This Land Is Alive

When writer Terry Tempest Williams arrived at The Huntington, she came in search of Henry David Thoreau. 

More precisely, she came for Walden—for the successive manuscript drafts held in The Huntington Library, where Thoreau’s revisions reveal a mind returning again and again to the question of how to “live deliberately.” Williams had read Walden since she was a teenager, marking her copy with a green felt-tip pen. It was the one book, she told Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence, she would grab if her house were burning. 

Williams’ encounter with Thoreau’s revisions grew out of Lawrence’s invitation to Williams to contribute to This Land Is …: Field Notes on American Ground, the richly illustrated companion book to The Huntington’s THIS LAND IS … initiative. The opportunity to write for the volume brought Williams to The Huntington; the knowledge that the Library held Thoreau’s drafts gave the visit its special draw. 

“I just knew that there would be something there that I did not know,” Williams said. 

That something was not only Thoreau’s language but also his process. The Huntington holds the bulk of the seven manuscript drafts of Walden—more than 1,200 pages—as well as the book’s page proofs, marked for correction by the printing house and by Thoreau himself. The manuscripts sit within The Huntington’s broad literary collections, which range from the Ellesmere Chaucer and Shakespeare and Renaissance print holdings to the papers of modern and contemporary writers, including Octavia E. Butler, Hilary Mantel, Thomas Pynchon, and Kim Stanley Robinson. 

That willingness to be changed by what the land—and the archive—reveals is central to THIS LAND IS …

Why It Matters 

Lawrence opened the May 14 program by noting that the “it” in Why It Matters changes with each guest, always within the context of the humanities. At this moment in The Huntington’s THIS LAND IS … initiative, she said, Williams was an especially fitting guest: “There is no more perfect guest for Why It Matters at this moment than Terry Tempest Williams, who spent her life and career thinking about why and how the land matters, not only to people, but to every living thing.” 

Williams is the author of 17 books, including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, When Women Were Birds, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Erosion: Essays of Undoing, and, most recently, The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Orion, and The Progressive. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction, the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award, the Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing, and other honors. She currently teaches at Harvard Divinity School, where she has taught for more than a decade, bringing together questions of spirituality, ecology, grief, and the moral imagination. 

Lawrence grounded the conversation in shared place and relationship: Williams’ deep ties to Utah, where generations of her family have lived since 1847, and where Lawrence and her husband, Peter, spent 20 years on the faculty of the University of Utah. The two women first bonded over literature. 

Williams returned the tribute by naming Lawrence as part of her own intellectual lineage. At the University of Utah, she said, Lawrence offered students something rare: a model of “beautiful, authentic power.” 

“We didn’t have a lot of mentors,” Williams said. “We didn’t have women that could show us what beautiful, authentic power looks like.” 

That history gave the conversation an intimacy that shaped the evening. It moved from Thoreau’s manuscripts to Williams’ father, from the Great Salt Lake to the pandemic, from Mormon girlhood to the open space of democracy. Throughout, Lawrence steered the exchange with the precision of a literary scholar and the ease of a good friend.

At The Huntington, Williams examined Thoreau’s drafts closely, encountering revision not as an abstract literary principle but as a visible record of choices made on the page. She paid particular attention to one of the most famous sentences in American literature: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” 

In an earlier version, Thoreau had written, “I went down to the pond.” For Williams, the revision mattered. “Down” slowed the sentence. “Pond” suggested reflection. “Woods,” by contrast, placed Thoreau among living beings. 

“The woods are living sentinels,” Williams said. 

The manuscript became a way of thinking about revision not only as a writing practice, but as a way of being. Lawrence drew out the connection: How does one revise a life? 

Williams answered from a place of personal experience. She spoke of growing up in Mormon culture, of the parts of that inheritance she still values—community, collaboration, a land-based religion—and the parts she came to question: racism, misogyny, patriarchy, and the limitations placed on women and the Earth. 

Literature offered one path of revision. Williams recalled telling her parents, “I’m no longer Mormon, I’m a Transcendentalist.” Her father, she said, rolled his eyes: “I don’t have a clue what that is, and I don’t want to know.” Years later, he gave her the complete volumes of Thoreau’s journals. “So I think he did know,” Williams said. 

Paying attention, she suggested, leads to revision. So does experience. So does grief. 

During her discussion with Lawrence, Williams revised her thinking in real time. In her THIS LAND IS … companion book essay, she had responded to Thoreau’s line, “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary,” writing that “resignation is not necessary.” But onstage, Williams reconsidered the word. She turned to Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which she has seen at both its historic high and historic low. “Great Salt Lake is in retreat,” she said. Rather than interpret retreat only as loss, Williams asked whether it might also suggest withdrawal, gathering strength, or restoration. 

During the audience Q&A, Williams was asked about the traces of her ancestors she had encountered in The Huntington’s archives. Her answer returned the conversation to the Library’s collections—this time not through Thoreau, but through her own lineage. 

She recalled that curator Josh Garrett-Davis had directed her to a small leather diary belonging to Eliza R. Snow, the 19th-century Latter-day Saint poet and one of Williams’ relatives. Williams examined the diary with a magnifying glass, studying Snow’s delicate script in sepia ink. 

The diary is part of The Huntington’s extensive Mormon holdings, one of the most comprehensive collections of Mormon history outside Utah.  

The collection encompasses thousands of pieces documenting the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, church members’ exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, their migration across the plains and Rockies to the Great Salt Lake Valley, and the settlement of the intermountain West. Its manuscripts include letters, diaries, autobiographies, reminiscences, missionary records, and writings that document both public history and private life. The collection guide also notes that women’s voices are represented through the diaries of Eliza Roxcy Snow, Mary Minerva Dart Judd, Lucy Mack Smith, and Lucy Hannah Flake, as well as through autobiographies, memoirs, poetry, letters, and reminiscences. 

That breadth mattered to the evening because Williams’ work has long returned to the relationship between family, faith, land, and the American West.  Those themes were not only discussed during Why It Matters but also live on in the archives. 

Snow’s Trail Diary, February 1846–May 1847 includes elegiac poems written during the period of the Latter-day Saints’ departure from Nauvoo and migration west. One poem, “Lines on the death of three small children of W. & P. Woodruff,” is marked “Written by her request.” The page offers a concrete example of the kind of devotional and communal writing Williams described onstage.