Terry Tempest Williams — The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary
Writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School Terry Tempest Williams explores the overlooked presences — animals, plants, memories — that reveal our connection to the natural world.
Why we picked this
Williams has spent decades at the intersection of natural history, grief, and political resistance — 'The Glorians' arrives at a moment when the need to articulate what is worth protecting feels especially urgent.
Terry Tempest Williams has written seventeen books of creative nonfiction and holds a place in the American literary canon for works that refuse to separate the ecological from the personal and the political — most notably Refuge, her meditation on cancer, birds, and the Great Salt Lake, and When Women Were Birds. As writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School, her recent thinking has moved toward what she calls “The Glorians”: the ordinary, often-overlooked presences — animals, plants, memories, moments — that carry an almost visionary weight when we pay full attention to them.
The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary is her exploration of how these presences teach us about consciousness, connection, and courage amid uncertainty. The book ranges across the natural world and the interior life, asking what it means to find wonder in a time of climate crisis and political fragmentation, and whether that wonder is a form of resistance or merely consolation. Williams argues it is neither — it is instead a form of attention that precedes any meaningful action.
For Pacific Northwest audiences, Williams is also a neighbor in the wider sense: a writer whose landscapes are the intermountain West and whose concerns map closely onto the ecological and political questions that define life in this region. The evening runs approximately 75 minutes, with a book add-on available at checkout.