This interview was first published in Etude, the online magazine of literary nonfiction published by the School’s literary nonfiction writing program: (etude.uoregon.edu). Etude includes author interviews, essays on the craft of writing and new narrative nonfiction.

Terry Tempest Williams is an environmental activist, a peace activist, a poet, a writer and, as Utne Reader proclaimed her, “a visionary… a person who could change your life.”

She is the author of one of the classics in American nature writing, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, as well as Leap, a quirky exploration of the art of Hieronymus Bosch, and, most recently, Red, an emotionally resonant book of essays about the redrock wilderness of southern Utah. She is also the author of several collections of essays, two children’s books and two books of verse. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Outside, Audubon, Orion, various literary journals, book reviews and a number of newspapers.

You’re the creator of many beautiful books, celebrated for your work as the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Leap and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. You’ve said recently that you’ve put aside the intention of writing books and turned to newspaper writing. Can you talk a little bit about why the newspaper has become your medium of choice?

Camus says, “To create today is to create dangerously.” I agree. Given the nature of the Bush administration’s war on terror, words are in many ways our most powerful form of defense. There are many forms of terrorism, and environmental degradation is one of them. So is the unraveling of our civil liberties. Just this week, a photographic exhibit by the Indian photographer Sudhankar Banerjaree, scheduled to be hung under the rotunda at the Smithsonian, was moved to the basement, where quotations by former President Jimmy Carter, Peter Matthiessen, and myself were censored. And scientists working for the NIH have been instructed by the government not to use words like “gay” or “homosexual” in their grantwriting efforts for AIDS research. It is this kind of censorship, fear and control that harkens the McCarthy era. Only I feel this is worse because it is much more slick, clever and manipulative. What we have here is a fundamentalist government that is running this country as a business, not a democracy.

The examples are endless. The threat and actions of oil and gas exploitation are real. And with covert actions led by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, many long-standing legal protections for wilderness are being removed. Every environmental organization I know is up to their elbows in lawsuits.

These are some of the reasons why I am primarily writing articles and op-ed pieces for newspapers. I want to register my dissent in the national conversation. I want my words to be entered in the public discourse. Newspapers are about the dailiness of our lives. They reach people in their homes around their kitchen tables and are taken out on the street within the dialogue of friends and colleagues. Articles are clipped and sent to family. Articles are emailed and shared around the country.

Books are a longer commitment. The reader sits down and opens a different mind, more thoughtful, perhaps more complicated in its renderings. I love the creative commitment that goes into a book. Each word, each sentence, each paragraph builds. A book carries the reader along slowly, caresses and cajoles. A piece in a newspaper is read on the move, enters the bloodstream quickly, a jolt of adrenaline, awareness. We learn something, we act—and within hours, it is discarded, used to wrap fish, laid on the floor as the training ground for new puppies.

I love the immediacy of newspapers.
 
You’ve spoken about the importance of “bearing witness” in writing. Is the work you’re doing now different in that sense from your “witness” in Refuge?

Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. Writing is about how we see the world. Our words bear the power and capacity of our perceptions. In this sense, there is no difference between a work like Refuge, which is a sustained exploration on how we find refuge in change—and the story I told in The New York Times about watching three thumper trucks traverse the delicate wildlands of southern Utah just outside Arches National Park, tearing down every tree in their path, the Bush-Cheney energy plan in action. Both pieces of writing are about bearing witness. One is a literary exploration. The other is a political exposé. Yet, Refuge carries its own politics between the lines. And hopefully, the oped piece, “Chewing Up a Fragile Land,” carried its own literary images and metaphors in the simple telling of what I saw.

Writing changes the way we see the world. And in the most powerful sense, writing can change how we feel about the world. This hinges on the language, intention and integrity of the writer.
 
Oped writing is not generally considered a particularly literary genre... and yet your newspaper essays contain more than a little poetry. How do you see that challenging writerly orthodoxies of voice, genre or structure affects the story (the “message,” the “content”) of the work?

