Good interview with Terry Tempest Williams in "The Progressive"

[DemBones DemBones]

Written by David Kupfer, published in the February 2005 issue and online.


"The sun was setting on a late October afternoon when I met with author Terry Tempest Williams in a hotel conference room built over a saltwater marsh near San Pablo Bay in San Rafael, California. She was in my hometown that day to deliver a Sunday morning keynote lecture about her latest book, The Open Space of Democracy, to 4,000 people attending the fifteenth annual Bioneers Conference. Following her morning plenary lecture, she hosted a press conference with several dozen journalists, spoke as part a workshop on her book, and signed copies for a long line of fans.

Despite her rather intense schedule that day, she was bright, evocative, introspective, and quite poignant. Like Edward Abbey, she is very much aware of her place in the world and her community in the American West. A fourth-generation Mormon and native of Utah, she takes inspiration from her church and from nature.

Among her books are Desert Quartet, Leap, Unspoken Hunger, and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. Her sixth, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, tells the story of how the Great Salt Lake once rose to historic levels and flooded the wetlands that serve the migratory birds in northern Utah. She also weaves in her own family's struggle with cancer as a result of living downwind from the Nevada Nuclear Test Site near Las Vegas. A recipient of both a Guggenheim and a Lannan literary fellowship, Williams lives with her husband, Brooke, far from the concrete jungle in Castle Valley, Utah, where she has been passionately active in social and environmental issues for decades. She is currently the Annie Clark Tanner fellow at the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah."

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The interview is presented as questions from Kupfer, followed by Terry Tempest Williams's answers. Here's one brief sample:


"Q: It seems to me that being an American right now has never been more shameful. How do you deal with that?


Williams: I don't think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being. On the other hand, you're right, I am an American, I do live in Utah, and I am deeply ashamed about the decisions our President is making around the world, in our name: the war in Iraq, his continued denial about global warming, the wholesale degradation of the environment on every level. Since September 11, 2001, I have come to believe that there are many forms of terrorism, and environmental degradation is one of them. "

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more. . .

http://www.progressive.org/feb05/intv0205.html