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 …, The Huntington’s multiyear initiative exploring the American experience through the lens of land. It also shaped the May 14 Why It Matters conversation, when Williams joined Lawrence in Rothenberg Hall for an evening that moved from Thoreau’s manuscripts to Utah’s Great Salt Lake, from grief to democracy, and from beauty to the discipline of paying attention. 

The THIS LAND IS … initiative spans the Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, drawing on The Huntington’s collections, including its living landscapes, to consider land as inheritance and home, refuge and responsibility, common ground and contested ground.  

Williams’ contribution to the companion book joins a diverse roster of writers, scientific and humanities scholars, and artists reflecting on the theme of land and their relation to it. Edited by Josh Garrett-Davis, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History, and Linde B. Lehtinen, Philip D. Nathanson Senior Curator of Photography, the volume includes a foreword by Lawrence. 

For Williams, the ellipsis in THIS LAND IS … became an opening. In her essay “Revising Ourselves, Our Democracy,” she considers Thoreau’s revisions to Walden as more than a literary exercise. Revision, she suggests, is a practice of attention: a willingness to return to what we thought we knew and discover that the world has changed, or that we have. 

Onstage, she put it plainly: “The land is alive. The land is mentoring us. The land is asking us to change as the climate changes.” 

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. 

The Practice of Revision 

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. 

“The world’s changing so fast,” she said. “We write something on one day and the next day it changes, and I think it asks us to revise our thinking.” 

The Holy Ordinary 

Much of the evening centered on Williams’ newest book, The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, which grew out of a dream she had during the early days of the pandemic. 

In the dream, Williams found herself crossing Harvard Yard. She climbed a spiral staircase to the top of a tower, where a woman professor asked whether she remembered the vow she had made. 

“Your vow is the epic documentation of the Glorians,” the woman said. 

Williams awoke with a word she did not know: “Glorian.” She wrote it down in the dark. 

For a long time, the word remained mysterious. Then one spring morning at her home in the Utah desert, Williams saw a Coyote Willow explode in magenta blossoms. When she went outside to photograph it, the wind had already stripped the blossoms away. Only one remained. 

Then it moved. 

It was an ant carrying the blossom like a parasol. 

Williams followed the ant across the patio, toward the desert, through obstacles that seemed certain to stop it. As the ant reached the patio’s edge, other ants appeared to help lift the blossom down. More ants emerged as it moved through a Prickly Pear patch, guiding the blossom toward the ants’ colony. 

Following the ant on its epic journey for a half hour, Williams came to a realization. 

“Glorian,” she said. “This is a Glorian.” 

She described it as a moment of focused attention—unexpected, unearned, unimagined. A moment of grace. 

Lawrence connected the story to The Huntington’s own pandemic experience, when the gardens became a place of solace after months of fear and isolation. Visitors returned to the grounds to walk, breathe, and spend time outdoors at a moment when shared public space felt newly precious. 

Grief, Attention, and the Land 

Williams also spoke about the darker visitations that can sharpen attention. 

In The Glorians, she writes of the pandemic, her mother’s cancer, and other disturbances as Glorians—not because they are beautiful in any easy sense, but because they force a deeper form of presence. 

She recalled a devastating exchange with her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. Williams had reassured her that she believed the results would be fine. They were not. Her mother looked at her and said, “I could have handled this. Why couldn’t you?” 

The moment changed Williams’ understanding of hope. 

Hope, she said, can be attached to what we desire. But presence requires something deeper. It requires being with what is true. 

“All we have is the day,” Williams said. “Let us be present with our pain. Let us be present with our love.” 

That ethic of presence ran through the evening. Williams resisted the idea that restoration means moving beyond disturbance. Instead, she said, the task is to stay with it—to remain alert to pain and beauty at once. 

“There is still so much beauty that remains,” she said. 

The Open Space of Democracy 

For Williams, land and democracy are inseparable. Public lands, she argued, became even more urgent during the pandemic, when people of all backgrounds turned to open space for respite, solace, and survival. 

Lawrence pointed to a recent example from Utah: a proposal to sell several million acres of public land that was defeated by an unlikely coalition. Williams described the breadth of that alliance—conservation groups, Indigenous people, hunters, anglers, ranchers, Democrats, some Republicans, and others—as evidence of what can still happen when people rally around land as common ground. 

“What do we do?” Williams asked. “We gather, we resist, we write letters, we engage to keep the open space of democracy open.” 

The phrase “open space of democracy” has long been central to Williams’ work. Lawrence connected it to THIS LAND IS …, which asks what land has meant in American history and how ideas of home, ownership, belonging, and stewardship have shaped the country’s past and present. 

Near the end of the evening, Lawrence held up a recent issue of The New Yorker devoted to America at 250. At its center was a full-page advertisement for The Huntington’s THIS LAND IS … initiative. On the adjacent pages: a review essay about Frederic Church and the American landscape. In a picture in The Huntington’s ad: Thomas Cole’s Portage Falls on the Genesee, from the American art galleries; Cole was Church’s mentor. 

For Lawrence, the placement offered a “wonderful juxtaposition” and example of The Huntington’s breadth, including Thoreau’s Walden drafts in the Library,  Cole’s Portage Falls on the Genesee in the American art galleries, and the living collections of the Botanical Gardens. 

The Archive as Living Ground 

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. 

Snow’s writing also records the practical realities of women’s lives on the journey. Williams laughed as she recalled one of Snow’s observations about the absurdity of long skirts amid the buffalo-covered plains. 

“I loved how she was devotional,” Williams said, “but she was also questioning some of the male decisions of leadership.” 

In that context, Snow’s diary is not an isolated object but part of a larger record of migration, belief, domestic life, dissent, and survival in the American West. 

A Pledge to the Only Home We Know 

Williams closed the evening with a passage she wrote in 2020 after a young reporter in California, terrified by wildfire smoke, asked whether she would write an obituary for the land. 

Williams resisted the premise. She did not believe in an obituary for the land. But because a younger person had asked an elder for help, she agreed to try. 

The piece she wrote became not an obituary for the land, but an obituary for an old way of being—one in which human beings placed themselves at the center of the universe and became “dead to the world that is alive.” 

Her voice caught as she read: “I will never write your obituary because even as you burn, you are throwing down seeds that will sprout and flower.” 

The passage ended not in despair, but in a promise.  

“Hand on my heart,” she read, “I pledge allegiance to the only home I will ever know.” 

The conversation had moved across manuscripts, memory, public lands, grief, beauty, and democracy. But its central argument was direct: attention is a form of responsibility. 

In her THIS LAND IS … essay, Williams writes that the land is “revealing what has been hidden” and “speaking to us.” 

“If we listen,” she writes, “we will know what to do.”

Watch the full conversation between Terry Tempest Williams and Karen R. Lawrence here.