Two women, separated by time and place, yoked by heritage and history

“The world is full of continuous conversations: Now is surrounded by Past, and both are encircled by Forever.” So states an unnamed narrator in As if a Bird Flew by Me.
 
Celia lives in the contemporary Midwest. Ann is an accused witch, executed during the Salem witch trials. Two women separated by time and place yet yoked by heritage and history. Set in three time periods, stories within stories unfold, and Greenslit’s language seamlessly weaves Celia’s modern life with the historical record of Ann’s demise alongside dazzling renderings of animal life. Greenslit’s hybrid of fiction and nonfiction occupies that rarest of airs: it is a book that illuminates, line by line and page by page, how it should be read.
 

Sara Greenslit has won two innovative fiction awards for her novels, As If a Bird Flew By Me and The Blue of Her Body. She earned an MFA in poetry from Penn State and lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is a small animal veterinarian.
 

“In her brilliant lyric novel As If a Bird Flew By Me, author Sara Greenslit spins a truly stunning, and often eerie, narrative from the careful cataloguing, seamless weaving, and inextricable interchange of music and language.”
—Susan Steinberg
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“Birds, we learn from Sara Greenslit’s As if a Bird Flew By Me, have a mantra of migration, an internal logic, rhythm, and music, invisible yet moving, and so does the world she depicts in this book: a cartography of musicians shaped by the vibrations they press into music, of the invisible histories, natural forces, and poetries that continually remake the world. Like butterflies in a collection, the individual specimens that make up this book are each a song, and together a symphony.”
—Steve Tomasula
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