When A Sparrow Falls

When A Sparrow Falls: Autumn Reflections on Life, Death, and Love, Rebecca Drouilhet's fourth book, explores life and change in all its seasons. An award-winning and oft-published author of the American South, Rebecca shares her wisdom and love in beautifully crafted stories and poems.

This book, begun in late summer 2024, was originally designed as a book of story poems, but her writing was interrupted by the sudden, unexpected death of Robert Michael Christopher Drouilhet, Rebecca's treasured husband of many years who died on September 1 of that year just as autumn began.

When A Sparrow Falls, the book that followed, contains story poems and much more, as Rebecca spins literary art into a web of poetry and philosophy that celebrates life, mourns death and reminds us, with her zanier pieces to laugh, love and hope in every season of life.

As in her last book, Wings Crossing the Moon, Rebecca invents a new poetry form which she shares here, a novel tanka form which she has named Flash Tanka. Flash Tanka combines Flash Fiction (stories of about 500 words or less) with the Japanese-derived 5-line English language tanka, and Rebecca writes using this combination to pen stories of mythology, sci-fi and magical realism. Also included are humorous poetry sequences, fine haiku and beautiful stand-alone tanka poems as well as one original short story that ties her themes together just before its poignant ending. Find a quiet spot to feed the sparrows, nurture your heart and hear the whispers of the autumn wind telling you wisdom and life are pretty good friends, and our old legends, our favorite ghosts.

---

Other Poetry Forms and Techniques

In this book, Rebecca applies a technique called Story Bookending - which has not traditionally been used with tanka prose stories - to lay the groundwork and provide a satisfying denouement that resonates with the book's central themes. Story Bookending is used to establish the book's initial tone and ultimately highlight how the characters change over time.

Another tanka form that Rebecca has invented and introduced here, which she calls Flash Tanka, is a combination of Flash Fiction (a prose story of five hundred words or so) and one or more tanka interspersed among the prose to create imagistic resonance and expand the prose.

Rebecca introduces here another new form for the first time that she has named Myth Tanka Prose - as seen in the tanka prose stories titled A History of Tomorrow, Gumbo, and Silver Needles. In these Myth Tanka Prose, the tanka are expanded and fuller than most tanka seen today. Both these and the prose often include a subtle type of rhyme and rhythm, like someone chanting the story in an oral tradition - as well as features of fairy tale, Magical Realism, Impossible Realism, and other fanciful or serendipitous ideation to create a magical feel for the reader.