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Coming May 2nd, 2005
President’s Speakers Series Spring Lecturer!
Terry Tempest Williams, the author of our Spring Quarter common text,
Refuge, will be here Monday, May 2nd. Terry Tempest Williams has offered
to do a two-hour Question & Answer session about her book for students the
morning of May 2nd in the S.C.C. Center for the Humanities. (The hours will most
likely be 9:30 and 10:30am; confirmation of the Q & A times, as well as
additional information and curriculum connections pertinent to English 101
students, will be sent out as soon as possible. Instructor copies of Refuge
will be available sometime in March).
Terry Tempest Williams will also be speaking on campus the evening of May 2nd
for the S.C.C. community and the Spokane community at large. See the S.C.C.
website below for further information about her evening lecture.
The President’s Speakers Series committee and the S.C.C. English department
are pleased to offer this wonderful opportunity for our students!
Check out:
● The link on our SCC President’s Speaker Series website promoting TTW’s
visit:
http://sites.scc.spokane.edu/Speakers/?v=speakers_TWilliams
● The most comprehensive website on any news/reviews/articles relating to TTW:
http://www.coyoteclan.com/
● The review from Amazon.com on Refuge, our Spring Quarter 101 Common Text:
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The only constants in nature are change and death. Terry Tempest Williams, a
naturalist and writer from northern Utah, has seen her share of both. The pages
of Refuge resound with the deaths of her mother and grandmother and other women
from cancer, the result of the American government's ongoing nuclear-weapons
tests in the nearby Nevada desert. You won't find the episode in the standard
history textbooks; the Feds wouldn't admit to conducting the tests until women
and men in Utah, Nevada, and northwestern Arizona took the matter to court in
the mid-1980s, and by then thousands of Americans had fallen victim to official
technology. Parallel to her account of this devastation, Williams describes
changes in bird life at the sanctuaries dotting the shores of the Great Salt
Lake as water levels rose during the unusually wet early 1980s and threatened
the nesting grounds of dozens of species. In this world of shattered eggs and
drowned shorebirds, Williams reckons with the meaning of life, alternating
despair and joy.
Product Description:
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 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
tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that
has become a classic.
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