RIVER SUN WARBLERS: A MYTH

Pushcart Nomination: American Athenaeum, Front Porch Edition Spring 2013


The animals and birds danced inside the core of the Earth, scorching their feet on hot crusty rock, thirsting, chanting in the dark. They rested, and Thrasher heard the sea seep from the rim way above. He sang the song of two tiny warblers, those we call the prothonotaries today…

Spirit Birds

Some of Richie’s stories involve “spirit birds” who inspire characters and plots with wisdom and loveliness beyond the human world and beyond human perspectives. Story / Species Cycle of Life: Swainson’s Thrush Owl’s Myth: Great-horned Owl, Prothonotary Warbler River Sun Warblers: Prothonotary Warbler, Brown Thrasher Injun Joe and Princess Wenonah: Passenger Pigeon Removal: Peregrine Falcon The […]

Creator Bird

Raven Chronicles Vol. 13 No. 1 2007


As soon as the tide got low enough, I snuck away from Ma and Pa and the fish nets, and I crossed the mudflat and saw my creator bird. I climbed way up Oystercatcher’s rock and laid me down, and she bobbed frantic on her ledge beneath me, flashing flaming-red rim…

Tide and Sorrow

Ginosko: between literary vision and spiritual realities Spring 2003


Though the World was very new, Raven watched the beach from a spruce that was old and dead, towering as bare as a bone atop a cliff. Raven knew hunger, and he felt lust, but no tide had washed the shore yet…

How the World was Stolen

Mobius: The Journal of Social Change Winter 2003


Sun as she set toward the sea made the song inside him strong, but Tune was hard black rock, basalt, and his song did not come out. His member swelled for ten thousand years, stretching across the ocean…

Cycle of Life: a novella

Falling in love with endangered lives

I leaned my bicycle against a big yellow backhoe, and flute notes whirred up the scale, airy and then musical and reedy and fast, ringing with the same frenzied chords…