By Morgen White | FāVS News Reporter
Terry Tempest Williams has spent 50 years writing at the intersection of nature, faith and justice. Her latest book, “The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary,” arrives at a moment she says demands all of us pay attention.
Williams will read from the book and speak during a free public event Tuesday at 4 p.m. in the Hemmingson Ballroom on Gonzaga University’s campus. The event is part of two ongoing lecture series — “For Our Common Home” and “Visiting Writers Series” — hosted by the Gonzaga Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment and the Gonzaga University English Department.
“The Glorians” centers on the small, often overlooked presences in the natural world — an ant, a coyote willow blossom, the night sky — that Williams calls the Glorians. Neither deities nor abstractions, they are the ordinary connections between species that reveal our shared vulnerability.
The book moves between the red rock desert of Utah during the pandemic and Harvard University’s Divinity School, where Williams teaches, weaving personal reflection with urgent questions about how we inhabit a threatened world.
“We’re in a moment that is calling us forward to protect what we have always taken for granted, and that’s freedom, and kindness, and compassion toward others,” Williams said. “People are dying. People are being abused. People are disappearing. I’m so excited to come home and to do the work that is mine to do. Not just as a writer, but as a citizen.”
“The Glorians” opens with a dream — something that Williams, who’s always kept a pad of paper and pencil by her bed to log her dreams details, took decades to use in a book. When she was 18, her first poetry instructor, Robert Mezey, gave her writing class a single piece of advice.
“He said, ‘All of you want to be writers. Most of you won’t be. Those who might be, won’t be very good ones. But I do have one piece of advice for you,’ and we all leaned forward, and he said, ‘never, ever, write about a dream,'” Williams said. “Somehow that registered in my bloodstream as a protest. I didn’t believe him. And it’s taken me 50 years to finally write about a dream.”
Brian Henning, director of the Gonzaga Climate Institute, said the “For Our Common Home” series brings guests who can help the community understand not only the science of climate change but its human dimensions.
“It’s a problem of how we conceive of ourselves as a species and how we think of our relationship to our planet. What is it to be a human at this time on this planet?” Henning said. “Williams’ writing does a beautiful job of helping you to have a window into natural environments through the lens of personal narrative and story.”
A lecture series rooted in climate and story
In a 2018 interview with the Harvard Gazette, Williams said that while she has always believed climate change is an ecological issue, it is first and foremost a spiritual and ethical one.
Williams was raised in a multigenerational Latter-day Saint family. Though she has left orthodox membership, she says both her faith and spirituality — which she defines separately — have remained constant. She says what she came to reject was the misogyny and racism within the church.
“As a young person, that didn’t feel like justice to me,” she said.
Williams said her faith in collective imagination sustains her even in her darkest moments. A core tenet of her upbringing was that everything — birds, coyotes, wolves, ants — existed in the spirit world before being embodied on Earth.
“Imaginations shared create collaboration, and in collaboration we find community, and in community I believe anything is possible,” she said. “We always worship the outdoors before we worship the buildings that we prayed inside.”
That sense of justice has shaped her writing and her activism. In 2014, she wrote an open letter to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints urging its leaders to stand in solidarity with Kate Kelly, a human rights lawyer and founder of Ordain Women — an organization advocating for women’s ordination to the priesthood in the LDS Church — who was excommunicated that same year. She drew on her own mother’s legacy in doing so.
Beyond hope: the lesson of presence
“The Christmas before she died, she gave a blessing to her granddaughters, that one day they too would hold the priesthood and to never forget the power that is inherent in them as women,” Williams said.
Her mother’s death also transformed how Williams thinks about hope. Her mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer after previously surviving breast cancer at 38. When they were waiting in the hospital to learn whether treatments had worked, Williams told her she was certain she would recover — a moment Williams now recognizes as being more about her own desires than her mother’s needs.
“I said to my mother, I know you’re going to be fine. I have so much hope and I just know that you’re going to be fine. And I remember the way in which my mother looked at me. She was a very strong woman. And she had accepted her cancer. She had breast cancer when she was 38-years-old.
“Now she was 50 and she accepted that she had had this time. But I was compelling and she said, ‘Terry, I want to believe you. The report came back and the cancer was there.’ And I will never forget my mother in the hospital bed looking at me with her piercing eyes and she said, ‘Terry, I could have handled this. Why couldn’t you have?’ And in that moment, I realized hope was what I wanted. Hope was attached to my own desires,” Williams said.
Now, she says something deeper than hope guides her — presence.
John Eliason, interim director of the “Visiting Writers Series” and an English professor at Gonzaga, said Williams models that balance for his students.
“She’s not naive, but she is willing to write about ideas and concerns in ways that say, yes, this is hard, but we can go on, we need to go on,” Eliason said.
Williams will join Eliason’s creative nonfiction writing class a few hours before the evening event.
“You can’t put a price tag on those student experiences if they are becoming inspired or leaving with a sense of hope,” Eliason said.
For Williams, the book’s central invitation is simple: “If we are present, we will know what to do.”
The event is free and open to the public in person and online. Registration is requested. Doors open at 3:30 p.m., when four of Williams’ books will be available for purchase: “The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks,” “Erosion: Essays of Undoing,” “Finding Beauty in a Broken World” and “The Glorians.”
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