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

Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies, September, 2006 by Armitage, Shelley

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 Terrain" (1) I'm an instinctive trail-follower. There's nothing I've loved better to do since I was "going-on-eleven" and went to live on the Pajarito Plateau. It was full of Indian...