Do you think the impulse to pour yourself into the hawk after your father's death came in part from having learned and internalized older narratives of 'running to the wild to escape. JG: The complicated relationship between instinct and training/social conditioning is something you explore throughout the book. She's buried on one of the hillsides over which she used to fly. I'm very sad to say Mabel died suddenly a few years ago of a fluke fungal infection called Aspergillosis that's been the bane of goshawkers for centuries and kills many wild hawks too. I edited the hell out of most of the prose, but the sections about the hawk what she was like, how she flew and hunted they were written fast and hardly edited at all. Short sentences to capture her world as a series of fleeting, present moments lyrical passages to suggest the strangeness of the landscape through the eyes of a hawk. Back then I wanted to assume her rapturous, wordless, hawkish mind, and I tried, as I wrote, to match my style to that imagined subjectivity. Grief does strange things to the workings of memory. Helen Macdonald: Writing about her was much easier than writing about my father's death, my family, or myself! I can recall my time with her that year with crystalline clarity. What was it like to write about her, years later, in such detail?

Julie Goldberg: Part of the magic of H is for Hawk is how alive your goshawk Mabel becomesin her body and moods, in her power and playfulness.

Julie Goldberg, on behalf of the Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Helen Macdonal about her book H Is for Hawk(Grove Press), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2015 NBCC Awards. Helen Macdonald talks about her memoir H is for Hawk, the complicated relationship between instinct and training, dealing with grief, experiencing wilderness and much else.

Helen macdonald