Terry Tempest Williams – författare

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.With honesty, passion and heart, Terry Tempest Williams's essays explore the impact of nuclear testing, the vital importance of environmental legislation, and the guiding spirit of conservation.Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

"Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision," Terry Tempest Williams tells us. "Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together." Ranging from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and community in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation. In her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The beloved author of Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Red makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah. As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams writes lyrically about the desert’s power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise–an animal that can “teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience” as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land–an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.“Lush elegies to the wilderness. . . . Earthy, spiritual, evocative.” —The Boston Globe“Erotic, scientific, literary. . . . Her intimacy with this landscape is complex and passionate.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review“Her finest writing . . . Use[s] pure language in the face of laws that need to be changed and lawmakers and citizens who need to understand that there is another way to see.” —Portland OregonianFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry''s mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.From the Trade Paperback edition.

With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch''s medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights. Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist''s prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams''s divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.

Williams weaves her observations in the naturalist field and her personal experience--as a woman, a Westerner, and a Mormon--into a resonant manifesto on behalf of the landscapes she loves, making clear as well that, through our disregard of this world, we have lost an essential connection to our deepest selves.

"I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone." This is what Terry Tempest Williams' mother, the matriarch of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her a week before she died. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock to discover that the three shelves of journals were all blank. In fifty-four short chapters, Williams recounts memories of her mother, ponders her own Mormon faith, and contemplates the notion of absence in art and in our world. When "Women Were Birds" is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?

When artist Tom Curry first moved to Maine, his house overlooked a small, uninhabited island in Eggemoggin Reach. One day, while rowing across to the island, his boyhood fear of water came crashing in on him. So he decided to explore his fear head-on, and began painting the island “as a way to delve into my own darkness and seek a way back to the surface.” That series of paintings, capturing the island in all lights, weathers, and moods, forms the basis of this book. But the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. These paintings represent an ongoing narrative: “island as escape and entrapment, island as longing and memory, island as sanctuary, island as self in a sea of turmoil.” The paintings are accompanied by essays by Terry Tempest Williams, exploring Curry’s spirit of place, and Carl Little, establishing Curry’s art within the field of landscape painting.

Terry Tempest Williams presents a sharp-edged perspective on the ethics and politics of place, spiritual democracy, and the responsibilities of citizen engagement. By turns elegiac, inspiring, and passionate, The Open Space of Democracy offers a fresh perspective on the critical questions of our time.

"[Terry and Brooke]''s quest to understand Jefferies'' ideas of a ''soul-life'' has brought the British writer''s ideas alive…"—THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE"…an oustanding new book…a first–rate tribute to an author who now has been rescued from obscurity."—THE UTAH REVIEW"…a small volume that packs a punch."—THE DURANGO HERALD"The couple converses with Jefferies in the book as if with a new friend…Jefferies'' prescient call for solitude in nature has proven itself worth fresh consideration."—ALBUQUERQUE WEEKLY ALIBI"What makes The Story of My Heart such an enjoyable find is the context that Terry and Brooke provide with their own commentary."—JACKSON HOLE NEWS & GUIDE"The Williamses anchor Jefferies'' profound inquiry to our churning world and illuminate their own passionate quests for truth and understanding."—BOOKLIST, starred review"Brooke and Terry give a sense of cohesion to Jefferies''s writing, and leave readers with much to ponder about our own chaotic, fast–paced, work–obsessed world."—PUBLISHERS WEEKLYWhile browsing a Stonington, Maine, bookstore, Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams discovered a rare copy of an exquisite autobiography by nineteenth-century British nature writer Richard Jefferies, who develops his understanding of a "soul-life" while wandering the wild countryside of Wiltshire, England. Brooke and Terry, like John Fowles, Henry Miller, and Rachel Carson before, were inspired by the prescient words of this visionary writer, who describes ineffable feelings of being at one with nature. In an introduction and essays set alongside Jefferies'' writing, the Williams share their personal pilgrimage to Wiltshire to understand this man of "cosmic consciousness" and how their exploration of Jefferies deepened their own relationship while illuminating dilemmas of modernity, the intrinsic need for wildness, and what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.Terry Tempest Williams is the author of fourteen books including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and When Women Were Birds. Recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, she teaches at Dartmouth and the University of Utah where she is the Annie Clark Tanner scholar in the environmental humanities graduate program. Her work has been anthologized and translated worldwide.Brooke Williams has spent thirty years advocating for wildness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and as executive director of the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. He is the author of four books including Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and dozens of articles. Brooke and Terry have been married since 1975. They live with their dogs in Jackson, Wyoming, and Castle Valley, Utah.Praise for Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds"Williams displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions…As the pages accumulate, her voice grows in majesty and power until it become a full-fledged aria." —San Francisco ChroniclePraise for Brooke Williams’ Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness“…a compact yet breathtaking treatise.” —Publishers Weekly