I bought this lovely book last summer while on a mini-retreat in Port Townsend. Then, as I often do, I mislaid the book and didn’t read it. The other day, a friend asked if I wanted to see Terry Tempest Williams with her at the Mount Baker Theatre in Bellingham (tonight!). Despite my usual crazy-busy schedule, I said yes. She will be talking about her new book, but I found my copy of When Women Were Birds and began reading it again.

The subtitle, Fifty-four Variations on Voice, is one of the aspects of this book that first drew me to it. And it doesn’t disappoint. It’s a a holder of stories: Terry Tempest Williams’ ancestors, especially her mother, are here; writer progenitors; the voices of birds; the voice of myths, both familiar and unfamiliar, domestic and international.

The concept behind the book is the gift of Williams’ mother’s journals to her, journals that turned out to be blank. When Women Were Birds seems to include everything Williams has read, and everything she reads between the lines (as it were) of what she has been denied. It’s a gift of interpretation, and a faithful rendering of a woman’s own complex and multi-vocal life. It is the story of a woman finding her voice.

“Rufous-sided towhees scratched in the understory of last year’s leaves; lazuli buntings were turquoise exclamation marks singing in a canopy of green; and blue-gray gnatcatchers became commas in a ongoing narrative of wild nature.”

Williams’ reverence for landscape is well known. Here, she reminds me that we are, each of us, an interpreter of our experience, of all that comes before us, and all that we co-exist with. What if we were reverent instead of defensive? What if we stopped and felt wonder, instead of looking for something to buy, or denounce, or attack? Reading this book, I’m reminded of the miracle of my own existence.

“I had been reading The Tongue Snatchers, by the French writer Claudine Herrmann. She focuses on the French verb voler, which means ‘to fly’ or ‘to steal,’ the two paths traditionally available to women when we speak. We either flee and disappear or steal, adopt, and adapt to the dominant language of men, often at our own expense. Herrmann offers another route, that of the ‘Mother Tongue,’ the voice with an authentic vernacular akin to our experiences, fierce and compassionate at once; the voice as a knife that can slice, carve, or cut, shape, sculpt, or stab.”

Whenever I feel the impulse to buy several copies of a book and distribute it to all of my friends, I come here instead. You’re welcome.

 

 

 

This picture of my mother’s family hung on the wall of my childhood home, and I saw it in many of the houses I visited frequently as a child. Mom is about fifteen years old here, the first girl on the left in the front row, sitting beside her father. All told, my grandparents had fifteen children. One died as an infant; the others grew up to have families of their own. My mother was the eleventh child, daughter number ten. She often joked that she didn’t have friends, she had sisters, and because I grew up on the family farm in southwest Washington, where my mother was born, I knew this reality intimately. My grandparents lived in a house a little ways down the creek, a house which their sons and sons-in-law built.I had cousins who were only a year or two younger than Mom, and their children were my age-mates. Who needed friends, when I had so many cousins?

When my Aunt Aronda died in March, at the age of 94 (she is to the left of the oldest brother, in the back row), it left us with only six of the original siblings. Aunt Aronda’s death reminded me of how much loss my mother has endured in recent years. And I felt keenly my own loss.

Losing my aunt, who took me in when I was twenty and couldn’t figure out how to leave home, a woman who I continued to visit and call over the years, felt especially hard. She was smart and always full of news. “Sharp as a tack,” as we say. Since my mother’s decline began a few years back, I had gotten into a habit of telling her she was my role model. She liked to wake up in the morning and sit outside with a cup of coffee. She liked to talk on the phone. And she still liked to read, which is just one thing among many that my mother has lost.

At 94, I would like to still be getting up every morning and writing. No matter what I write about, I know I’ll keep circling back to that over-populated childhood, and that farm that nurtured so many childhoods besides my own.