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Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Vintage Paperback, 1991) On the first page of Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams provides us with a fact of her life: at thirty-four, she is the matriarch of her family. Refuge is the personal, intimate, and also universal journey into loss and death that Williams took when her mother, and then her grandmother, died of cancer. Simultaneously, another beloved piece of her world also vanished: the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge disappeared under the flooding waters of Great Salt Lake. Williams is a writer rooted in place. Raised a Mormon in Utah, the natural world has become her church as an adult. She writes in a language saturated with sky, desert, stone and the life that inhabits this landscape. Her grandmother had taken her to the refuge as a girl and now she knows its every recess with the intimacy of a lover. The death of her mother echoes off the drowning of the wetlands as all that orients her within her world shifts. What is most striking in Refuge is how Williams weaves the two tragic narratives together. It is a simple structure - chapters named after the birds of the Bear River Refuge, subheadings showing the rising and then falling of the lake - but the poetic prose perfectly renders the heart of a woman undergoing an unbearable loss. There are excerpts from her journal, letters from her grandmother, Tempest women reading poems by Rainier Maria Rilke and Wendell Berry to each other. Williams deconstructs her dreams and searches for meaning everywhere. Within the refuge, birds are birds, and something altogether more. Her style can make the reading seem disjointed or incoherent to more literal readers, but for those who relate to her connection to the natural world or the way cancer devastates families, this will be a book of solace. Williams also doesn't shy from the writer's ability to be an activist, using her words to enact change in the world. In an epilogue that was added as an afterthought, Williams draws a connection between the atomic bomb testing she experienced as a girl in Utah between 1957 and 1971 and the fact that most of the women in her family are dead from cancer. She explains that Mormons are raised to be obedient and quiet and duly respectful of authority and then rejects the notion. She is fully engaged in actively protecting the wildlands of the West. She edited Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, which President Clinton claimed, "made a difference" as he dedicated the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. Towards the end of Refuge, she joins a protest at the Nevada Test Site armed with her weapons: a pen and pad tucked into her boot. Her other work includes An Unspoken Hunger and Leap as well as articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, Outside, Audubon, and Orion. She was named one of Utne Magazine's 100 Visionaries, and The Center for the American West chose her for the 2005 Wallace Stegner Award. MORE: More information and reviews |
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