Terry Tempest Williams' latest book, The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, was inspired by a dream during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Terry is the author of dozens of books and the recipient of many literary awards for her writing about the natural world. She lives in Castle Valley, Utah, but for nine years she served as a writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The job at Harvard, which took her away from the American West, figures heavily in this latest.
In our interview with Terry, which has been edited for length and clarity, Terry shared the bewildering genesis story of the book.
Adam Burke: Let's talk about the seed of this book, which came in the form of a dream. It was a dream you had just after the COVID-19 pandemic reached the US and prompted much of what we would call ordinary life to shut down at the end of March 2020. You'd been teaching and writing at Harvard Divinity School. The world shuts down. You get on a plane, then you get into a car, and you're back in Castle Valley, Utah, where you live with your husband. And then a week later, you have this dream.
Terry Tempest Williams: The dream I had was this: I was walking across Harvard Yard. It was fall. Red maples, golden birches, bronze oaks. I knew I had to get to "the tower". There is no tower (in Harvard Yard). But in my dream, I turned, and there it was. I walked toward it, and I realized there were two entry points: the staircase going directly up the front to the tower, and a spiral staircase to the side. I chose the spiral staircase to the side, around, around, around. When I was on top, I realized I was standing in the ruins of Cassandra's temple. I had this strong feeling that I had forgotten something. I heard my name called. I turned. There was a woman, Professor, walking up the main direct staircase with students behind her, and the gate at the top of the tower was closed. I walked toward her, and she said, "Terry, do you remember the vow you made to us? And I said, "Remind me, and she said, "Your vow is the epic documentation of the Glorians, and then I woke up, and I thought, 'What is a Glorian?' And I went back to sleep, but before I did, my grandmother was a dreamer, and she was a self-taught union scholar, and so we were raised with dreams, and she always told us to have a pad of paper and pencil by our bed, so that if we had a dream before we even woke up, when we were still in that dream state, we would write it down, and that's what I did.
Burke: So you have this dream, and you write these words down. You mentioned your grandmother. You were raised to take stock in your dreams and encouraged by your grandmother, but when you were a young woman and a student in college, you were discouraged from using your dreams in your writing.
Williams: It was my first class at the University of Utah. I was an English major. It was my first poetry workshop, that's all I ever wanted to be, was a poet. And we had a visiting professor, Robert Mezey, and he was tough. He was not generous, sort of snarky, but he was a good poet. There were 12 of us around this table, I remember, and he said, "All of you want to be poets. Few of you will be, and those who will, will be bad poets." That was pretty discouraging, and then he said, "but even so, I will share my one piece of advice with you: never ever write about a dream." And my 18-year-old self registered that as a protest.
Burke: Meaning you physically were against that idea that went around counter to everything you'd been raised to think about dreams?
Williams: I just didn't believe him. Even then. But he was my professor. This is my first class, and I just buried it somewhere in my DNA.
Burke: Did you heed that advice for decades before breaking with it?
Williams: I was conscious of not writing about a dream. I mean, it does affect you. I can tell you, I never wrote another poem. He had an interview with each of us at the end of the class, and he looked at me, and he said, "Terry, I think you have a really bright future as a writer for Hallmark."
Burke: Wow, that's pretty brutal.
Williams: It was brutal.
Burke: ...to say to an 18 or 19 year old....
Williams: It was brutal, and I never wrote a poem again, and whatever lyricism I had in my heart was disguised through prose.
Burke: ...and not well disguised, I should say, like we can see the poetry in your writing....
Williams: But I think it's the power of teachers, and even then, at 18, I was writing about the natural world. I was writing about the sensorial experience of being in the land. I think he saw that as sentimental, and I saw it as a necessity, even then. You know, I think to this day, if you're writing about nature, it's oftentimes viewed as soft-headed or sentimental again, or a luxury, and I don't believe that, and I think the same goes with dreams. Dreams are attached to our realities in ways that we know and don't know. So, I guess I can thank Robert Mezey for keeping that alive.
Burke: So, you have this dream that it is your vow to create, "the epic documentation of the Glorians." You have no idea what "the Glorians" means, and you have no idea whether you're going to accept this mission right away. It sits with you for a while. How long does this exhortation from a dream or within a dream sit with you before you start to act on it?
