Q&A Rebecca Rasmussen. April 1, 2011 

Reviewer Andrea Tarr catches up with Rebecca Rasmussen, whose debut novel, The Bird Sisters (LJ 3/1/11), is a lovely, luminous, character-driven story that captures the joy and heartbreak of youth. The poetic, vivid prose is enchanting—once you meet the Bird sisters, you’ll be reluctant to leave them as they try to repair their parents’ troubled marriage and other relationships.

Readers first come to know Milly and Twiss living together in their golden years and tending to injured birds. We later meet them as teenagers intent on healing their broken family. Why do the sisters remain rooted in Spring Green, WI, while the birds they care for travel far and wide?
The novel began with lines I happened upon in an Emily Dickinson poem: “These are the days when Birds come back—/ A very few—a Bird or two—/ To take a backward look.” I have always loved birds on a literal and metaphorical level and, like most children, was deeply fascinated with their coming and going whenever they pleased. The older Milly and Twiss have spent their lives nursing birds back to health, mostly because a starling struck their car at a fateful moment in their youth. On that day, the sisters no longer possessed the power to change their futures and so took this bird back to their leaning farmhouse, hoping it would recover and take flight for them.

The sisters apply various remedies to their splintered family. Could this be the beginning of the sisters’ future bird healing?
Twiss is my wild girl, which is why I love her, but it’s also why she is in more trouble than Milly. Her rudimentary methods are full of heart. There’s a line in the book about the inescapable fate for birds losing their ability to fly. Twiss’s parents are like that; yet Twiss can’t help but try to get them to spread their wings. To rise up and fly!

Dramatic tension in the novel arrives with Cousin Bett, when she visits for the summer and shakes up the family’s world. Can you explain this?
Oh, Cousin Bett! This family is barely coasting along when in comes this distant cousin changing the dynamic the moment the postman drops her off at the end of the driveway with a paper bag for a suitcase and an armful of mail. She’s poor, she’s unlovely, and yet, like with most everyone and everything in the novel, it’s not Bett who works to charm the family. It’s they who work to charm her.

Sacrifice is a striking theme in your book.
The older I get, the more I am tuned in to the sacrifices—large and small—made daily for the good of husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, and even animals we love. I am drawn to the idea of sacrifice because it often goes against our instincts and because it can be one of the most beautiful things in the world. Yet its consequences can be devastating. Milly and Twiss have my love and always will, due to sacrifices they make.

Why did you choose a summer fair as the setting for your novel’s climax?
A most wonderful thing about small farming towns is when the townspeople gather to celebrate something: a marriage, a graduation, or even the end of the summer in some places. Town fairs are especially magical to me. I love to think about spun sugar, apples in barrels, and pies sitting on checkered tablecloths. Put a town fair in a historical setting, add a bit of quack medicine in the form of bathtub elixirs, a propeller plane, and a goat named Hoo-Hoo, and there you have it: the climax of a novel.

What are you working on next?
I just finished my second novel, which is set in the wild and remote landscape of northern Minnesota in a fictional place called Partway. It begins with a pioneering woman named Eveline in the 1930s and ends with her son Hux’s story in the 1970s. This book was a pleasure to write, and I am quite sad to be finished with it. But I’m pressing forward with the third, which is about a small-town doctor, his wife, May, and a little girl named Lizzie Ogden, who drowns in a river on a cool fall morning, mere steps from her back porch.—Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA