Refuge

Terry Tempest Williams starts her narration with its relation to herself. She puts her reader in the car with her, and takes him on twists and turns that pass by temples and tabernacles and big city life. She allows him to see what she sees, and to understand the gist of her background.

When she stops at the lake she transitions to speak about this central aspect. For pages she tells of the ebb and flow of the lake, as it recedes and expands yearly. Williams describes this all primarily through quantitative and factual language. This is not the time for entertaining narration but for background evidence to make her more reliable as a writer. The reader trusts her because she has clearly done her research, but he is also intrigued to see what she will say next. Her flow is a typical one, and the reader knows that the true story will soon follow.

It does. Williams proceeds then to narrate her experiences with the burrowing owls at the Bird Refuge that she says you can "gauge your life by". She goes into a block about the rage she feels at their destruction and then her mother's reaction to her emotional outburst, followed by her trips with her grandmother.

Williams lets her characters' actions speak for themselves. They are introduced in a way that suggests their presence will continue in her tale. Each of her sections has some sort of beginning and end, a story in and among itself, but it also leads into something further. She pushes the reader into the next section, but gives him a chance to breath and let in all that he has read thus far. She intermingles her own life with the natural life surrounding her. She writes Refuge as though it is a braid made of strings of beads, one onto another and all intertwining.