Williams: It's such a good question. It was a haunting, and it hunted me for a year. I didn't do anything about it. I just lived with it, and I just kept thinking, 'What is a Glorian? What is the epic documentation of Glorians? And you know, I did what I think most of us would do with something we don't know. I Googled it the next morning, and I remember it was March 20, 2020 literally one week after lockdown, and that morning on the 21st I looked it up, and there was nothing, and I just let it go, and then a year later I thought, wow, it's a year since the pandemic, Glorian, I wonder, maybe I'll look again, so I googled it, and that's when the Urban Dictionary popped up, and it said Glorian, a hoarder of excessive toilet paper, and I thought that's it, it's over.
Burke: You're not going to write that book necessarily.
Williams: No, that's not what I want to commit my life to. And then it just, it wouldn't let me go, and then I saw this ant and followed it, and what else do we have in the pandemic, but time, and in that moment it was carrying this blossom of a coyote willow, you know, those beautiful magenta blossoms on those willows in the desert, and for close to half an hour I just watched it, and I watched how it went, you know, over the cliff of our patio, it was like a parasol or a sail with six little legs, and it was holding the flower in its mandible. And then all of a sudden, just as I thought it was going to drop off the edge of the patio, you know, these four attending ants come help lift it up over down back into its mandibles, they disappear heading all the way down this path to its ant colony, you know, an ant hill. This clay-covered fist rising from the desert floor. Pushing it up, up, up, up, up this steep hill, and then over to where the hole is of the entrance, lays its blossom down. Dozens of ants come, shred it to tiny bits, disappear, and I think they must be lining the path to the Queen. A Glorian, and that changed everything.
Burke: So, in that moment, that's when you put this puzzle together. And did you say it loud? Was it in the process of writing, or was it in that moment that recognized it?
Williams: I was in the moment. I thought this is a Glorian. I had a name for it. Whether it's an insect, an animal, a bird, a moment, a memory, we all have those moments when our attention is so fused nothing else exists, and I think to have a name for that I. Glorian, the Glorians, you know, seeing you, Adam, after 25 years, reconnecting. This is a Glorian. This moment, this time, my attention is nowhere else but with you in this moment, right here, right now. I love having a name for it. It's not my name; it came to me through a dream. It's that collective unconscious, and I think now more than ever, we're hungry for a new language. We're in such a surreal moment at this time.
Burke: It sounds like what you're saying is the Glorian isn't necessarily a thing, although it may be. But it's a dynamic encounter.
Williams: I think the pandemic was a Glorian. I think it's taken us a long time, I think, to even be able to talk about this. I noticed with my students at the Harvard Divinity School in our writing classes, they did not want to write about the pandemic. I think in what, six years since the pandemic, I had one student write about the pandemic, and he was in New York. Both his parents, early on, were in the hospital, different hospitals with Covid, and his father passed, and he wrote a powerful essay of that encounter. Beyond him, no one wanted to talk about it, but everyone was still experiencing it. Where I think, as human beings, we're desperate to have these intimate, honest, authentic conversations, and I think the pandemic - we all turned inward, at least I did.
Burke: In some ways, this is your first go at making sense of this time period, right?
Williams: It is. I still feel we have not properly grieved the people we lost. You figure well over a million people, American citizens, let alone how many people died globally. We have not had a collective ceremony, we have not had a memorialization of the dead who passed, and I think that grief comes out sideways if not addressed, if not acknowledged.
Burke: One of the things that you are processing in this book is some of that grief, some of the losses that you endured.
Williams: And some of the joy, because I think we can't have grief unless we've loved, and the minute we commit our love to someone, a person, place, or being, then we open the door to grief. Grief is love, and together they do create this joy that is not without its suffering. I think one of the things that I learned in exploring this idea of the Glorians and life during the pandemic and life after was I believe there's something deeper than hope, and that has to do with engagement, choosing not to look away, to do what we can do, to be present with one another, that when someone is experiencing a hard time, illness, death, divorce, rather than saying it's going to be okay, sitting with them in that moment and listening. In many ways, I would say The Glorians is a book about listening.