Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America Along the Oregon Desert Trail
“There is no better guide to Oregon's high desert than Ellen Waterston. Her sense of place, her lyrical love of this sometimes hard to love place, her balanced yet passionate dissection of the issues roiling the big land of junipers and open sky is a wonderful match for her subject. While the West is full of poets who love the land, few of them are as intellectually nimble as Waterston.”
— Timothy Egan, author of A Pilgrimage to Eternity
“Walking the High Desert grows right out of the relatively new and little-traveled Oregon Desert Trail, but it is no trail guide, much less a braggadocious through-hike log. Ellen Waterston has given us her own very personal Baedeker to a little-known landscape that she knows well as both rancher and writer, hitting all the high points of the heart as well as in elevation. In language as crisp as the desert air, her book serves equally well as a primer on Western conservation, a lure into difficult but hugely rewarding country, and a who’s who and what’s what of high desert life and culture. Woven out of her own remarkable stories, her trek becomes an insightful research for how we might all get along, here and elsewhere, in a perilously shifting world.”
— Robert Michael Pyle, author of The Thunder Tree, Mariposa Road and Magdalena Mountain.
”Since time immemorial, humans have been living, loving and exploring the West’s high desert. In turn, those of us living here are influenced by how the desert is subtle, nuanced and rich. Ellen’s Walking the High Desert is at once profound and worthy of all these descriptors of the high desert. Uniting stories from across this diverse landscape—the humans and non-human voices—Ellen weaves an incomparable narrative of wonder, science, history and prose. This book deeply and cleverly explores the desert landscape and the complexity of the interplay of humans and this amazing piece of the Intermountain West.”
— Dana Whitelaw, Ph.D., Executive Director of the High Desert Museum
Bend Bulletin article June 18, 2020: “New Book Inspired by Oregon Desert Trail” by David Jasper
Bend Magazine article July-August 2020: “Ellen Waterston’s Longest Chapter” by Bronte Dod
HOTEL DOMILOCOS
In the opening poem of this generous, richly detailed collection, guests at a tropical hotel push their tables together after dinner and “sit their stories side by side, until they blend into something better, the good eclipsing the bad.” So it is with Hotel Domilocos as a whole. In a world of both staggering beauty and loss, from the tropics to the high desert, Ellen Waterston offers us intimate conversations among heart and mind and place, stories that speak to hope and recovery and joy.
— John Calderazzo, author of Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives
Ellen Waterston offers us her full attention to ordinary lives in places as diverse as Costa Rica and her high desert home in Oregon. The texture of details and imagery in her poems present full pictures which call the reader’s inferential powers about people and places into play. And, yet, her voice drives every line—wry, empathetic, self-deprecating, and always engaging. Her full attention lets us see how one dwells in the world and how we too could find care in uncertain times.
— Bill Siverly, author of Steptoe Butte and The Turn: Poems and Reflections 1987-1997
Ellen Waterston looks at what’s right before her, what’s around her, and what’s brought her there. She looks with great anxiety and yearning for hope, to the welfare of the Earth and the overall shape of her life. The intensity of her attention and the urgency of her desire to find or construct meaning are made palpable in the poems’ thickly textured sound and sharply focused images. Their characters and landscapes enlarge our experience and impress themselves on our memory.
— Eleanor Berry, author of Green November and No Constant Hues
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VÍA LÁCTEA
This book is a story told through a number of poetic forms that seamlessly carry me along the Camino de Santiago. The narrative pulls the readers along, yet, the poetry insists that they linger with the music of words and the often-surprising images. In a time when paths and “old ways” are the subject of much writing, Ellen Waterston has found an entirely new way to record her footsteps as they seek out a news direction in her modern life. A free-thinker, she is respectful but independent of the Catholicism all around her; honest about her own lack of clarity, she is able to find humor as well as pain in the sometimes grueling task of putting one blistered foot in front of the other. Those who don’t usually seek out poetry will find this a compelling read, while those who do will appreciate the craft and creative innovation.
—Judith Barrington, author of Long Love and The Conversation
Many pilgrims who walk the Camino reach some new form of understanding of their life and its direction. A fair proportion of these wish to share their insights but words don’t lend themselves easily to describe innerworkings of the soul. Great sensitivity is required and this is where Vía Láctea bridges the gap so skillfully between the sacred and the mundane. Vía Láctea should be in everyone’s backpack, or at least on their bookshelf. —John Brierley, author of A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino de Santiago
Ellen Waterston is our guide, our compass through these beautiful and human poems. One feels as if you are walking right next to the poet, your heart full—the sky all starlight.
