Will I love Refuge?

Tracing the thread of mystery and meaning through our lives can be so hard! Here’s a trick of the memoir trade: The world has a tendency to give us the metaphors we most need.

When I first read Terry Tempest Williams’ book, I was amazed by the parallels she drew between threats to her beloved Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, her family history of breast cancer, and her soul’s experiences in the Mormon church. Now, I know the perfect images to illustrate our inner world are always in plain sight. This is beautiful and enduring.

Terry Tempest Williams is a Utah-based poet and naturalist who writes in this book about her mother's devastating cancer diagnosis and the rising of the Great South Lake in 1983, which was endangering the bird population by which Terry measured her life.

The way she interweaves the human world with the natural world and how interconnected everything is, in some ways, in my memory, reminds me of the same power Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast had for me, in that I was mesmerized out of my misery by the incredibly specific descriptions of sights and sounds and even smells.

Her mother’s… show more.

The book, which I first read as an assignment in a college class, was my first introduction to both personal narrative and nature writing, and I was hooked. I decided right then and there that I wanted to explore the natural world and write about it when I grew up.

I was—and still am—enamored by Williams’s descriptions of wild birds, the desert landscape around Great Salt Lake, and the solace she derived from the natural world as she faced her mother’s and grandmother’s illnesses. Williams’ lyrical writing and deep knowledge of and love for her home landscape are a constant… show more.

Reading Terry Tempest Williams’ book brought me an intimate awareness of the magical beauty of The Great Salt Lake ecosystem and its abundant, fascinating bird life, while at the same time, the book educated me about the long-term impacts on both wildlife and human life from all who lived downwind of the 1950’s Western nuclear weapons testing and development.

I loved the themes of wild bird habitats and migratory bird refuges that ran throughout the book, and I truly felt the emotive connection that Williams created between wild birds and human lives.

The honesty about increased cancer rates and the… show more.

One of the things I love about his book is that Ms. Williams is a woman with a huge heart, who isn’t scared to write it down on paper. As a writer, I know how challenging it can be to bare yourself so deeply.

This story chronicles events over a two-year period when the Great Salt Lake rose and flooded wildlife habitats. She writes about the north end of the Great Salt Lake with such a feeling that she made me love that part of the earth, a place I’d never been.

She describes it with emotion that made me… show more.

Finishing out the nonfiction—though I leave thousands undiscussed here—is Terry Tempest Williams’ seminal Refuge: An Unnatural History of Place. Bold and original in its direct comparisons between the personal and the ecological, the memoir chronicles the deterioration of Williams’ beloved mother, Diane Tempest, to ovarian cancer at the same time their shared landscape, the Bear River marshes of the Great Salt Lake where three generations of the Tempest had gloried in birding expeditions, were succumbing to record flooding. The memoir also details the exposure of Williams and her mother—her entire family—to radioactive fallout from the U.S. government’s atomic testing… show more.

Since Virgil’s Georgics, nature writing has largely consisted of dispatches of pastoral splendor to soothe the jangled urban soul. It tended to be nostalgic for a lost Arcadia, some former, purer world. Writing about the sky, it didn’t mention the contrails. In a time of mass extinction and climate change, to remain relevant, nature writing needed to address the actual situation, but how to do it without being so depressing no one would read it? Terry Tempest Williams made this shift in a profound and beautiful way with this first book, edited by the late Dan Frank. How Williams… show more.