“Susan Spangler has created something unique in The Year of the Bird. She has a startling and refreshing voice, that sings next to her beautiful illustrations. The reader is drawn in by the tragic and comic details of daily life, often simultaneously, and we are transported and uplifted. Buy this book.”

Patty Dann, author of Mermaids and The Goldfish Went on Vacation

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Inspiring & funny, harrowing & hopeful, The Year of the Bird (TRUE STORIES IN PICTURES & WORDS) is about the surprises life can dish up. Illness, death and grief. Midnight trips to the ER. Airplanes crashing into towers on a bright blue morning that’s also your grandson’s seventh birthday. Those kinds of surprises.

It’s also about the things that keep you sane. Violets in the kitchen window. The first day of spring. Your own love story. The kinds of things that help you put one foot in front of the other- even when you’re not sure where they’re taking you. This powerful graphic journal recalls “a year that actually began three years ago.” The words & pictures are snapshots of life- bright flashes of moments remembered. The Year of the Bird is about family, about finding words, finding meaning, finding strength to go on. It’s about holding on and letting go. It’s a book to share with your friends and to keep in your heart.

Beautifully written and illustrated by Susan Spangler, this book is a masterpiece of feeling, color and word that will transport the reader into a better place.

December 2001
year of the bird

This is the year I discovered my husband, George, loves a bird.

All this time together—pets, daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren—
I thought I had his number: no more surprises. Hah! My mistake, as I should have realized when this same man who used to muse about becoming a vegan decided that a diet of meat and cheese was just the thing for him.

Well, somehow all I managed to learn from that was that he really does love meat. And cheese.

This bird came out of nowhere.

Actually, not nowhere.

Actually, the playground, sitting on a branch. Clearly not a creature native to the temperate zone, but a lost pet, flown the coop.  Our daughter, Jenny, is pushing her kids on the swings when the bird catches her eye. She clucks to it, holds out her finger, the bird hops aboard, and, just like she’s done since she was a kid, she brings it home—the latest in a long line of rescued critters, protected in boxes or the back yard until their owners show up to claim them.
Jenny’s friend, Gary, a man who loves birds, brings over a cage and bird food and a book about cockatiels, which this one, it turns out, is.

Susan Spangler is an award-winning graphic designer and illustrator, digital painter and writer in Gaithersburg, MD. She’s always been drawn to stories and snapshots – the moment captured and the feeling that the carefully observed details of a moment – pictures and word, can reveal something of its essence.

Drawing with a mouse on a Mac, she often uses her snapshots as reference, in the same way that they’re used as the inspiration for hand-drawn art. The pictures and words in this book are all about her daily life – family, home, memories and dreams.

From her work illustrating Ray Watt’s book, Old Age and Three Virtual Remissions, Spangler said, “Drawing is almost as mysterious as dreaming. Varying parts observation, thought, and imagination; a collaboration of the eye and the hand, the mind and the body. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and draw-ers have to draw. Who knows why? And how do you know when a drawing is done? It just feels complete.”

Susan Spangler  and her husband, George, have two grown daughters and four grandchildren. They share their home with a young dog, an old cat and fluctuating numbers of fish and kids.

To see samples of her work, visit Susan Spangler’s website at susanspangler.com