Shared and shifting land(scapes): making memoir and personal ecology in the pajarito journals of Peggy Pond Church.(Critical essay)

Places, too, pretend to be blank, though beneath any place is everything that has ever happened there.... To write such a place is not, as it first might seem, simply to inscribe the place onto a page.... In practice, to write a place is to lay across it a skin, a membrane of text and experience.

The skin is there to hold the stories of the place in place, transforming the illegible (because shapeless) land into a storied landscape. Land becomes landscape once humans have touched it-- once it contains and embodies our stories. Norma Tilden, "Stratigraphies: Writing a Suspect ...

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