Williams urges risk-taking in writing
Writer, naturalist and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams spoke about her work at a Montgomery Fellows lecture Monday afternoon.
By Jamila Ma, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The emotionally harrowing creative process has taught Montgomery Fellow Terry Tempest Williams that “the only book worth writing is one that threatens to kill,” she said in front of a packed audience at Cook Auditorium Monday. Williams, a writer, naturalist and environmental activist, is in residence at Dartmouth as one of two winter Montgomery fellows and is teaching Environmental Studies 80, Writing Our Way Home.
Williams, whose writing draws on her roots in the American Southwest, said she finds inspiration in a world that “keeps astonishing [her] in both its beauty and in its terror.”
In her lecture, Williams shared personal stories to encourage audience members to change the status quo through their own personal forms of expression.
“We can no longer rest in our complacency,” she said. “We can no longer retreat in the comfort of our own certitude.”
In her book “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” Williams connected an environmental tragedy — the rise of the Great Salt Lake and flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge — with a personal one — her mother’s battle with cancer.
“Ultimately, Ms. Williams finds refuge in the reality of death and of change,” Richard Stamelman, executive director of the Montgomery Endowment, said in his introduction to her lecture.
Williams described the experience of looking through her mother’s journals, which has been left to her, following her mother’s death from ovarian cancer. None of the journals contained any writing, she said.
“I do not know why my mother bought journal after journal and never wrote in any of them, but I believe her intention was to try, and to try and tell the truth of her life in a culture that did not value it,” she said.
Williams’s controversial writing has at times alienated her from her family members, she said. Following the publication of “Refuge,” her brother removed her as guardian of his daughters in the event of his death, she said. Later, he admitted that he had never read the book, but upon completing it, he reinstated her as guardian.
Williams stressed the need for writers to seek challenges for themselves and warned against falling back on published pieces and an established reputation.
Fear can be a source of inspiration but it should not limit writers, she said. While completing “Refuge,” Williams found it helpful to write against her instincts, she said.
“When you think you’ve gone too far, go deeper,” she said.
During the lecture, Williams shared several pieces of new, unpolished writing she had written over the past two weeks.
In one, she recalled an encounter with a woman selling paintings in the Dominican Republic to support her family in Haiti.
“The dignified desperation I saw reflected in the eyes of the mother artist has never left me,” she said.
Williams dedicated the lecture to the 17 students in her environmental studies class. During the lecture, Erica Boyce ’10 and Julia Schneider ’12, shared essays they had written for the class.
Every individual has a unique voice and the ability to tell the truth of their lives, Williams said.
“The most ordinary sentence gains transcendence if it deals with the chaos of life in a true way,” she said. “There is no separation from the writing life and the life engaged and it has everything to do with love.”
Williams said she views Dartmouth not only as an intellectual community but also a kind of “sanctuary.” She was previously a Montgomery Fellow in 2006, and has spoken at Dartmouth four times.