Guest author to speak at Sehome High School for next Nature of Writing series
For 40 years, the North Cascades Institute, located off State Route 20 East on Diablo Dam Road near Sedro-Woolley, has had at its mission to foster connections to nature through stewardship, workshops, retreats and presentations.
Its Nature of Writing Speakers Series aims to create a space for community members “to connect with nature and one another with the turn of a page,” said Britt Coy, outreach and events coordinator.
In partnership with Village Books and Paper Dreams, prominent authors on ecology, natural and cultural history, poetry, art and conservation have brought their creative voices to the region each spring and fall.
The response and support from our community for these events has been fantastic, said Sean Kearney, events coordinator at Village Books and Paper Dreams.
“From writers to nature lovers, these events are a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the world around them,” he said.
Next up is a visit from Terry Tempest Williams, the award-winning author of 17 books of creative nonfiction, who’ll be in conversation with essayist and poet Brenda Miller, professor emerita at Western Washington University, where she taught creative writing for 25 years.
Williams will discuss her latest book, “The Glorians: Visitations From the Holy Ordinary” at 6 p.m. April 11 at Sehome High School.
Williams is currently the writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Castle Valley, Utah. She was last here in 2012, also in the Nature of Writing Series, to talk about “When Women Were Birds: 54 Variations on Voice.”
Her other books include “Refuge — An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” “Finding Beauty in a Broken World” and “Erosion — Essays of Undoing.”
Glorians are the often-unnoticed presence of small things, sometimes in nature, sometimes in moments we disregard, that connect us with the dreams we may ignore, and reveal who we are, who we might become.
In her teaching at Harvard Divinity School and through her deep roots as a Mormon growing up in Utah, she believes that “by knowing who we live among be it our neighbors or the plants, birds, and animals who live alongside us, we are able to develop not only a sense of place and an ethic of place, but we come to see what the poet W.S. Merwin called his ‘radius of care’.”
To take this awareness to a sense of community, Williams said in an interview, “If we know the names of our neighbors, their children, their histories, we come to care about their wellbeing and they care about us.”
Her Mormon faith is a strong influence in her life. She said she appreciates her Mormon heritage that cultivated in her a deep sense of home in the Interior West.
“My generational roots here have cultivated a strong sense of community where I know where I belong,” she said.
Mormons are actively engaged in being of service to others and “find purpose in working for the larger good,” she said.
Growing up, her family shared their dreams with each other and took time to talk about what they might mean.
“Our dreams are manifestations of what is being explored in our consciousness,” she said. “The more we understand the symbolic nature of our dream life, the greater our understanding of the complexities of our outer life.”
A writer from a young age, Williams often wrote down her dreams in her journals.
She said that “whether we are writing the truths of our lives in a journal or whether we are sharing a story with a friend or listening to a story — we are engaged in the process of discovery and all it means to be human.”
It’s another way of paying attention.
“Dreams offer us another kind of story that have the capacity to illuminate our state of mind if we develop a practice of keeping a dream journal, augmented by taking the time to interpret the symbols that appear, both what they mean to us as an individual and what the dream may mean to us culturally,” she said.
Watching, listening, paying attention, almost like a child discovering the newness of everything, can serve us to be better people and better citizens.
“If we are present with those we live among, we will know what to do,” Williams said. “There is something deeper than hope, and for me, that is engagement.”
— By Margaret Bikman
Also read in Salish Current:
• “New book recalls Skagit experiment in socialist living,” March 5, 2026
• “Ascending Eagles and River Otters near Diablo Lake,” Aug. 13, 2025
• “New book savors the wild life,” April 25, 2025
• “State book award finalists include four Whatcom authors,” Sept. 5, 2023