On coming home: Terry Tempest Williams reflects on moving back to Utah

Terry Tempest Williams had already brewed tea and set out cookies in her new Salt Lake City apartment, asked several questions and listened intently to each answer, before admitting that she was feeling a little nervous to be interviewed.

“I said to Brooke (her husband) before you came, what if I just cry through the whole interview?,” Williams said. “Because I feel like that’s where we are.”

That tender divulgence was one of many Williams made while being a gracious host on a recent February morning. She also expressed an abundance of gratitude. But neither that vulnerability nor the outpouring of appreciation would be surprising for those familiar with her work.

Williams’ career can be hard to define, but she is first a writer. She has published more than 20 books of mostly creative nonfiction and has won many awards. She’s written about birds, the Great Salt Lake, her family, marriage, art, music, public lands and conservation. For the past 40 years she has written with candor about her personal relationships and all of the subsequent joy and grief.

“(My grandmother) allowed us to believe one profound truth: that which is most personal, is most universal,” she wrote in her new book, "The Glorians," published in March. “If I felt something, might you feel it, too?”

She’s also a Guggenheim fellow, a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, a teacher, conservationist, activist and a sixth generation Utahn whose family came across the plains with Brigham Young. That knowledge of her history and the connection it gives her to lands of the West define much of what Williams chose to do with her life.

Which is, among many things, celebrating the natural splendor of her home state. And she’s spent much of her 70 years outside, exploring its deserts and mountains. As such, Williams has the ruddy quality that many outdoorsy folks have, and her face is framed with the silver hair commensurate with her chapter of life.

Yet, her eyes and demeanor exude a coy youthfulness that makes her seem much younger than she is. That sense is confirmed by how quick she is to laugh and her close-to-the-surface emotions. She cries easily and comfortably, but when she smiles it’s with her whole face and total abandon.

Part of her nervousness was that she was just a few weeks away from publishing “The Glorians.” But the heft of what caused Williams to tear up stemmed from a larger, more meaningful transition.

After a decade away from their hometown, Williams and her husband of 50 years — who is a descendant of Brigham Young — had just moved back to Utah full time and also back to Salt Lake City.

Leaving the state capital had not been an exile, but it wasn’t a mutual break, either.

In 2016, Williams was teaching at the University of Utah when she legally purchased more than a thousand acres of oil and gas leases from the Bureau of Land Management as a protest against federal energy policies. Two weeks later, she received an email from the school administration that stated there was a problem with her contract. She resigned from her teaching job at the university amidst the prolonged and contentious negotiation, and subsequently left the city of her ancestors.

Since then, she’s split her time between Castle Valley — where she’s had a home for 30 years — and Cambridge, Massachusetts. After leaving the University of Utah, Williams was among the first ever offered a writer-in-residence position at the Harvard Divinity School. She’s been teaching there ever since.

One might think that a curious landing spot for someone with a background in biology and conservation, but it was her foundation in faith and the spiritual approach she takes toward nature that made her a compelling candidate for Harvard.

The publishing of “The Glorians” is, in part, the culmination of her time in Cambridge. While there, she was immersed in an institution of religious education during a period of profound change for the world. During that time she modeled for her students and colleagues what a new perspective of a spiritual life could be.

“Whether we believe it or not, rapid change is upon us,” she wrote. “I am searching for grace.”

“The Glorians” shares what she found, which is a different approach for those who might be struggling to navigate any despair associated with a changing climate, culture and world. Spoiler: it’s a new language to use and a hopeful form of attention to keep us present.

“Faith without works is dead. And you know, that’s a scripture,” Williams said. “Faith is stronger than hope. Hope is attached to what we desire. Faith is about doing the work.”

Finding a refuge

Williams’ most well-known book is a memoir from 1991 called "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place." It tells the story of when, during the 1980s, the Great Salt Lake rose to record heights and flooded the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a place of reverence for her female forbears.

