Like birds blown off course in a great storm, the characters in these connected stories need a place to roost—a place to settle long enough to learn the secrets of their own hearts. They find that place in fictional Ambler County, North Carolina, by the banks of the Sissipahaw River.  From a heartbroken city girl to a runaway bride, from an old-timer with regrets to a Yankee retiree, from a New Age farmer to an African American midwife, from an English explorer to an Eno Indian —all are looking for a way to connect, a way to heal, a way home.

Praise for Accidental Birds of the Carolinas

“Hudson’s prose is pure as birdsong.These fine stories of change and discovery are a field guide to the human species in transition.”

  — Doris Betts, author of Beasts of the Southern Wild and Souls Raised from the Dead

"These are truly great stories…each voice so distinct, each “bird” so lost, so misplaced, so in need of someone to listen to their calls, their natural music.”  

  — Susan Ketchin, author of The Christ-Haunted Landscape

“The  journeys of these lost characters overlap and echo back in ways that leave the reader both heartbroken and uplifted.” 

  — Jill McCorkle, author of Going Away Shoes

" 'It takes no time at all to fall in love with such a place, if you are paying attention,' says Elizabeth in the first of these seven extraordinary stories (and one novella). The same can be said for this collection: Pay attention and you will fall in love." 

  — Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC

“A fiction writer of considerable craft, and her interplay of personality, nature and fate brings Thomas Hardy to mind.” 

  — Ben Steelman, Wilmington Star-News

About the Author

Marjorie Hudson was born in a small town in Illinois, grew up in Washington, D.C., and now writes and lives in Chatham County, North Carolina. She is author of Accidental Birds of the Carolinas, a PEN/Hemingway Honorable Mention, and Searching for Virginia Dare, a North Carolina Arts Council Notable Book, just released in an expanded edition from Press 53.

Recipient of two Pushcart Special Mentions and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship , Hudson has published stories, essays, and poems in 5 anthologies and many magazines and journals. She writes on topics ranging from pond fishing to Sufi dancing, from extraordinary dogs to English explorers, from the artist’s life to the life of the monarch butterfly. Much of her work explores the links between history, the human spirit, and the natural world, and reviewers have compared her work to that of Thomas Hardy and Alice Munro.

Hudson is a graduate of American University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. She teaches fiction and nonfiction writing and lectures for the NC Humanities Council Road Scholars on history and creative writing technique. 

www.marjoriehudson.com/accidentalbirds

www.kitchentablewriters.wordpress.com

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