also knows how to survive.

TM: I was so moved by the rich space of love and loss the novel draws us into. I was pulled deeply into my own memories of loss of loved ones to AIDS. I suppose from the ancient myths of Orpheus right up to the movie Titanic, this is the core subject of our human tribe. What paths and lessons does your book offer us about living and dying?

BK: Wow. That's a big one. What I can talk about is mythology, because there’s a lot of storytelling and mythology that happens in the heart of this novel. The lesson we learn from much of classical myth and the classicists themselves is that nothing really dies - it just changes into something else. That though the form of things changes, the essential spirit or "soul" or essence doesn't really die. Everything is always in a state of "becoming"- even own our selves. As Walt Whitman wrote, "If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles."

Tim Miller is a solo performer and the author of the books "Shirts & Skin," " Body Blows" and "1001 Beds." He can be reached at his website http://hometown.aol.com/millertale/