Those record heights happened at the same time Williams learned her mother was diagnosed with cancer. As they fight and come to terms with the disease, the book becomes a meditation on acceptance, grief and humanity’s relationship with nature.

One powerful revelation comes after yet another set of treatments does not help. Williams was so convinced her mother would be cured after a surgery that she was shocked to learn the cancer was still present, aggressive as ever. While she was reeling from the news, her mother taught her an invaluable lesson.

“I could have handled it,” her mother said to her. “Why couldn’t you?”

“What I learned from it was, in that moment of hope, I was actually turning away from life. Hope became the object of my desires rather than being present with the here and the now, and that was a life-changing moment for me,” Williams said.

“We make choices. After that day, I made a choice not to look away, but to embrace what is. And in that presence, grief becomes a tenderness. Not something to be avoided ... because in that embracing of grief, you move through to this place of deep tenderness and compassion.”

The lesson from moments like those with her mother is to focus on the value of being present for life no matter what it throws your way. Williams’ new book — which she exhibits in the way she lives her life — shows readers all the ways she seeks out the beauty and the divine in the day-to-day act of existing.

To this day, Williams said, seeking to find a refuge from change is the primary driver for all her work.

What are the Glorians?

Interpreting her dreams was something Williams’ grandmother encouraged her to do when young, but writing about them was something a poetry professor told her never to do. Fifty years later, the protest she lodged against that teacher’s advice was finally given life.

That’s because the organizing principle of “The Glorians” is a dream Williams had at the start of the pandemic. In it, a colleague at Harvard tells her about a vow she made to “create the Epic Documentation of the Glorians (sic).”

Of course, she had no idea what that meant, either.

But over the course of reading the book, a working definition of what a Glorian is emerges in the examples she identifies. They are not some deity, but rather the ordinary moments of beauty she encounters during the run of life where her attention turns raptly to a particular presence — whether an interaction with nature, another person, a community or just the plain, regular cadence of day-to-day life.

“I trust the process of life. Some may call this God, some may bow to Allah, others may speak the name of Amida Buddha,” Williams wrote. “We can name this force field for ourselves as we celebrate each moment when our interior and exterior landscapes fully meet and merge in a story of astonishment.”

As the book progresses, Williams paints a series of portraits of such moments from her life. They begin back in the pandemic, but travel through the travails Harvard has encountered, a significant health scare of her husband’s and the many beautiful (and terrifying) moments she shares with the desert of southern Utah.

She does not want to define what a “Glorian” is so much as to give readers a sense for how they can encounter — and describe — the more ineffable moments of beauty in their own lives.

Even in climate change — something she has long been passionate about addressing — she sees an opportunity for people to adjust their perspective.

“We can adapt and reimagine the climate crisis to be a time of transformation where we can be participants in change, not victims of it,” Williams wrote. “We can choose to live differently together.”

Religious education but a spiritual life

At Harvard, Williams teaches classes from the chapel where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his “Divinity School Address.” Like the Transcendentalist forefather he was, Emerson opened that famous address with a reflection on the beauty of the natural world. That emphasis is one Williams identifies with and she feels a kinship with all the Transcendentalists, who blended self-reliance, naturalism and faith together.

During her tenure, she has taken students to visit Walden Pond, the brief home of the other intellectual leader of that school of thought, Henry David Thoreau. One of his most famous essays is called “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," which has surely inspired some of her own decisions.

“So that’s where I teach,” Williams said. “I feel like the energy of Emerson is always there. How to be, how to question, how to go deeper. Always with a sight line to nature.”

Stephanie Paulsell, a professor emerita at Harvard Divinity School, was both Williams’ professor for a course on contemplative prayer and also a co-teacher on a class focused on the Great Salt Lake. Not only was she a tremendous teacher, getting the very best from her students, Paulsell said, she also helped bring her home state to Harvard Divinity School.

“She brought Utah to us in a way that was really important,” Paulsell said.

