You’ve raised a few points in your comment I’d like to address. First: “I can appreciate that her style may not appeal to all, but I feel that to assume because it is not what engages you that it cannot accomplish what it sets out to do is to discount a viable audience of readers.”

One thing that cannot be discounted is Terry’s very large, very passionate, and very devoted audience, and I do not discount that audience nor Terry’s effective influence upon it. I acknowledge that influence in the second paragraph of this blog post. Just this past Saturday, March 8, I quoted her in a positive light in a paper I presented at the Association for Mormon Letters Annual Meeting.

Terry’s work does engage me, but not on the deeper levels that, say, Craig Childs’ writing engages me. If her work did not engage me, I’d wouldn’t be writing about the reading or the workshop. In fact, I wouldn’t have gone, since I typically don’t attend events involving authors that don’t engage me to one degree or another.

Second: “I put forth that maybe her writing is about a lot more than conservation. This statement seems to lock her in a tiny box. As I see it, her medium is simply language, and the ideas that feed her work are many beyond her love of environment.”

No argument that her writing is about more than conservation.

Third: “I would also like to touch on the discussion of her criticism of the LDS church. In my conversations with her personally about the LDS faith I have only felt a great love of the religion and the people coming from her. I have never felt reading her works any animosity towards the church. As a member myself I was so overjoyed when I found her work and felt I had finally found someone wrestling with the same ideas as I was in my faith and political views.”

Good! I happy that Terry’s language resonates with you. It’s those her language doesn’t resonate with I’m interested in, because I am interested in promoting the reading and writing of nature literature among Mormons and have found significant obstacles in the way of doing that. You’ll notice that in paragraph 4, I say, “I count others’ reactions to her work as one of the obstacles that must be faced in encouraging the development of this genre in the LDS writing community.” I don’t say, “I count her work as one of the obstacles …”

You can see from some of the comments above that some harbor attitudes ranging from strong resistence to to complete disinterest in her writing. Among Mormon readers, such attitudes toward her are not unusual. As I wrote in a private e-mail to another respondent to this post, I know of instances where people have actively worked to block her speaking at BYU. Now, I’m not interested much in whether or not these attitudes are justified; I’m only interested in how to work with them to bring Mormons and literary nature writing together. I will guess that you would not object to writing that is not done by Terry Tempest Williams but that speaks with passion about stewardship and the natural world to a larger LDS audience than Williams typically reaches. And what if Mosaic does prove more engaging to a larger LDS audience than her earlier work has been? I, for one, would cry tears of gratitude and relief.

About this: “I would like to recommend ‘New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community.’ if you haven’t read it. There are some articles that come from a more critical point of view towards the church, but for me the main message it conveyed was that indeed conservation is part of the teachings of the gospel and our roles as stewards of the land. To be in harmony with the Lord we must be in harmony with the land and all of His creations.”

I have read it, and while it does strive to assert the points you make in your last lines, it has hardly caused a revolution in the church. Why hasn’t it? Maybe that’s a topic for another post.

Fourth: “I am a passionate person myself and I love passionate discourse and so it speaks to me. There is in honesty in reacting strongly to things that are most precious to us. I can also appreciate there are many who don’t feel comfortable with the “making waves” approach. And yet, I hope you can appreciate that the fervor of some her work elicits emotion and when people feel emotion, good or bad, it engages them, and from there we get the blessing of discourse and debate which I feel can never be bad things. Just as physical pain alerts us there is something we need to be aware of in our bodies, emotional discomfort often brings things to our attention we would have otherwise ignored.”

Here’s a passage from my novel, The Pictograph Murders:

“Alex had read or listened to words from others like herself who adored Nature and spoke of preserving it. Some pilgrims, stricken by visions that the earth and her skies conjure, seemed to try to make of it a lover, a parent, a goddess. Alex suspected that at least a few who sought to defend Nature from the ravages of humankind in turn exploited it on other levels by forcing upon it imagery and intentions shaped wholly upon fixed self-images, sorrows suffered, innocence lost. Then in such cases, and to varying degrees, perhaps it was themselves they were hastening to defend, salvage, or preserve.

