A Rain of Night Birds

by DEENA METZGER

Perhaps never before in the history of humankind has the disparity between Indigenous mind and Western mind been more on the pulse of what we must pay attention to in order to insure our survival. Deena Metzger has written a novel in which two people, who are from each side of this polarity, begin a loving relationship. Sandra Birdswell is a student of climatology with an uncanny ability to sense weather events. Her mother, who died in childbirth, is a mystery to her. Her father, John, is a Reservation doctor who afterwards raises her despite his limitations and obligations. She first meets Terrence, a Native man and a professor of climatology, at her university classes. Years later, they are drawn together by the powerful forces of their love, for the Earth, for each other, and their mutual need to seek out the broken links of their family histories. When the UN report on climate change is released in 2007, the reality of the effects of the Anthropocene era sends a shock wave through both their lives. Their relationship to each other and to the elementals they are so intimate with-lightning, thunder, rain, mountain-brings them deeply and violently into a quest to live their lives in ways that disengage from colonial mind, the same mind that brought devastation to the Native peoples, and now brings all of humanity to the brink of extinction. Through their love of and deeply felt intuitive connection to the Earth, they each go to the brink of death to find their truth, to gain strength and wisdom.

—Midwest Book Review

“Original, exceptional, inherently fascinating, and one of those all too rare novels that will linger in the mind and memory long after it has been finished and set back upon the shelf, “A Rain of Night Birds” by Deena Metzger is a truly exceptional and highly recommended addition to community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that “A Rain of Night Birds” is also available in a Kindle format ($9.99).”

—Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and the forthcoming novel Darwin’s Ghosts

“Now more than ever, we need to read, and then read again, Deena Metzger’s new novel.”

-Lori A. May, Rattle

“For each moment of ruin, Metzger offers suggestions for reviving beauty.”

Deena Metzger is a radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for 50 years and a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleaguered world. She has written eight works of fiction, five poetry collections, several plays and works of non-fiction. Her books examine the tragic failure of contemporary culture and provide guidance for personal, political, environmental and spiritual healing. Her novel La Negra y Blanca won the 2012 Oakland Pen Award and her Warrior Poster photograph is celebrated around the world as a testament to a woman’s triumph over breast cancer. Deena has also been actively engaged in integrating Indigenous wisdom and medicine practices into contemporary culture through her projects ReVisioning Medicine, the Literature of Restoration, Daré and the 19 Ways Training for the 5th World. Deena lives at the end of the road in Topanga, California.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A RAIN OF NIGHT BIRDS

— Eduardo Duran, author of Native American Postcolonial Psychology

“The story told by Deena Metzger has deep and mysterious meanings. I believe that what is being told here is the . . . prescription for healing our personal and collective split.”

— Stan Rushworth, author of Going to Water

“It gives no easy answers, but immerses us in an intimate and far-reaching world that requires one of the most difficult challenges we’ll ever face, a profound shift of intention toward all that lives.”

— Regina O'Melveny, author of The Book of Madness and Cures

“Every step of the way Deena keeps faith with the soul-work that must be done, with the heartbreaking questions of climate change and devastation, with the vital Indigenous relations to Earth and Sky, and with the essential healing imperative of Western medicine, Do no harm.”

— Carolyn Brigit Flynn, author of Communion: In Praise of the Sacred Earth and editor of Sisters Singing

“A momentous and needed confrontation between indigenous knowledge and the modern scientific mind.”

A Rain of Night Birds is now available on Amazon. You can also purchase A Rain of Night Birds from Book Clearing House, 800-431-1579 or visit their website or Bookshop.org to order through your favorite independent bookstore.

FICTION/LITERARY | Trade Paperback | Hand to Hand Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-998344-30-0 | 6 x 9 | Pages: 280 | $18.95

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