It’s late on the 25th day of Women’s History Month, and from amongst the crowd of worthy women and organizations on lists I wrote as I contemplated a month of daily tributes, I’m choosing Terry Tempest Williams. Reading her memoir, Refuge, in 1993, inspired me on so many levels. In luminous prose, she wrote of her mother’s slow death from breast cancer, the loss of habitat of the birds of the Great Salt Lake, and the dark legacy of patriarchy and nuclear testing.
Almost twenty years later, as I struggled to complete the catalog of my mother’s art, I heard Terry Tempest Williams had a new book, and I couldn’t believe it was a book about her mother — another one — only this second one took her twenty-five years to write. Her mother had left a difficult legacy: scores of blank journals. I knew I must go to her reading at the Philadelphia Free Library that week.
As soon as I arrived, I bought the book, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, and began reading. When she spoke of years of approach and retreat, revision and attempts at making sense of the blank journals, I felt emboldened. She wrote on her mother’s blank journals, not just about them. She worked through layers of questions, and left others remain. I was enthralled by her speaking, but also pulled to the words on the pages of the book. Holding it in my hands was like sustenance. If the author of Refuge needed decades to process and write about her mother, it was all right that I’d spent twelve years on mine.
I’m pulled back in by sentences like these:
“I will say it is so: My mother’s voice is a lullaby in my cells. When I am still, my body feels her breathing.
“My mother left me her journals, and all her journals were blank.”
Terry Tempest Williams has authored fourteen books, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She is an ardent defender of wildlife and the environment, in addition to her literary contribution to peace, spirituality, and social justice.
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I was touched by this post Jan. As you know, my mother is living, although quite elderly and becoming more frail (somehow she took a tumble two days ago and hit her head with an audible thump – banged her knee as well – no injuries. She is also remarkably resilient). I have packed and repacked her belongings across several moves these past few years, and have seen no journals. But this does not surprise me; my mother is more of an oral historian. The tales she tells of her early years – working as a waitress at the Effert Diner, or sneaking into the closet in her grandparents farmhouse to find and consume her Easter basket when she was bedridden with typhoid fever – are nonembellished and sparkling still. Your writing, and indeed your Awesome Daughters project has inspired me to collect these stories on my tape recorder.
So glad to share this mother-daughter journey with you, JoAnne, and I hope you can record those stories soon, and ask questions now while you can. She may surprise you. I look forward to hearing more . . .