One question often asked of Michael Toms and me was: Who were your most favorite guests interviewed? When asked that question, right up there at the top of a short list was always Terry Tempest Williams. Her authenticity, curiosity about the world, passion, and love of the landscape including the rocks, the plants, the animals, and even the people, continued to move us throughout the years. She serves up a delicious table of unique life experiences from staring at a Hieronymus Bosch painting for a year in Madrid, to studying prairie dogs in Bryce National Canyon. Download any one of these programs, or download them all, you won’t be disappointed. I can’t wait for her to grace our studio again and share her next adventures.
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. Read more »
Environmental politics becomes a matter of sensual passion rather than political correctness in this rich, colorful mosaic of thoughts on wildness, landscape, animals, and humans. It sparkles with gems of insight mined from Williams’ own profound sense of belonging in nature and includes the voice of the late Edward Abbey, maverick environmentalist and friend of hers. Read more »
The Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights remains as mysterious and provocative as it was five hundred years ago. This masterpiece spoke to Williams and she returns the favor by eloquently weaving together the spiritual, psychological, religious, ecological, and emotional intensity of a work of art that transformed her life. Read more »
Williams speaks out for some of most disavowed individuals on the planet: prairie dogs, who are threatened with extinction, and Rwandan refugees. She deftly draws meaning out of moments of devastation with inspiring stories of rodents who pray at sunrise and sunset and a mother who, after losing her child to the ravages of war, creates a mosaic sunflower out of the rubble. Read more »