David Gessner: I reread Ill Nature over the last two days. One of my own complaints with most writing about the natural world is that it is too precious, lyric, mannered. That is not your approach. I found it so refreshing to read sentences that were funny, wild, opinionated. At one point (in “Why I Write”) you talk about developing a style/persona for your nonfiction, a style “unlike the style of my stories—it was unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided.” Could you say a word or two about the development of that style? Did you have any models? Outside of Ed Abbey, I don’t know of anyone who has pushed it as hard in this direction. You mention the reactions you got. Did they bother you at all? Will you keep writing this way? (You should.)

Joy Williams: In 1987, I was asked to write about the Florida Keys in a small guidebook series Random House was developing. As a concept the series quickly evaporated, but the Keys guide chugged along. I had no monitoring. It was weird. I had a number of editors but they never edited anything. One said she thought it was too “environmental” for a guidebook but her heart wasn’t really into making it less environmental. The Keys were still quite pleasant and peculiar in the 1980s. I explored a lot—the waters and streets, the gardens and bars, and spent many hours in the coolness of the Key West Library. I discovered terrible things about John James Audubon—a mass murderer if ever there were one. He found it an unhappy day in Florida if he didn’t shoot at least a hundred birds. I discovered how sick Florida Bay was, how diseased and damaged the once beautiful coral reef. I was on a very long leash for some reason and I found I could write about anything I wanted in whatever way I wanted. The book wasn’t written for people who wanted to know where to eat. This went on for years—through ten editions—and each edition got gloomier and wilder until I stopped “updating” it and wrote a terminating afterword in which I quoted the great Ed Abbey, who, in his forward to his great misanthropic hymn, Desert Solitaire, said, “This is not a travel guide but an elegy. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock.”

The Florida Keys: A History and Guide wasn’t really a travel guide either, and it wasn’t really for tourists. To be a happy tourist, one has to be determinedly ignorant about a great deal. Writing about the Keys taught me to be scrappy and irreverent and ecologically educated. I had not written much nonfiction when I began.

Gessner: In “The Killing Game” you use the phrase “blazed through the philosophical fog.” That seems to me what these essays do, too. Enough pussyfooting, they seem to say, here it is. Was it uncomfortable at all to play the role of truth-sayer? “But a writer isn’t supposed to make friends with his writing, I don’t think,” you write. Can you talk about how it felt to make some enemies? Was it liberating to write this way? A little frightening?

Williams: In some classrooms where “The Killing Game” has made it into required reading anthologies, I’m sure dreadful things are said about me by lathered up youth. But again, in that piece, hunters are mocked by their own lingo, skewed by their own arguments in favor of killing.

Tolstoy called hunting “evil legitimatized.” That’s blazing through the philosophical fog.

Wendy Brenner: You don’t oppose gun ownership?

Williams: I don’t oppose it at all. I oppose hunting. How did killing animals for fun ever become so enshrined in our noble traditions? Hunting is cruel and unconscionable but has somehow been deemed an unassailable right. In Alaska, they’re still killing wolves from helicopters so there’ll be more elk for hunters to shoot. It used to be that the joy in strafing wolves from helicopters was its own reward, but now these guys want to be paid for the fuel they use. Wimps.

Brenner: Do you think plants have feelings of some kind?

Williams: Of course. Sunt lacrymae rerum, a line from The Aeneid. Things have their tears.

Gessner: When we first met, you told me that it was almost the twentieth anniversary of “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp,” and that “nothing has changed.” Of course, at the moment we are experiencing a surge of fashionable greenness, post Al Gore Oscars etc. Being eco is hot, but you have to doubt it’s going to stop one developer from tearing down trees and sticking up a trophy house. What’s your take on where we are now? In that essay you say that the environmental crisis is a “crisis caused by culture and character.” Given this, is there any reason to be hopeful?

Williams: I see no check on greed or irresponsibility in the states I know best, Florida and Arizona. Those who oppose environmental action often talk about our “lifestyle.” Global warming “hysteria” threatens our “lifestyle.” I’m surprised that the crooks in the White House haven’t declared war on every environmental freak who would attempt to diminish, alter, or crimp our lifestyle. But they’ve become preoccupied with that other matter, I realize that. To the right wing there actually are no environmentalists, there are only radical environmentalists. About the only non-controversial thing you can do for Mother Earth is to buy one of those stupid light bulbs. Even then, there are those who will whine that those bulbs don’t cast a pretty light. It’s kind of a hard, unflattering light, you know?

I’m extremely disheartened. There doesn’t seem to be concerted will to change. There doesn’t even seem to be common sense. The spotted owls who attempt to eke out an existence in the remaining old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest have been a “controversial” endangered species for years. At last the government is poised to act on the owls’ behalf. But rather than checking logging and preserving old growth, they’ve decided to go after the barred owl, which competes with the spotted owl for habitat. Kill the barred owls! There are more of them, kill them! It’s all so, so mad. . . .

Gessner: On a more writerly note, the structure of “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp” is complex with the dialogue between the first-person voice and the italicized other speaker. How did that develop, and what did it accomplish? The other speaker is liberal and educated but she wants what she wants, and one thing she doesn’t want is to actually change. “You’re getting a little shrill here,” she says to the narrator near the end.

Can you discuss the way we marginalize anyone who actually tries to fight for change? And this evolution of the perception of environmentalists as “extremists”? “It is a moral issue,” you write near the end. As a culture we seem to shy away from the word moral—it seems preacherly. How can we address moral issues when the culture looks down on the word?