But then … maybe that was exactly right — voices of the earth speaking loss and longing. Parts of the earth mourning over exploitation suffered, struggling to survive. Yes, Alex mused, it was possible: being of the earth, people shared its fate right down to the cellular level and all that trouble raised voice in these ways, crying out.”

But what if there’s a better will and a better way? Something that someone hasn’t yet written? Language that, like nature itself, creates an awe-inspiring wordscape that makes it possible for more people to heal, engage, bring about increase? Ideas that in the very thinking of them engender human progression and advances in human to human relations and human relations to the natural world?

I take you would have no objection to the prospects.

BTW, reading other posts I’ve written on related subjects might provide a more thorough context for understanding my thinking regarding Mormons and nature literature, if you’re interested. Some can, of course, be found here on AMV:

http://www.motleyvision.org/?cat=33

And there are some here, too:

http://www.timesandseasons.org/index.php?author=100&poststart=1

But of course that’s a lot of reading, and I’m no Terry Tempest Williams.

Indeed, if environmental rhetoric can create a hospitable environment where people who care but don’t necessarily feel outrage can likewise engage their passion for the natural world, it might become even more productive. Many people want to do better but don’t quite know how to start. Statements like “If you care about the environment and you aren’t political and outraged, you’re asleep” don’t go very far toward helping them figure it out.

And of course, this isn’t an environmental blog. There’s plenty of outrage out there on the Internet for environmental (and many other) issues. Instead this is a blog that, when it focuses on nature writing, focuses on literary environmental rhetoric and how that intersects with Mormon discourse.

Patricia has written many very interesting posts on nature writing and Mormonism.

The weekend I spent in November at the Bluff Arts Festival struck me hard. I had never heard so much fear, longing, sorrow, loss, and desperation expressed in concert. One of the writers, whom I hadn’t seen in four years, pulled me off to the side and listed everything she had lost during the four years that had passed since we’d met. She thought the world was falling apart.

I think many nature writers are people of conscience who are clinically or marginally clincally depressed, just like a lot of other people are. They feel a native impulse to reconcile events in their lives, but that’s a difficult and long-running process. This is something I understand because of the long and difficult process of negotiating my disabled daughter’s condition and position in the world, especially when I faced the pedestrian forms of manifest destiny doctors displayed toward people who live with the degree of challenge that she does. Since I had no map of the world for where I was with my daughter, I did and said things not knowing whether the language I used or the actions I took would bear fruit or not. Try having faith when people you depend upon to give you something to go on don’t have faith. It’s hard — epic. Where are our patterns for epic journeys? Many are fading.

Since so much of the population at large is operating at as broad of a feeling of loss, disorientation, and anger as some (not all) of these writers are, everybody seems disposed to see only the flash of swords in the crowd around them. Only natural environments have come through to provide such people relief from the anguish they frequently suffer. So naturally, they defend their places of solace as they would their lives. To them, they are defending their lives.

Even where the cultural critism strikes sparks of truth, I hope Mormons can show these writers charity and not commit the same grave error of throwing the baby out with the bathwater that the writers themselves frequently do. Unfortunately, many nature writers cannot recognize chilling degrees of manifest destiny in their own language.

One real way to travel the troubled waters of literary nature writing is for Mormons to learn what’s necessary and then write material that offers people something more compelling. Along with everybody else, Mormons have room for improvement when it comes to caring — about anything — and once they learn how, they should learn how to write in such a way as to make it possible for others to care about what they care about.

It does sound ready-packaged for the liberal academic elite, though.

Trangressive! Environmentalism! Native Americans! Apostate! Escape from the Church and the Father!

Also:

“of learning to live among people who fear the wilderness the way they fear the devil”

That doesn’t sound like the people I knew in Kanab. Perhaps my impressions were filtered through my childhood eyes and so I was blind to the “real” attitudes. And perhaps that sentence is just lame marketing copy and the book goes a lot deeper than that. I certainly hope so. I’ll have to check it out.

