Seasons: Desert Sketches, Paperback

"Brief essays buoyed by a wonderful conversational ease and puckish sense of humor."
--THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Meloy's nonfiction sparkles, taunts, and ensnares the reader with her incisive humor and stunning depictions of desert landscapes and wildlife."
--15 BYTES

"This cinematically vivid collection feeds both intellect and soul, and shows that Meloy possessed the brevity and vision of a poet, and the coy sass of an understated comedian."
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"These essays explore life in the desert lived by a woman who loved it fiercely. A vital collection."
--LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review

"Ellen Meloy just might be my favorite Utah writer. She's smart and witty. She's laugh-out-loud funny. She's self-deprecatory and never preachy. She always gets her natural history right. And her writing is sufficiently gorgeous for her books to be finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Seasons serves as a fine introduction to the work of this underappreciated writer. Meloy grounds us in her home landscape--our home landscape, where, she realizes, 'I always belonged, but didn't know it.' To earn our place in this red rock desert community, Meloy asks us to 'slow down, pay attention, stay local, go deep.' That's what she does here, and we are privileged to travel with her through the cycles of southern Utah seasons as she searches for 'the core of home.'"
--STEPHEN TRIMBLE, editor of Red Rock Stories: Three Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah's Public Lands

The late writer and naturalist 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. With a foreword by Annie Proulx.

"Ellen Meloy just might be my favorite Utah writer. She's smart and witty. She's laugh-out-loud funny. She's self-deprecatory and never preachy. She always gets her natural history right. And her writing is sufficiently gorgeous for her books to be finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

"Seasons serves as a fine introduction to the work of this underappreciated writer. Meloy grounds us in her home landscape--our home landscape, where, she realizes, 'I always belonged, but didn't know it.' To earn our place in this red rock desert community, Meloy asks us to 'slow down, pay attention, stay local, go deep.'

"That's what she does here, and we are privileged to travel with her through the cycles of southern Utah seasons as she searches for 'the core of home.'" --STEPHEN TRIMBLE, editor of Red Rock Stories: Three Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah's Public Lands

Ellen Meloy was a native of the West and lived in California, Montana, and Utah. Her book The Anthropology of Turquoise (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), The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest (2001), and Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (2005). 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.