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When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice

Terry Tempest Williams

Paperback | Pages: 228 pages

Rating: 4.16 | 5479 Users | 939 Reviews

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Title	:	When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice
Author	:	Terry Tempest Williams
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 228 pages
Published	:	February 26th 2013 by Picador USA (first published April 10th 2012)
Categories	:	Nonfiction. Autobiography. Memoir. Feminism. Writing. Essays. Poetry. Biography. Environment. Nature

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I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone. This is what Terry Tempest Williams' mother, the matriarch of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her a week before she died. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock to discover that the three shelves of journals were all blank. In fifty-four short chapters, Williams recounts memories of her mother, ponders her own Mormon faith, and contemplates the notion of absence in art and in our world. When Women Were Birds is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?

Point Books Supposing When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice

ISBN:	1250024110 (ISBN13: 9781250024114)
Edition Language:	English

Rating Regarding Books When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice

Ratings: 4.16 From 5479 Users | 939 Reviews

Criticism Regarding Books When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice

Gorgeous prose. I gulped this one down. Some highlights:"These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.""She was a Coyote, a trickster, a woman deflecting an interest in her to an interest in others. In my mother's presence, you were heard. And she always left knowing a lot more about you than you knew about her. She preferred it that way. She was warm and

In recent years, Terry Tempest Williams has written about patriotism and democracy in America, Italian mosaics, the Sundance Film Festival, Rwandan genocide and Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece, The Garden of Delights. Not bad for a so-called nature writer. In her latest book When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, the author returns to some of the themes found in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, her highly-regarded 1991 environmental

Midway through When Women Were Birds, the author describes a kind of writing she does when she wants to probe her mind's own secrets. She writes a sentence, raw and private, then immediately traces a new sentence over the top of it, and then another on top of that, line after line, layer after layer, until she's left with a multi-textured palimpsest of truth, obscured. She explains: "My own hand, with pen in place, bushwhacks through my psyche, cutting through the dense understory of random

I have been utterly captivated by this book. "My mother left me all her journals, and they were all blank." I'm not sure whether this is a memoir, or a meditation, or a environmental journal, or some kind of unconventional feminist manifesto. A woman searches for her voice, silenced by familial expectations, patriarchal religion, and both cultural and personal insecurities. It reads like an exquisite prose poem, but in other ways it's a wild ride between voice and silence, home and wilderness,

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

What am amazing book. The form of this book is spirals and a seeming chaos of ideas, but what emerges is a deep, textured whole. What is this book about? Mothers, daughters, women, birds, intuition, voice, ecology, silence, wilderness, death and life and growth. As I was listening I felt at first that Terry was picking wildflowers that come together to make a beautiful bouquet, but then i revised this perception; it is more like she is planting a meadow of wildflowers one at a time randomly.

Before I even started reading the book I was struck by the physical beauty of it (Picador paperback version). The way it felt to hold it in my hands. I wanted to know which bird feather pattern was on the cover. Is it from an owl? A falcon? It's significance is one of the mysteries that still linger for me. Much like the blank pages in the back of the book are a reminder of her mother's journals and all they said by not saying anything. These are things you would miss on an e-reader.Spoiler