<p>This Little Jackdaw is my adaptation of ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims’, an eighteenth century poem written by Richard Harris Barham. In my interpretation, the imagery is stripped back, the use of marks, smudges and flourishes threaded throughout the book in one moment simply suggest a place to perch and in another become the violent and excessive curse delivered to the bird, thus distilling the narrative right back to its most basic elements. In this presentation I explore the layering of parody and adaptation on adaptation, intertwined with personal memory and present experience. The circumstances of my recalling of the poem during a long period of recuperation after surgery in 2017 are vital to my own process of interpretation. The Jackdaw’s fate became my own: a broken bird (my pre-op/post-op self) had a curse lifted (cancer removed and a scar healed).</p>