Publishers Weekly review:
In this clouded memoir, Irvine, former development director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), pursues her tortuous trajectory from a loosely Mormon upbringing to strident environmental activism. Irvine writes from the fresh grief of her father’s suicide: a fierce atheist with a Mormon pedigree, her father divorced her mother when Irvine was 10, drank heavily and gradually grew estranged from his family before shooting himself in the heart. With her mother and sister, Irvine grew up a Jack Mormon (one whose belief in the Church of the Latter Day Saints has lapsed), endured a brief marriage with a yuppie vegetarian and found true love with a lawyer named Herb, with whom she moved to San Juan County, Utah. As Irvine, a grant-proposal writer, and Herb both worked for the SUWA, their advocacy for public lands pitted them in uncomfortable opposition to the pro-development, cattle-friendly interests of their largely Mormon neighbors. Irvine structures her memoir cannily around the four eras of local Native American prehistoric culture (Lithic, Archaic, Basketmaker and Pueblo), each reflecting a period of migration and settlement in her own life. However, her work is filled with so much tertiary detail that emotional resonance is rare. Still, her views on wilderness preservation ring passionately and her research is sound. (Feb.)

Library Journal review:
It took a flight to the desert after the suicide of her estranged, alcoholic father and a crisis in her marriage before activist Irvine (Making a Difference: Stories of How Our Outdoor Industry and Individuals Are Working To Preserve America’s Natural Places) finally accepted herself and the harsh forces that have shaped her life. Nestled amid descriptions of the stark, red-rock desert of the Colorado Plateau, speculation about ancient inhabitants, and reflection on the Mormon migration west is Irvine’s own story, which she unfolds gradually while moving seamlessly between past and present. Growing up in Salt Lake City under a cloud because she was a “half-breed”-half Mormon and half Gentile-Irvine suffered from chronic alienation that worsened after she moved to a desolate country of God-fearing Mormons who viewed outsiders, especially environmentalists, with suspicion. In a story at once compelling and exasperating, Irvine is like a fictional heroine bent on self-destruction. Finally, at the height of crisis, an epiphany occurs, and the author reveals what was heretofore hidden-that this is a story of love and reconciliation. This beautifully written work deserves a place among memoirs and Western writings in public and academic libraries.

Publisher blurb:
Trespass is the story of one woman’s struggle to gain footing in inhospitable territory. A wilderness activist and apostate Mormon, Amy Irvine sought respite in the desert outback of southern Utah’s red-rock country after her father’s suicide, only to find out just how much of an interloper she was among her own people. But more than simply an exploration of personal loss, Trespass is an elegy for a dying world, for the ruin of one of our most beloved and unique desert landscapes and for our vanishing connection to it. Fearing what her father’s fate might somehow portend for her, Irvine retreated into the remote recesses of the Colorado Plateau—home not only to the world’s most renowned national parks but also to a rugged brand of cowboy Mormonism that stands in defiant contrast to the world at large. Her story is one of ruin and restoration, of learning to live among people who fear the wilderness the way they fear the devil and how that fear fuels an antagonism toward environmental concerns that pervades the region. At the same time, Irvine mourns her own loss of wildness and disconnection from spirituality, while ultimately discovering that the provinces of nature and faith are not as distinct as she once might have believed.

Back-cover comments:
“Trespass is a book full of transgressions because Amy Irvine has dared to examine the nature of orthodoxy, be it religion, environmentalism, or marriage. What saves this book from simply becoming an indulgence is her fidelity and love for all things beautiful and broken, especially the redrock desert of southern Utah. If erosion is the face of a changing landscape, Amy Irving has written erosional prose. This is a transformative memoir that dances between shadow and light.” —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

“Trespass is the story of one woman’s escape: from the Mormon Church, from her father’s demons, from her own self-sabotage. Irvine’s take on early Native Americans in the Southwest and hunter gathering as a way of life is extraordinary and original, as is the way she uses these thoughts to better understand her own place in the world. Trespass is also a tangled, fevered, ambivalent love story—the true kind.” —Nora Gallagher, author of Changing Light and Things Seen and Unseen

Irvine and Terry Tempest Williams will appear at the Salt Lake City Library, Feb. 28 at 7 p.m., to kick off her book tour.

I hope it’ll be useful.

I hope you will post the highlights of TTW’s writers workshop and what you learned from it. I’d love to read about it.