The Williamses anchor Jefferies' profound inquiry to our churning
world and illuminate their own passionate quests for truth and
understanding.
--BOOKLIST, starred review
While browsing a Stonington, Maine, bookstore, Brooke Williams and Terry
Tempest Williams discovered a rare copy of an exquisite autobiography by
nineteenth-century British nature writer Richard Jefferies, who develops
his understanding of a soul-life while wandering the wild countryside of
Wiltshire, England. Brooke and Terry, like John Fowles, Henry Miller,
and Rachel Carson before, were inspired by the prescient words of this
visionary writer, who describes ineffable feelings of being at one with
nature. In an introduction and essays set alongside Jefferies' writing,
the Williams share their personal pilgrimage to Wiltshire to understand
this man of cosmic consciousness and how their exploration of Jefferies
deepened their own relationship while illuminating dilemmas of
modernity, the intrinsic need for wildness, and what it means to be
human in the twenty-first century.
JOHN RICHARD JEFFERIES (6 November 1848 - 14 August 1887) was a
British novelist and essayist who helped pioneer the field of modern
nature writing. Jefferies described the English countryside with an
intimate vividness and expansive passion that inspired both his
contemporaries and later writers.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is the author of fourteen books including
Erosion: Essays of Undoing, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family
and Place, and When Women Were Birds. Recipient of John Simon
Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowships in creative nonfiction, she
is the Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College. Her work has been
anthologized and translated world-wide.
BROOKE WILLIAMS has spent thirty years advocating for wildness, most
recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and as the Executive
Director of the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. He holds an MBA in
Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and a
Biology degree from the University of Utah. He has written four books
including Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and dozens of
articles. He is involved in The Great West Institute, a think tank
exploring expansion and innovation in the conservation movement and is
currently working on a book about ground-truthing.
Brooke and Terry have been married since 1975. They live with their dogs
in Jackson, Wyoming, and Castle Valley, Utah.
