| This project focuses on the role that landscape plays in contemporary women's life writing of the western United States and how it is integrally tied to the female life writer's sense of identity. Using Mary Clearman Blew's Balsamroot, Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, and my own memoir piece, Looking Back, I examined the ways that landscape not only functions as a setting for the action in these contemporary life writing texts, but additionally works as an impetus for the texts. Further, as these texts were considered in depth, it became clear that for female memoirists, their writing was working as a space of healing as they were brought to their projects, in part, to make sense of the divisive and painful events that created conflict within them. Additionally, the project explores similarities in how the female body is portrayed in these texts and how it is connected to landscape and identity as an aspect of the healing process. Finally, the project is concerned with the ways that story works to bridge a writer and her landscape and a writer and her family. |
