This Desert Hides Nothing
Selections from the Work of Ellen Meloy, with Photographs by Stephen Strom and Foreword by Ann Weiler Walka
Torrey House Press
80 pp., 2020
Ellen Meloy’s exuberant layering combined with Stephen Strom’s quiet minimalism.
More than fifteen years ago, Stephen Strom and [the late essayist] Ellen Meloy spent two intense days exploring mutual passions and their idiosyncratic ways of addressing them. Swept up in the excitement of shared perceptions and the possibilities for collaboration, they decided to experiment with making a book.
The contrasts in their work—Strom’s quiet minimalism and Meloy’s exuberant layering, the meditative intent evinced by Strom and the wit and exaggeration with which Ellen leavens her own seriousness, the subtlety of Strom’s colors and forms and the heightened sensuality in Meloy’s descriptions—only spice their mutual sensibilities.
Artists with scientific minds and fervent hearts, their work illuminates the astonishing detail and seductive patterns that endlessly re-create our planet, that allow life to thrive, that assure that we walk in beauty. Combining meticulous craft with spiritual curiosity, they explore nature in something like fractals, from desert skies to vast landscapes to the interior of a single flower. Each step down in scale is a study in resonance, another way to see the same thing.
— Ann Weiler Walka, from the Introduction to This Desert Hides Nothing
PRAISE FOR ELLEN MELOY
Funny, wry, steeped in nature and as sharp as the needles on a pinyon pine, these essays will make you rethink your view of the American West. Meloy’s wise and unexpected observations are a pure delight.
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
llen Meloy has been called one of the great writers of the American desert. She was a naturalist . . . deeply curious about the world and our place in it. But there was nothing stuffy about her Pulitzer-prize nominated writing. Meloy was funny, and she used that humor to welcome you into wild places.
— RadioWest
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.
Stephen Strom spent his professional career as an astronomer. Born in New York City, he graduated from Harvard College in 1962. In 1964 he received his Masters and PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University. Stephen began photographing in 1978. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections, including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His photography complements poems and essays in three books from the University of Arizona Press: Secrets from the Center of the World, with Muscogee poet Joy Harjo; Sonoita Plain, with ecologists Jane and Carl Bock; Tseyi (Deep in the Rock): Reflections on Canyon de Chelly, with Navajo poet Laura Tohe. Death Valley: Painted Light with poet Alison Deming was published in 2016.
Poet and naturalist Ann Weiler Walka worked for decades as a museum educator and back country guide. She moved to Bluff at the same time as Mark and Ellen, and for nearly 10 years Ann hiked and floated, gossiped and philosophized, talked writing and taught writing with Ellen. Ellen will always be a beloved companion on Ann’s explorations of landscapes of the imagination.
