Terry Tempest Williams

"A personal, lyrical, and idiosyncratic ode to our national parks"-- "For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary...

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 Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and 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...

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...

Terry takes us on a whirlwind tour of what it means to give voice to our own authenticity. It requires deep listening and fertile silences. She encourages us to speak "Mother Tongue" - speaking from the belly rather than the mind. She laments that in Western culture "the language of economics has power, the language of the law has power, the language of science has power. But an intelligence of the heart, an emotional intelligence, or a poetic sensibility,...

Williams connects two catastrophic events: living downwind of atomic nuclear testing in the deserts of Utah and the record breaking flooding of the Great Salt Lake. These events have deeply affected her sense of the need for refuge. She poetically conveys to us her personal perspectives on grief, love, and the spirituality of nature, lake and desert.

Williams tells the story of her initiation by the living land when she was 7 years old. While taking a school trip she ended up alone, in the dark, in Mount Timpanogos Cave. For a brief but powerful moment she felt the beating heart of the mountain. She says, "For the rest of my life I've been trying to retrieve that sacred space I felt inside that mountain alone. I have been searching for that moment when you're part of something so old, so deep,...

A nineteenth-century love letter to nature is rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams.

Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams
Afterword by T. H. Watkins
 
Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations...

A man who writes a hotel review-column for a newspaper is given the wrong key card when he checks in to a hotel, and he opens the door to the wrong room. Instead of finding an empty room he stumbles onto a porn shoot. Eventually he meets the woman who arranged the filming and becomes obsessed with her.