Why am I passionate about this?
I felt, after the AIDS crisis, as if I had been one person before it and another after it. I lost so many friends, collaborators, colleagues, and then finally, my own lover, I felt like the shell-shocked survivor of a war after it at least abated somewhat. Then my two sisters and both my parents died, and I became someone whose topic, no matter how veiled it is, is grief and loss. I am a living coffin on its way to a funeral to the sound of a cortège I composed.
Ricky's book list on saving my life when I was miserable
Why did Ricky love this book?
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 illness and the tragedy that was occurring in the lake were somehow embroidered together to feel like the same story. When my opera The Grapes of Wrath premiered in Utah in 2008, it was as if Terry’s exquisite book had iconized the state for me. Coincidentally, it was Mark Doty…
6 authors picked Refuge as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms…