At Iowa, Williams studied alongside Raymond Carver, Ronald Verlin Cassill, Vance Bourjaily, and Richard Yates.

[3] For the 2008-09 academic year, Williams was the writer-in-residence at the University of Wyoming, and she continued thereafter as an affiliated faculty member of the English department.

Williams's fiction often portrays life as a downward spiral, addressing various forms of failure in the USA from spiritual, ecological, and economic perspectives.

Her characters, generally from the middle class, frequently fall from it, at times in bizarre fashion, in a form of cultural dispossession.

[9] Williams's adult characters are usually divorced, her children are abandoned, and their lives are consumed with fear, often irrational, such as the little girl in the story "The Excursion", who is terrified that birds will fly out of her toilet bowl.

[12] In an introductory note in 1995's edition of Best American Short Stories, Williams wrote: "All art is about nothingness: our apprehension of it, our fear of it, its approach.