Her name suggests a storm like the one last October that sparked a boulder-heaving flash flood in an arroyo near her home in Castle Valley, Utah. But her words evoke the calm nucleus of chaos.

Terry Tempest Williams sees the world through the prism of the dialectic. She finds grace in places of suffering and humor in the fisticuffs of frustration and conflict, and she shares those insights as a writer, storyteller, and teacher committed to the preservation of wild places and creatures. She expects her conversation with poet Christopher Merrill at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, May 30, to be “a spontaneous, soulful sharing among friends who care deeply about beauty and injustice in this world — a private conversation that’s public.”

Williams’ appearance ends a season of relative hibernation that included time at her family’s property in Maine. There she worked on her new book, Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Pantheon Books is set to publish the book in August 2008. “I’ve been in a space of listening; it will be a challenge to be talking at this time,” Williams told Pasatiempo a week ago. “In winter, I’m below ground. I’ve been underground for the last year, writing.”

Spring and fall are when Williams shares her stories with the larger world. Summer and winter she reserves for herself and her family. Keeping this balance, she said, “is the tension in my life.”

Williams and her husband, Brooke, moved to Castle Valley from Salt Lake City 10 years ago to downshift from fast forward to saunter, and for greater intimacy with the desert they love. In “Ode to Slowness,” an essay from Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (Pantheon Books, 2001), she writes, “I am not so easily seduced by speed as I once was. I find I have lost the desire to move that quickly in the world. To see how much I can get done in a day does not impress me anymore. I don’t think it’s about getting older. It feels more like honoring the gravity in my own body in relationship to place.”

But nearness to wild places heightens awareness of what threatens them, and Williams quickly found herself in league with others working to protect a region that many in government and industry dismiss as “a blank spot on the map.”

“Awareness of the Colorado Plateau has become more sophisticated in the past 10 years,” she said. “We see pockets of activism where people are saying, ‘This may not be green, but look what is here. It deserves our protection.’ It’s been so frustrating ... under this [White House] administration — they care nothing for it.”

In October 2005, Brooke started work as executive director of The Murie Center in Moose, Wyo. The one-time ranch of environmental pioneers Olaus and Margaret Murie and Adolph and Louise Murie operates in partnership with Grand Teton National Park as a retreat for the study of wildlife and wilderness and how to protect them.

A month before she and Brooke began splitting their time between two homes nearly 500 miles apart, Williams traveled to Rwanda as part of a small team of “Barefoot Artists” led by Philadelphia painter Lily Yeh. The group’s goal was to help build a memorial in the village of Rugerero to victims of the 1994 civil war, during which 800,000 people — mostly ethnic Tutsis — were massacred by their Hutu neighbors. Yeh believed that including art in this collective effort would promote reconciliation between the former enemies.

While there, Williams met a young genocide survivor named Louie Gakumba, who acted as her translator. By the time she visited Rwanda for the second time last month, Williams had formally adopted Gakumba and sponsored his visit to the United States. “Louie took my hand and walked me into the landscape of his own story,” said Williams, who chose long ago not to have children of her own. “For both Brooke and me, this landscape of collective sorrow and reconciliation has now become our family.”

Gakumba plans to obtain a master’s degree in conflict resolution so he can return to Rwanda and be part of its reconstruction, Williams said. In June he begins work toward an undergraduate degree at Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City.

Rwanda “is an example of our species committing horrendous crimes with our own hands,” Williams said. “What I’ve also seen is that we’re capable of forgiveness — not forgetting, but forgiveness.”

Rwanda is one theme of Mosaic; prairie dogs and the Italian town of Ravenna, renowned for its Byzantine mosaics, are the other two. Finding the “beautiful connectivity” between disparate fragments is what Williams does best. Her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon Books, 1991) is the story of her mother’s death after a four-year struggle with cancer; a parallel narrative shows how rising water levels affected birds at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on the shores of Great Salt Lake, which Williams calls “my basin of tears.” Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert is equal parts manifesto and love story, a howl of outrage against the desecration of public lands in the West and a tender invitation to join forces on behalf of the nation’s wildlands.

Storytelling has helped Williams evolve from fifth-generation Latter-day Saint to feminist and earth emissary. “It’s my culture,” she said of Mormonism. “I honor it. It has taught me a lot about community.” There, too, she learned the ethical approach to land development practiced by Utah’s Mormon settlers but since forgotten, she said.

“The only thing I truly know is the power of story,” she said. “It is the umbilical cord between the past, present, and future. Story keeps things known. It becomes the conscience of the community. It is through story, both the listening and the telling, that we remember what it means to be human.

“To bear witness is part of the storyteller’s path and practice, to walk the path of engagement with faith.”

details

Lannan Readings & Conversations presents Terry Tempest Williams with Christopher Merrill

7 p.m. Wednesday, May 30

Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.

$6, $3 students & seniors; 988-1234

Radio broadcasts 2 p.m. June 3 on KSFR-FM 90.7 & X p.m. June X on KUNM-FM 89.9; podcast available from www.lannan.org

Sidebar/possible design elements

Terry Tempest Williams has received numerous awards and honors for her literary advocacy of environmentalism and social justice. Her fellowships include one from the Lannan Foundation and another from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her words are disarming in their intimacy and ferocious in their conviction.

In Mormon culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered, and independent thinking is not. I was taught as a young girl not to “make waves” or “rock the boat.” … For many years, I have done just that — listened, observed, and quietly formed my own opinions, in a culture that rarely asks questions because it has all the answers. But one by one, I have watched the women in my family die common, heroic deaths. … The price of obedience has become too high.

The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons is the same fear I saw in my mother’s body. … I cannot prove that my mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, or my grandmothers, Lettie Romney Dixon and Kathryn Blackett Tempest, along with my aunts developed cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I can’t prove they didn’t. … What I do know, however is that … I must question everything, even if it means losing my faith, even if it means becoming a member of a border tribe among my own people. Tolerating blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.

— from Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

As an American writer, I have found no subject to be as intellectually challenging as writing about wilderness. How can I convey the scale and power of these big wide-open lands to those who have never seen them, let alone to those who have? How can I learn to write out of my own experience, out of my deep love for wild country, while still maintaining a language that opens minds rather than closes them?

— From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands. — from Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

I believe that spiritual resistance — the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede — that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is best retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert. — From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

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