I love the challenge of writing for newspapers. Like all writing, the task is to find the story we want to tell and do that in a way that will move the reader. In newspaper writing and op-ed pieces in particular, it is about time and space. You have very limited time to capture the reader’s mind, and you have a very small space in which to write. Therefore, every word counts. I bank on the power of imagery to create images that stand up to the ideas you are trying to convey.
 
You’ve said, “I always view writing as ritual.” What does that mean to you?

Writing is a ritual. Whenever I sit down to write, I am mindful that I am entering another mind, another space of thought that is different from everyday conversation. Our writing is oftentimes ahead of our thinking; the words we write on paper can be wiser, braver and more knowledgeable than we are. Writing is a ceremony in the name of community. And it is full of paradox. We write to create community, yet in the writing process we are taken out of community. We write to create dialogue, yet words on paper are set in type.

I light a candle on my desk when I write. It reminds me I am in the service of something other than myself. The flickering candle sheds light on thoughts, a stay against darkness.

Often, it seems, your narratives are not linear; you are not moving directly from point A to point B but taking a route that is more roundabout (or more kaleidoscopic). I am thinking of your op-ed “In the Shadow of Extinction” as well as of books like Refuge and Leap. Your narratives seem to travel via metaphor, image and voice. How do you think about story in your writing?

Story is the umbilical cord between the past, present and future. When we write, time both expands and contracts. The act of writing is the act of presence. One word leads us to the next. Of all of my books, Leap is the most representative of this organic mind. Hélène Cixous asks, “What might it mean to write out of the body?” I took her up on her challenge. Leap is a book that wrote me, not the other way around. I focused on a painting and allowed my imagination to guide me in the world and on the page. I tried not to put any constraints on my thought process. If Leap was asking what happens when our institutions no longer serve us, if Leap is about questioning authority on all levels, I wanted to challenge even the authority of a sentence, of proper grammar, syntax and structure, in general. Isn’t this the gift of art? I felt this is what Hieronymus Bosch dared to do in his triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” I wanted to see where he would take me on the page. Would I dare to follow an intuitive mind and see where it would lead me?

In many ways, this process was the same process I went through in the writing of Refuge. You begin with a question and see where it leads you. I recognize words as guides. We live our writing—it is not an abstraction, but cyclical, circular, rhythmic. For me, writing is about paying attention to the truth of our lives and then locating the metaphors and images and stories that speak to the magic and inspiration and struggle of what it means to be human, to be in relationship to the life around us.
 
You have said that you “write out of not-knowing.” What do those words mean to you?

To write out of not-knowing is to stay open to the possibilities, to discover what we cannot yet know. Otherwise, why bother? If I know where the story is going, I am not interested. Writing is mysterious, alongside plain old hard work. We show up. We sit. We think. We wait. Hopefully, something moves within our imagination, and we respond. The creative process is a process of waiting, trusting, acting. It has a deep wisdom if we will surrender to it. The power of the unconscious rises to the page. It can be frightening. It is difficult. But it is in the vitality of this struggle between the writer and the word that we can create transformative work. Each book I have written has transformed me in the process. I write myself to the other side of my question and in a very real sense, I am liberated from the burden of inquiry, for a time, until it starts all over again. Perhaps that is the process of revision and refinement.
 
What writers feed you?

The poets. Levertov, Merwin, Kinnell, Rich, Rexroth, Snyder, Emily Dickinson, Japanese haiku, Tomaz Salamun, Homero Aridjis, Jane Hirshfield. Have you seen the collection Sam Hamill inspired, Poets Against the War? Deeply moving. The essayists and storytellers: Kundera, Breytenbach, Stegner, Susan Griffin, Maxine Hong Kingston (her new book, The Fifth Book of Peace, is stunning), Ed Abbey, Thoreau, Emerson, Louise Erdrich, Alex Kotlowitz, Joe Klein, Susan Sontag, Italo Calvino, John Berger, Clarice Lispector, Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, younger writers like John D’Agata and Rebecca Solnit. The list could go on forever. I’m in the middle of reading Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches. I love anything that lights the imagination and bows to ideas.

From what source or sources do your stories arise?

Quite simply, the source is life. Day to day, day by day. I never stop being amazed by the simple, raw, true power of life.