“Nothing comes easily out here,” Terry Tempest Williams, a Utah-based writer, said of the American West. Her family was once almost taken by fire, and as a child of the West, she grew up with it.

Our producer Bianca Giaever, who was working out of the West Coast when the wildfires started, woke up one day amid the smoke with the phrase “an obituary to the land” in her head. She called on Ms. Williams, a friend, to write one.

“I will never write your obituary,” her poem reads. “Because even as you burn, you throw down seeds that will sprout and flower.”

Guest: Bianca Giaever, a producer for The New York Times, speaks to the writer Terry Tempest Williams.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily

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