Sacred Sites and Geographies

This chapter’s reflection on an array of sacred sites and geographies opens with commentary on spatially rooted orientations of the genius loci as variously represented in texts by Marilynne Robinson, Thoreau, Richard Tillinghast, Black Elk, Melville, and others. Writers have often envisioned both watercourses and mountains as vehicles of spirited presence. And the striking liminality of place dramatized in Melville’s Moby-Dick becomes inseparable from that novel’s deep-diving interrogation of the world’s potentially sacred character. The hallowed aura of American battlegrounds and burial grounds is memorably confirmed through the ritualizing rhetoric of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Wastelands, too, contain a spiritual fecundity variously evoked in nonfictional writings by Ed Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and Kathleen Norris. Even a metropolis like New York can be envisioned as a scene of grace-amid-struggle in writings by Dorothy Day, James Baldwin, and Alfred Kazin—from the respective faith-inspired standpoints of Roman Catholicism, disaffected Protestant Christianity, and Judaism.

The poetics of restoring Glen Canyon: the ‘desert imagination’ of Ellen Meloy and Terry Tempest Williams

There has been a literary tradition supporting the restoration of Glen Canyon in southern Utah ever since construction began on Glen Canyon Dam in the late 1950s, and the canyons began to disappear behind the rising waters of Lake Powell. While some of Glen Canyon’s literary protagonists put forward a strong political and anarchical refrain for a ‘Glen Canyon restored’, this article considers those writers and texts that instead look to the power of appeals to emotion in defense of the desert. In particular, this article considers the evocative capacity of environmental writing to convey emotional and affective landscapes. This article examines the desert writings of Ellen Meloy and Terry Tempest Williams, and the ways in which they employ rhetoric, myth, story, motifs, metaphor, symbolism, and allegory to speak back to the environmental condition, and the ongoing call to restore Glen Canyon. Meloy’s and Williams’ works present individual testimonies molded by personal engagement, experience, and investigation in the desert – but also contribute to ecological and political discourse in the Glen.