Terry Tempest Williams explores women’s voices, power

When Terry Tempest Williams was 5 years old, her grandmother gave her Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide to western birds.

She took her red pen and drew three lines in the corner.

“Between you and me,” her grandmother said, “That says I love you.”

That book, coupled with her grandmother’s sentiment, sparked a lifelong interest in nature for Williams, UNC’s 2015 distinguished writer-in-residence, who will be participating in two panels and a reading this week.

Having grown up in Utah, Williams’ writing is based on her experience with nature and landscape in the West.

She just completed a book on America’s natural parks and the idea of public lands.

“Living in Utah, we have five national parks and five national monuments,” she said. “All of them are under threat by oil and gas development.”

Williams has written about everything from women’s issues to issues of voice and finding beauty in a broken world.

Williams said she explored the topic of voice in her most recent book, “When Women Were Birds,” after her mother died of ovarian cancer. Soon after her mother’s death, Williams read journals her mother had left behind to her — all of which were blank.

“That question — why did my mother leave me her empty journals — propelled this book on what does it mean to have a voice as a woman,” she said. “How do we find our voice? How do we keep our voice? How do we lose our voice? How do we retrieve it?”

UNC English professor Minrose Gwin said Williams’ memoir, “Refuge,” about her mother’s death was the first book of hers she read.

“She writes so beautifully about women’s lives and women’s power and the relationship between older and younger generations of women,” she said.

Williams’ epilogue to “Refuge,” “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” relates her family’s history with breast cancer to nuclear testing in Utah and Nevada, which left nuclear toxins in the environment that likely led to the high rate of cancer in her family.

UNC English professor Jennifer Ho said the way Williams is able to convey an intimate family story set against the backdrop of the landscape is impressive.

“She tells this deeply personal family story, but she does it while telling a story about the Great Salt Lake and the rising lake levels that created all of these flooding problems and the way that that impacted not just the human population of Utah but the bird population and the animal population, so you see this interconnectedness,” Ho said.

Williams said the thing she most wants to share is the power of being curious and the power of having a voice in the open space of democracy.

“I write to create an awareness out of the questions I hold and to create inspiration for each of us to tell our own stories and to value our stories,” she said. “It’s what makes us human.”

arts@dailytarheel.com