I just returned from a 2 week trip to the Pacific Northwest for a graduate school residency. Out on Whidbey island, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound, I went on long walks along the coast and took the ferry to Port Townsend, a quaint port town with some good bookshops. (I’m including some photos I took so you can enjoy the views, too.)
At one such shop, I bought Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds. William’s has worked throughout her career as an environmental activist and as a result, much of her work focuses on our relationship with the natural world. However, in When Women Were Birds, Williams focuses on her relationship with her family, her mother in particular.
Upon her death, Terry Tempest Williams’ mother left her all of her journals. The journals were all blank. Spurred on by this mysterious silence on the page, Williams, in 54 small essays, explores voice–what it means to both speak and be silent. With poetic prose, she ventures into her relationship with her mother, her Mormon faith, and her own writing voice.
Even the beautiful Washington coast couldn’t pull me away from this book, and I highly recommend it to mothers and daughters, wives, artists, and women of faith. Terry Tempest Williams charts the female coming-of-age with poignancy and language that is sure to curl your toes.
Here’s one of the shorter essays:
Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen a home and the bird-words are calmed into an arts poetica. The women in my family didn’t always agree, but it was in their comp
any I felt inspired and safe.
What is birdsong but ‘truth in rehearsal’?
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