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ELLEN MELOY

ELLEN MELOY was a native of the West and lived in California, Montana, and Utah. Her book Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (2005) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for nonfiction. The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (2002) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Utah Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award in the adventure and travel category. She is also the author of Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River (1994) and The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest (2001). Meloy spent most of her life in wild, remote places; at the time of her sudden death in November 2004 (three months after completing Eating Stone), she and her husband were living in southern Utah.

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BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
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SEASONS

Desert Sketches

Ellen Meloy wrote and recorded a series of audio essays for KUER, NPR Utah in the 1990s. Every few months, she would travel to their Salt Lake City studios from her red rock home of Bluff to read an essay or two. With understated humor and sharp insight, Meloy would illuminate facets of human connection to nature and challenge listeners to examine the world anew. Seasons: Desert Sketches is a compilation of these essays, transcribed from their original cassette tape recordings. Whether Meloy is pondering geese in Desolation Canyon or people at the local post office, readers will delight in her signature wit and charm—and feel the pull of the desert she loves and defends.
 

"Brief essays buoyed by a wonderful conversational ease and puckish sense of humor."

—THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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THIS DESERT HIDES NOTHING

selections from the work of Ellen Meloy
photographs by Stephen Strom

Writer and naturalist Ellen Meloy and photographer Stephen Strom met in the fall of 2004 and began work on a book of images and prose expressing their shared love of the desert. Two months later, Meloy died suddenly at her home in southern Utah. Over the years to follow, Strom called on Meloy’s writing to put his new photographs to words. The collaboration seemed to deepen over time, and it comes to fruition in This Desert Hides Nothing, edited by poet Ann Walka, a friend of Ellen Meloy. 

As the leading mission-driven nonprofit publishing house in the Intermountain West, Torrey House Press is proud to publish some of the best environmental writing—and writers! Our work is only possible because of donations from readers like you.

Torrey House Press

370 S 300 E, Suite 103

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

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