Interview With Author Terry Tempest Williams...

Jun 6, 2012 by Bonnie Simon

15 May 2012  Tabard Inn Washington, D.C.  Dearest Bonnie:  Greetings.  Here are my responses to your evocative questions.  Many thanks, Terry atsGf/Bonnie Simon: Terry, I love your poetic style of writing.  What influences helped you develop it? Terry Tempest Williams:  I think style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one’s own life experience.  I don’t think in terms of chapters, per se.  I think in terms of stories.  It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.  With this book, “When Women Were Birds,” it is a story about how my mother left me her journals andall her journals were blank.  There are twelve blank pages that follow this revelation in the book.  That is not a style, but the physical truth.  I wanted the reader to feel that same...