Writer Terry Williams speaks at Pitt

For a woman who began her life without confidence in her powers of voice, Terry Tempest… For a woman who began her life without confidence in her powers of voice, Terry Tempest Williams has come a long way.

Williams spoke Monday night at Pitt, first at a question and answer session for students, and then at a reading that was free and open to the public as part of the Pitt writing program’s Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers’ Series.

“I began college thinking I didn’t have a choice,” Williams said. “I didn’t think I could leave Utah. And I didn’t think that my story was interesting.”

The author of several books that connect landscape, culture and gender, Williams told the students at the question and answer session that she sees “the world through the lens of my experience as a Mormon woman in the American West.”

Williams prefaced her response to the first question of the evening with a reflection about her openness to questioning.

“Everything is fair game,” she said.

The question and answer session opened with a discussion of eco-terrorism and quickly moved on to a discussion of the current presidential administration.

Williams spoke of watching government sponsored vehicles “plow through growths of 100-year-old cottonwood trees.”

“The Bush administration is ravaging the American West,” she said.

Being opposed to the Republican administration as a Mormon woman in Utah often makes things difficult, Williams said. She told the assembled group about working against an anti-wilderness bill in 1995 that had the support of her bishop and neighbor.

“But,” she said, “you have to take your stands.”

And Williams says that she has taken a stand with her writing. Her politically charged work has earned her the National Wildlife Federation’s National Conservationist’s Award for Special Achievement, and induction into the Rachel Carson Honor Roll. On Feb. 2, she published an op-ed piece in The New York Times that used the plight of the prairie dogs in the West to question the range of human compassion and the wisdom of war.

Williams used this piece to show how she changes her thoughts and feelings into a piece of writing. She stressed the importance of sincerity when writing.

“If you are as impeccable as you can be with your facts, if you speak from the heart, and if you don’t get personal, then the story will work for you,” Williams said.

Williams’ also voiced her dedication to story.

“For me, the answer has always been through story,” she read from her book “Red.” “Story bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. Story offers a wash of images and emotion that returns us to our highest and deepest selves, where we remember what it means to be human, living in place with our neighbors.”