For that course, the intention was for the two to take 20 students to see the lake and while there meet with stakeholders and leaders. But Paulsell’s father was very ill at the time and close to dying. For Williams, Paulsell had only one priority: she essentially “forbade” her from going.

“She just said, ‘You can’t come. Do what you want with the time, but you can’t come on this trip.’ So I went home and I was with my dad and I’ll never be able to thank her enough for that,” Paulsell said. “It was such an act of generosity.”

On another occasion, Williams accompanied Paulsell to her cancer treatments. Looking back, it was not that she came to the hospital that Paulsell recalls most, but rather how present and kind Williams was to her daughter, who was with them that day, too.

“She shined her whole unbridled light on my daughter and that’s what any parent wants for their kid,” Paulsell said. “For them to be loved like that.”

Williams values that sense of being present and sharing with more than the intellect, but realizes that it’s a mental leap between academic and religious thought.

“The scientists don’t know how to communicate to the heart, and ... in the humanities, we don’t know how to trust the ineffable because there’s no evidence,” Williams said. “It’s a correspondence that I’ve had my entire life, and it’s led me to a spiritual place.”

Pointing to her two palms, she said, “It’s like, here’s art, here’s science, here’s the humanities, here’s politics.” Demonstrating the act, she said, “How do we bring these two hands together in prayer?”

Leaving Utah

When she bid on the BLM leases in 2016, it was similar in concept to what Tim DeChristopher did in 2008 when he illegally bid on oil and gas leases without intending to pay the $1.8 million bill. His protest landed him in jail for nearly two years and was a significant controversy at the time. Williams’ version had its own consequences.

She was teaching at the only school where she ever wanted to work, the University of Utah, and leading the Environmental Humanities Program, a program of academic study that she helped design and bring to life. Losing that was hard.

The way Williams and her husband bought the leases was legal and she remains proud of it. They formed an energy company with her father called Tempest Exploration and paid for them once they won the bids. Still, it set her off onto a decade-long adventure.

“When I — you know — left the University of Utah, I had no clue what was next. But I trusted it,“ Williams said. ”Because I trusted what we did and why. It was part of that tradition of civil disobedience with Thoreau ... We did it legally, but it didn’t matter. It still was a disruption."

One that’s given her a new book, and a fresh chance to return to Salt Lake City. Today, Williams’ new living room is covered in art. The walls are a mosaic of paintings featuring birds, abstract landscapes and a portrait of Brigham Young. Most of the art, she said, was done by friends or people she knows and each tells its own story. Despite the resplendence of things to look at, though, the dominating draw was the view out the windows.

Williams and her husband can look straight down the valley toward Point of the Mountain. Their view is mostly uninterrupted and would have included a clear view of the Wasatch had the range not been shrouded in clouds from an unseasonably warm winter storm dropping rain instead of snow.

Coming home

This spring, Williams is teaching her final semester at Harvard and her return to Utah is something like a homecoming. The way she sees it, the timing couldn’t be better.

There’s a large, bipartisan push to save the Great Salt Lake with momentum from Latter-day Saints and an ally in President Donald Trump. Her father, who owned a successful oil and gas servicing company, is 92 years old. She wants to spend more time with him. Plus, she’s ready to be back in Salt Lake City.

It’s the town where she grew up, where she was married and the home of her family’s faith. She no longer practices that faith herself, but her family still does, so she feels like it is still very much her culture. “I’m still a member (of the church),” Willams said. “An unlikely one — a tail between my legs, a coyote figure.”

She said that “The Glorians” is a book about faith, about doing the work and about trusting that even unbearable stories of life — like losing parents, climate change remaking the world, leaving your home — all have another side to them.

“That is being true to the ethics that we hold. And everything we’re talking about, whether it’s faith, whether it’s love, whether it’s grief, whether it’s community. That’s how I was raised,” Williams said. “And that’s why I’m so happy to be coming home.”