— Mathew Dickman, author of All-American Poem and Mayakovsky’s Revolver
“We all walk endlessly,” states the peregrina, the seeker whose voice begins and ends this Chaucerian tale told in an impressive array of forms. Ellen Waterston calls on many voices to recount a Camino pilgrimage—voices that offer wit and satire, voices that prickle with gritty observation, voices profane and sacred. One is the embodiment of the female principle. In place of the archetypal Cosmic Man who contains all men, the poet gives her readers Camino Woman, an entity composed from countless women pilgrims—those too long discounted by patriarchal orthodoxy. Another notable voice, the compassionate hospitalero, urges the peregrina to “listen to the language of your prayers.” And the peregrina—a in Vía Láctea’s final poem—responds: “Petitioning/a distant deity is a waste of time. Prayer is a reporting, a telling…” Indeed, Waterston tells her tale eloquently by speaking to us in the language of poems.
—Paulann Petersen, author of Understory
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WHERE THE CROOKED RIVER RISES
Ellen Waterston’s new book is a slug of juniper air, a breath-taking view of a rough-edged land, as bracing and taut as October mornings—part celebration, part elegy, all love and the wisdom that grows from deep roots in basalt rock. Like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, Waterston writes masterfully about what it means—what it really means—to live in the West.
— Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort, Great Tide Rising and Piano Tide
In this colorful mosaic of essays drawn from her long experience form Oregon’s dry side, Ellen Waterston pictures the region and some of its inhabitants in nimble and passionate prose….she confesses an “amalgamated faith” in the high desert itself, evoking the harshnesses and bountiful graces of a storied landscape laboring to give birth to its future. — John Daniel, author of Gifted, The Far Corner and Rogue River Journal
Let Waterston locate you in dry, spare “speaking places” where the waters of spirit arise—”to find gold not in the easy of it, but in the hard.” Reading this fine book, you, too, will be “burnt and instructed.” Like obsidian, emerging into a new understanding of Oregon, the desert, and human pluck, you will be “unearthed with the run-off, and sparkle like the bright, black eyes of a newborn.”
— Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate and author of 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do
In this remarkable collection of essays, Ellen Waterston conjures the beauty and variety of central Oregon’s high desert country…this collection is a treasure like the region’s legendary Blue Bucket Mine.”
— Craig Lesley, author of Burning Fence
BETWEEN DESERT SEASONS
The music of Ellen Waterston’s language in Between Desert Seasons is touching and vibrant, fiery raw and refines, reined in and set free. The endings of so many of these poems are startling and perfect, compelling re-readings just to experience again the turn of logic and imagination that created them. I’m grateful for the open vice of this book that has allowed me to enter places, meet people, and experience events I might otherwise have missed.
— Pattiann Rogers, author of Wayfair
The poems in this collection search for a way beyond loneliness of self by first naming that loneliness and then by threading connections to the multi-layered world beyond the self…In Between Desert Seasons Waterston has found a way to “plant words strong enough” to do the hard work of describing what it means to be human.
— Wendy Mnookin, author of The Moon Makes Its Own Plea
The truth is: Ellen Waterston’s poems arrive. They situate themselves naturally, to proceed in compelling and telling ways. Each poem leaves something behind.
— Lawson Fusao Inada, author of Legends from Camp
THEN THERE WAS NO MOUNTAIN
Then There Was No Mountain describes the experiences of Sophie’s mother as she comes to terms with her teenage daughter’s substance abuse, and in seeking and ultimately finding help. The author is forthright in examining the role that she, as a single mother, played in perpetuating her daughter’s crisis by not coming to terms with her own “drugs of choice”: guilt, shame and denial.
A timely and provocative voice in the chorus of firsthand experiences of parents dealing with their children’s substance abuse, Then There Was No Mountain is set against the backdrop of the ranching West, where the parallel paths of mother and daughter to healing are mapped by Waterston’s powerful pen. In real time, the story covers a period of two years; in “heart time,” the author writes, “it takes a reader to places of pain, promise and wonder.”
The illuminating force of this book is Waterston’s pacing, her subtle detail of life on Oregon’s high desert, her metaphors, and her choreography with the language. Perhaps the compelling frankness of Then There Was No Mountain is possible because, after years of severe and troubled darkness, pages of honest emotion seem like steps of light.”
— The Oregonian
Full of honesty, heartbreak and revelation.
— San Jose Mercury News
Waterston bravely navigates a painful period in her life…Her book should help others who are navigating their way back to health and normalcy.
— Publishers Weekly
Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group Powell’s Barnes and Noble
Edge of Awe
Edited by Alan L. Contreras, this compelling anthology gathers together personal impressions of the Malheur-Steens country of southeastern Oregon, known for its birding opportunities, its natural beauty and remoteness, and, more recently, for the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Contributors of poetry and narrative nonfiction include biologists, students, tourists, birders, and local residents, thus reflecting the perspectives of both visitors and residents. OSU Press
Home Waters: Stories of the Deschutes River Basin
Home Waters is a high-quality coffee table-style book that tells the story of the Deschutes Basin's past, present, and future through art, poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
Storytelling and imagery from a diversity of voices and perspectives - raw, honest and overflowing with reverence for this sacred and generous basin.
— Bobby Brunoe, DRC Board Chair and Wasco Tribal Member