In several interviews, Terry Tempest Williams has said that she writes out of her own biases of gender, geography, and culture--as a Mormon woman from the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau of Utah. Just as the borders between the genres she writes in are fluid, her works show little separation in nature, gender, and spirituality or in the connective threads of story, experience, community, art, and activism. She writes of a need for the natural world that is physical, spiritual, and artistic. As a fifth-generation Mormon, moreover, Williams concentrates on living a spiritual life rather than a religious one, choosing to value individual vision and experience as she pushes against the patriarchal nature of the Mormon religion and focuses instead on the importance of family, story, and place--the parts of her spiritual heritage that sustain her and come through in her writing.

Williams writes partly for a Mormon...