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Learning from silence with Pico Iyer on Access Utah

The cover of "Aflame: Learning From Silence" by Pico Ayer is orange with a yellow outline of a sun, rays reaching across the cover.
Penguin Random House

Pico Iyer has made more than 100 retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian — or a member of any religious group — but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence.

In his new book "Aflame," he meditates about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.

Pico Iyer is the author of 15 books, translated into 23 languages, and has been a constant contributor for more than thirty years to Time, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His four recent talks for TED have received more than 11 million views.

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Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.