Seasons
Desert Sketches
Seasons
Desert Sketches
by Ellen Meloy
Foreword by Annie Proulx
TORREY HOUSE PRESS
SALT LAKE CITY • TORREY
Excerpts from “Tilano’s Jeans” and “My Animal Life” from The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit by Ellen Meloy, copyright © 2002 by Ellen Meloy. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“California” by Ellen Meloy from Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal edited by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldwaite, copyright © 2014 by New York University Press. All rights reserved.
First Torrey House Press Edition, April 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Meloy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
Published by Torrey House Press
Salt Lake City, Utah
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-01-0
E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-02-7
Audiobook ISBN: 978-1-948814-07-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951996
Illustrations by Ellen Meloy
Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf
Interior design by Rachel Davis
Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
| This book produced in collaboration with KUER RadioWest |
|
To all who see clearly
and are unafraid to speak and write
Contents
Introduction by Doug Fabrizio
Foreword by Annie Proulx
The Snakes in Desolation Canyon
Introduction
One of Ellen Meloy’s obituaries said her days of wandering began in the dry foothills of California. She left the desert for many years, following her father’s work for the federal government. Ellen graduated from high school in London. She studied in Florence and Rome and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She worked as an illustrator and as an art curator in Baltimore and San Francisco.
Most of us came to know Ellen when the desert reclaimed her in Utah. She and her husband Mark made the tiny town of Bluff their home. In the really important ways, she never ever distinguished herself from all the other settlers of the West. Ellen said most people come to the desert for something else and then they strip themselves of everything but water and their thoughts. At some point, she said she crossed that threshold of absence in the desert. She looked beyond the austerity and found the place packed. Maybe that’s when she started writing.
I met Ellen when she wrote essays in the 1990s for our radio station, KUER, an NPR affiliate in Salt Lake City. She would make the drive up north every so often to read a new batch. They were funny and beautiful and almost always surprising. But after she died in 2004, those tapes