PRINTColumbia author Bridget Bufford releases Cemetery Bird
From fighting fires to writing about them, local author brings life to her fiction
Christopher Parks
September 12, 2011 | 12:00 a.m. CST
The first thing Bridget Bufford, 53, says a person needs to know about her is that she’s a writer.
It’s not easy to tell that from the sunspots and freckles that dot her deeply tanned arms. It’s much easier to see that she spends her working days as a landscaper. She’s quiet and self-contained, and when she speaks, she does so slowly and thoughtfully, in an almost laconic tone. Bufford says she is not a people person. Flowers and plants are less stressful.
WHERE: Get Lost Bookshop
WHEN: Sept. 15, 7 p.m.
COST: Free to attend; $15 for the book (available at Get Lost)
CALL: 442-3330
With her abundant pepper-gray hair that nearly obscures her ears and falls in cowlicks over her forehead and wide-set oval glasses, she cuts an unintimidating figure. But when she says she’s a writer, the Missouri native proclaims it with a self-assuredness that reveals how excited she is about the recent release of her second novel, Cemetery Bird. Bufford had to wait almost six years to see the work in print.
On the surface, the novel’s protagonist parallels the author in many ways. Cemetery Bird revolves around Jay Aubuchon, a woman who moves from Missouri to Arizona after high school to fight forest fires, just as Bufford did as a firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. A career-ending injury brings Aubuchon back to the fictional town of White Oak, Mo., where she becomes the caretaker of her nephew who has autism.
Just as she learned about fighting fires firsthand, Bufford has garnered much of her knowledge about caring for children with special needs from personal experience. She worked as a physical therapist in 1983, six years after she moved back to Missouri.
Despite the parallels between author and protagonist, Bufford says Cemetery Bird is not about her or her own experiences. “I’d like readers to see that this is a book about redemption,” she says. “It’s not so much about autism, mental illness and addiction.”
“It was captivating to encounter a character who, while teaching the disabled characters life skills, lacked the coping mechanism required to deal with her demons,” says Lily Richards, Bufford’s editor at Casperian Books.
Local poet Marta Ferguson says Bufford’s assorted professions — Bufford has also worked in carpentry, in a group home, in a nursing home and in clinical physical therapy — give the author’s work an unsurpassable grittiness and realism. “In all of her work, the common thread is that the world she evokes is palpably real,” Ferguson says.
In Bufford’s first novel, Minus One: A Twelve-Step Journey, which was published in 2004, Bufford worked with a terrain that she knows well because of her personal recovery from drug and alcohol addiction in the ’80s.
“Some of the absolute worst periods of my life are something I mine for my writing,” Bufford says. “They’re not feel-good stories at all, but I think there’s a veiled sense of hope.”
Although Cemetery Bird was completed in 2005, Bufford had at one point all but given up on finding a publisher for the novel. It was only last year that the manuscript was picked up by Casperian, a small independent publisher of trade fiction based in Sacremento, Calif.
“We very much enjoyed encountering a female protagonist who is both incredibly strong and incredibly flawed, and so unlike many other female characters in contemporary fiction,” Richards says.
Although it might have taken Bufford longer than expected to find a publisher with Richards’ enthusiasm for the manuscript, those who know her writing well say Cemetery Bird far surpasses the author’s first novel. “This book is much bigger in its scope, and it’s a much more mature piece,” says Jane Ellen Ibur, Bufford’s longtime friend. “I feel like she’s really hit her stride with this.”
Stride might not be the word Bufford would choose. She says her writing will keep getting better and that she is hoping a day will come when writing will pay her bills. Then the only garden she’ll tend will be her own.
