Tami Simon: So You Are Here at Sounds True, Terry, Recording an Original Audio Abridgment of Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and I Am Curious Just to begin, When You Approached the book, How Did You Consider How to Abridge I

Tami Simon: Now you said, "If I were honest, writing is about creating community." So I am curious about two parts of that. First of all, how do you see that your writing creates community? And then second, why is that an edgy thing to say?

Terry Tempest Williams: You are such a good listener. I think you have to understand where I come from. I come out of a Mormon community, and in many ways every time I speak I think I am breaking set from the community that I came from, the community that I was a part of, because in my generation in many ways, women, at least as I understood it, women did not speak truth to power. You certainly didn't question the status quo. And it feels…so often when I am writing I am questioning the status quo. I am addressing an issue that has to do with power and politics, whether it is oil and gas leases in Canyonlands or prairie dogs. So there is that.

Because in writing to create community I am also severing aspects of community. I think the irony as a writer is in order to create community you are pulled out of community to do the writing. Because ultimately writing is a solitary act.

Tami Simon: You are a solitary laborer.

Terry Tempest Williams: And it is presumptuous to think that you can create community. You don't know. I have never seen anyone read one of my books. I have no idea. But I know the writers who have brought me into a sense of community, that when I am reading them in the margins I write "yes, thank you, exactly." And then there were times when I just thought, is anyone else thinking this? Am I the only one that cares about this idea? So I think writers make us feel less lonely in the world. And I would hope that my writing can do the same for others, as other writers have done for me. Rachel Carson. Virginia Woolf. Denise Levertov. Wallace Stegner. Coetzee. I could go on and one about all the writers who have changed and altered and expanded my life.

Tami Simon: You know, I want to circle back to something. You said, "This friend of mine says I am addicted to sorrow." And you said that no it is not true.

Terry Tempest Williams: Married to sorrow.

Tami Simon: Married. Sorry. Married to sorrow. And you said, "No, that is not true. I am just willing to kind of stick with it." And in the meditation tradition in which I have been trained, there are these three words. Never turn away. Never turn away. And so as you were talking about that, I thought about those three words. Never turn away. And the question that emerged for me is for you, how do you do that?

Terry Tempest Williams: How do you not turn away?

Tami Simon: Yeah.

Terry Tempest Williams: Such a great question. The word that comes back to my mind again and again is being present. If you are present, then there is no past, as you well know. And there is no future. You are there. And whether it is being with a family member who is dying, you are present with them. You are breathing. And in that breathing there is this commitment and communion to that breath. Presence. And you don't look away. It is this shared gaze. My friend's dog just passed away on Monday. And she asked if I would come as she was about to put her down, and I walked in and there was Lynn and there was Kola. And we just knelt down with Kola and we just started breathing. You are present. And I think when you are present, fear is still there, but you are moving with it. You are breathing with it. It is the only way I can describe it. I think we go where we are called. And for one reason or another I was called to Rwanda. I have felt a deep communion with prairie dogs since I have a memory, because my family shot them. And I kept thinking, why? And so there was an affinity there.

So again that word "empathy." And when I think about the times in my life when I have had regrets, it is never when I stayed. It is always when I left. It is never what I did so much as what I didn't do. So I think it that desire to be fully present, and having both the curiosity and the mind to try and understand the mysteries that surround us, that we wear as loose clothing in our lives.

Tami Simon: Now this conversation series that we are having is called Insights at the edge, and the thing I am curious about is, we will start with your work in the world, your writing, what the current edge is for you? This moment?

Terry Tempest Williams: I was nervous for our conversation. You know? That is an edge. I think whenever you enter truth with another person, I hope that I can be present and be honest in that expression. There is an edge to the adult adoption that we are about to enter on April 16. How is that going to change things? You know, to me this is a bigger commitment than my marriage to Brook. We've been married thirty-five years. I always know with Brook that we can get divorced. You know? It is a daily commitment. I can't imagine that with a child, even though Louis is not a child but an adult. But this is a huge commitment, and it scares me. So that is the edge that I am standing on right now. Is…I am about to become a mother, and that has always terrified me. And so it is a legal term. Will he call me mom? I've said, "just call me Terry." So it is these things that I think are the private things that we hold in our hearts and don't really talk about. That's an edge.

I don't know writing wise where I am going next. I never do. I wait for a question that obsesses me and keeps me up at night. I am interested in women. My mother and grandmother have been gone for twenty years, and I think it is time for me to go back into the place of the feminine. And I can feel that…I think that is where I want to go next, I think is really explore what the feminine is. Because I think that we have to go into…I am interested in what we know as women. And I need to go back into that place and rediscover what does it mean to be a mother now. Why have I been afraid of it? And I've always felt, you don't have to give birth physically to children to have them be your children. So there are a lot of questions that I am thinking about personally.

I am interested in texts, the texts that I have been reading by women, and what they hold. I have been reading a lot of Helene Cixous' Promethea about love. And what fuels us. Again, what we turn away from. Again, Julia Kristeva. Powerful women. A book called The Problem with Africa. So I am interested in women's voices right now, and maybe because I want to return to my own deeper feminine.

Tami Simon: And what might that mean to you? Your own deeper feminine?

Terry Tempest Williams: I don't know. I don't know. I think after the Bush and Cheney era, I am just so tired of the politics of oil and gas and I mean how many forests I have killed by what I've written, how many endless reams of paper I have used in polemics. So I want just in the same way that I was desperate to retrieve my poetry, I think now I really want to explore what do we have to give as women to this next era—both politically as well as spiritually? Climate change? What is our role of women as we think about where we are heading as a people on a planet that is heating up? I am just exploring. So I really don't know. That is the honest answer. But there are clues when I am thinking about what I am reading and what I am thinking about. I am my own struggle. It is always tied to the questions that keep me up at night.

Tami Simon: Yes.

Terry Tempest Williams: How about you? Do you mind me asking? I mean what edge are you standing on?

Tami Simon: Being fully myself, especially in public, without worrying about the echo.

Terry Tempest Williams: And have you not always been?

Tami Simon: I haven't been that public. I have sort of hid behind spiritual teachers and people like you. So, coming forward and being able to do it without any concern of that internet echo, any echo, because then I am spending my time looking at myself through other people's eyes instead of just being.

Terry Tempest Williams: I think that is what is being asked of each of us right now. Don't you? Of becoming really fully who we are so that we can be of use. And it is scary. But I think the risk is worth it. And what do we lose and what do we sacrifice if we are not fully present, fully engaged, fully embracing who we are.

Tami Simon: Exactly. Thank you, Terry.

Terry Tempest Williams: Thank you so much. It has just been wonderful. Thank you for your capacity to listen so exquisitely.

Tami Simon: Thank you for your capacity to articulate and dream and follow the thread that you receive.