Williams: I never show my work to anyone. When I’m finished, I just send it off. Whereas my friends could have lovingly mauled it and had complaints and suggestions, I choose to put it immediately in the hands of strangers, possibly fiends. This piece denies rhetorical niceties in that it hectors a you—that is you—for wrecking the Earth with habits and wants. But the you is me, and the they is us. We’re all pretty much responsible for the mess we’re in, some deliberately so, some just in the process of conducting normal somnambulist routines.

Pope John II said that “the environmental crisis is a moral issue.” I’m not sure what the new Pope has said on the subject. He’s recently closed limbo, which is where most environmental statutes end up.

I think destroying the Earth and its creatures—our mute fellow travelers—is sinful. If the word retains any meaning at all, it should be applied to the wanton acts we accept and tolerate daily.

Brenner: What should young writers—or all writers—watch out for?

Williams: Laziness. Finding you don’t have anything to say and persisting. John Updike said that writing a novel is like sex. It is either easy or impossible. I would like our better novelists to respond to that remark. Perhaps in the next issue? A great short story is never easy, its greatness lies in its impossibility.

Brenner: What can a short story do, ideally?

Williams: I would like more seriousness and risk and beauty. American writers rely a lot on the safety net of humor in their work. Work without a net. The tragic is absurd enough. Life has become too familiar to us. We think we know it and we do not. We think we’ve heard it all before. The good story must startle us into seeing something for the first time. I’d even settle for sensing something for the first time.

Brenner: What should we not fail to read?

Williams: Oh, I like the way that’s phrased. It’s like something the judges at the end of Elizabeth Costello might ask. Literature should alarm and elate. Cherish anything that wakes you up, if even for an instant. I enjoy reading Maurice Nicholl’s commentaries on Gurdjieff and the “Work.” It’s all so interesting, it’s practically incomprehensible.

Gessner: I love “The Case Against Babies.” At one point in Ill Nature, you say you don’t take pleasure in writing, but this one must have been fun to write. It seems gleeful, almost giddy. To the reader, at least, it feels like you have gotten on a roll and just keep heaping stuff on. “Sex seems such a laborious way to go about it,” “entrepreneurial breeders, “adoptive parents” who “must feel dreadfully dated these days.” Did you take some (small) pleasure in just letting it rip? What’s your take on babyhood these days? As you know, I had a kid with me the first time we met, so I was a little nervous . . . but it seems you are only against them in the abstract.

Williams: Population is a big part of the environmental crisis that is seldom discussed. It’s the third rail. How did one become the new zero? And two the new one? This is hardly the time for two to become the new one. Two is two. Double the impact on the reeling Earth.

“The Case Against Babies” addressed mostly the fertility business, the in vitro craze, the wacky argument that not having a baby is disallowing a human life. Everyone has rights, the unborn have rights, it follows that the unconceived have rights. (Think of all those babies pissed off that they haven’t even been thought of yet.)

The unfunny fact is that Earth’s capacity to support our species is reaching its limit. Each brimming blue trashcan on Wrightsville Beach has a polite plea stickered upon it. Beside a drawing of a turtle are the words Share The Planet. Does it say “Please share the planet”? I can’t quite recall. I imagine that similar sentiments are plastered across the many millions of trash receptacles and recycling bins all over our big-hearted country. Just a suggestion, of course.

Brenner: Why don’t you like cats?

Williams: I have never met a cat I particularly liked. Harry Matthews had a black cat in Key West that would drink out of a small sculpted breast in the garden, but it died. I thought cats never died. I thought they just went on forever, staring at you or cleaning their cat parts.

Gessner: Can you say a few words about Florida? My place—the place I write about most—is Cape Cod. It’s a land where people come in the summer and then leave for the rest of the year (more than a few going to Florida). When I lived there I rented wealthy people’s houses on the water for cheap during the off-season. Florida is about transience, too, right? What does the state say about our general unsettled-ness? Does it work for you as a metaphor (as well as simply what it is)?

Williams: Florida’s toast. But so, of course, is almost every place else. Didn’t Cape Cod recently vote against a Land Bank transfer fee to be paid by the buyer in any real estate transaction? On Nantucket it’s two percent of the purchase price and the rule’s been in effect since the 1970s. It’s had a tremendous effect on preserving open space on the island.

Florida seems not to possess one gram of civic responsibility toward nature. No, really. I’m sure there are exceptions but they’re meager ones. People pretend the Everglades can still be “saved” when the patient has been deceased for some time. I drove down the west coast this spring and hit the sprawl of Naples—the golf courses, condos, and “village markets”—sliming their way right up to the boundary of the Big Cypress preserve. There are PANTHER CROSSING signs here and there amidst road widenings and Winn-Dixies and Wal-Marts. It’s heartbreaking. Obscene. No one seems to care. Don’t care, invest, exploit. Is Starbucks putting something in the coffee?

Key West didn’t even celebrate Earth Day this year. It would have competed with the Offshore Powerboat Races.

Gessner: Lots of things about Ill Nature will stay with me. But one thing in particular has been nagging me for the last couple of days. It’s those mice. I mean the two mice in the fable about man’s fate that you tell. Man has sought refuge from a raging elephant by climbing a tree but these mice gnaw through the tree’s roots. They represent the passing days and nights before our inevitable end. How are your mice these days? Death—looking death in the face—seems to inform quite a few of these essays, from “The Killing Game” to “The Case Against Babies” to “Why I Write.” Was this a conscious theme of the collection as a whole or just a preoccupation? Also, the death of places we love. . . .

Williams: This is the way the story goes. 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 forget 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 into hell and this is the life of man.

I don’t think writers should provide the honey. Writers should capture and describe those terrifying small mice. The mice are Time, shifting, transforming Time, which alters everything we love.

People think I’m gloomy. But then they meet me and they say, I thought you’d be more twisted.

Brenner: What is the best-case scenario?

Williams: Dying while you’re still interested? That doesn’t sound all that great, actually. Does it?