joy williams (non-fiction)

she has two non-fiction books out

The Florida Keys: A History and Guide (1986 for the first edition?)

i have not read this

it's a travel guide--she wrote a travel guide--the latest edition of which is 10th

i'm not sure if joy williams wrote all 10 editions

or if at some point the original author died, and then they somehow chose joy williams to continue, at, say, the 7th edition

this edition's front cover... look at it

"A magnificent, tragi-comic guide," says Condé Nast Traveler

Ill Nature (2001)

collection of essays, most of which are about humankind's knowing, self-conscious apathy; knowing, self-conscious obliviousness, and knowing, self-conscious inconsiderateness in regards to its knowing, self-conscious annihilation of nature, the environment, and animals

almost every essay has a different tone

some are deadpan/sarcastic, some Lucy-Ellmann-ish (conventionally italicized words in all caps instead of italics), some black-comedy/absurdist, some detached, some resigned, some almost wistful and lamenting

from 'Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp,'

You are driving with a stranger in the car, and it is the stranger who is behind the wheel. In the backseat are your pals for many years now--DO WHAT YOU LIKE and his swilling sidekick, WHY NOT. A deer, or some emblematic animal [...]

from 'Safariland,'

In the morning the groups split and meet their guides. Group B's guide's name is Chunk, say. All guides can't be called Ian or Gavin or Colin. [...] They will constantly be fishing around in the cooler for cans of Coke or beer or apple juice or club soda. [...] They will stop at a village and take pictures of huts constructed out of mud, and Coke, beer, apple juice, and club soda cans.

from 'The Case against Babies,'

Hundreds of them popping out every minute. Earth's human population has more than tripled in the last century. Ninety-seven million of them each year. While legions of other biological life forms go extinct (or, in the creepy phrase of ecologists, "wink out"), human life bustles self-importantly on. [...] Overpopulation poses the greatest threat to all life on earth, but most organizations concerned with this problem don't like to limit their suggestions to the most obvious one--DON'T HAVE A BABY!--because it sounds so negative.

here's what she herself says about her non-fiction(she says this in her last essay, which is an essay about writing; see below):

When I began writing essays. I developed a certain style for them that was unlike the style of my stories--it was unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided. They were meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers, at least the kind of readers who write letters to the editors of magazines, half nuts with rage and disdain. The letter writers frequently mocked my name. Not only didn't they like my way with words, my reasoning, my philosophy, they didn't believe my name.

the last essay in here is about writing, and is at once inspiring, dispiriting, funny, nihilistic, depressing, motivating (will motivate you), and insightful; ninety-nine out of a hundred mid-list to famous literary writers, i think, would not be able to defend--using their ouevre, religion, and worldview--their own existence against this essay (the other one out of the hundred would cite some kind of quantum physics theory of the soul, or something, i'm sure):

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because hs is not whole: he has a wound, he writes to heal it. But who cares if the writer is not whole?

[...]

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

[...]

The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life.

[...]

The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writers to serve...something. Somethingness.

[...]

Why do I write? Writing has never given me any pleasure. I am not being disingenuous here.

[...]

Writing has never done anyone or anything any good at all, as far as I can tell.

[...]

And:

There is a little tale about man's fate, and this is the way it is put. A man is being pursued by a raging elephant and takes refuge in a tree at the edge of a fearsome abyss. Two mice, one black and one white, are gnawing at the roots of the tree, and at the bottom of the abyss is a dragon with parted jaws. The man looks above and sees a little honey trickling down the tree, and he begins to lick it up and forgets his perilous situation. But the mice gnaw through the tree and the man falls down and the elephant seizes him and hurls him over to the dragon. Now, that elephant is the image of death, which pursues men, and the tree is this transitory existence, and the mice are the days and the nights, and the honey is the sweetness of the passing world, and the savor of the passing world diverts mankind. So the days and nights are accomplished and death seizes him and the dragon swallows him down into hell and this is the life of man.

This little tale with its broad and beasty strokes seems to approximate man's dilemma quite charmingly [...] This is the story, then, pretty much the story, with considerable latitude to be had in describing those mice, those terrifying mice. But it is not for the writer to have any part in providing the honey--the passing world does that. The writer can't do better than that. What the writer wants to be is the consciousness of the story, he doesn't want to be part of the distraction; to distract is ignoble, to distract is to admit defeat, to serve a lesser god. The story is not a simple one. It is syncretistic and strange and unhappy, and it all must be told beautifully, even the horrible parts, particularly the horrible parts. The telling of the story can never end, not because the writer doesn't like the way it must end but because there is no end to the awareness of the story, which the writer has only the dimmest, most fragmentary knowledge of.

And then:

In the months before my mother died, and she was so sick and at home, a home that meant everything and nothing to her now, she said that she would lie awake through the nights and plan the things she would do during the day when it came--she would walk the dog and buy some more pansies, and she would make herself a nice little breakfast, something that would taste good, a poached egg and some toast--and then the day would come and she could do none of these things, she could not even get out the broom and sweep a little. She was in such depression and such pain and she would cry, If I could do a little sweeping, just that... To sweep with a good broom, a lovely thing, such a simple, satisfying thing, and she yearned to do it and could not. And her daughter, the writer, who would be the good broom quick in her hands if only she were able, could not help her in any way. Nothing the daughter, the writer, had ever written or could ever write could help my mother who named me.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.