Showing results by author "Terry Tempest Williams" in All Categories

Terry Tempest Williams's mother told her: "I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone." Fans of Williams's iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was a member of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them.

In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.

“I go to Terry Tempest Williams for the reasons I go to Whitman and Thoreau: to recover a capacious spirit and to rejoin the urgent living world. She gives me something bigger than hope.”?Richard Powers, author of The Overstory From the visionary New York Times bestselling author, a...

It is an extraordinary time. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 have propelled us all into a new cycle of our personal, national, and global lives. It will never be the same. There is no "normal" to get back to. Life is in this country is changed forever, and it seems clear that we have entered an era in which new questions need to be asked, because there are no easy answers or quick fixes.