Funding for this podcast comes from Math Works, creators of Mat Lab and Simulink software,

accelerating the pace of engineering and science. Learn more at Math Works.

This is on point. I'm Meghna Chakra Bardi. Terry Tempest Williams

joins us today. She's an author, poet, and conservationist. Her writing has been

profoundly shaped by her home state of Utah.

Her books include refuge, an unnatural history of family and place,

read, passion and patience in the desert,

the hour of land, a personal topography of America's

national parks, and the moon is behind us, amongst many others.

Tempest Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.

Terry Tempest Williams, welcome to Onpoint.

Thank you so much, Megan.

So you grew up in Utah.

How far away was the Great Salt Lake from your childhood home?

The Great Salt Lake was always in view.

We lived on a hill and so every day walking to school I would pay my respects.

It was like a silver line of mercury across the horizon.

And sunsets were not only revelatory, but reverential.

My mother would always clap when the sun went down

and it went down in Great Salt Lake.

We thought that that's where the sun was held.

And it was a magical place to grow up.

...