Where the Crooked River Rises, a collection of award-winning personal and nature essays based in Central Oregon’s high desert, OSU Press, 2010. Distributed by Chicago Distribution Center.

“In this colorful mosaic of essays drawn from her long experience of 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 The Far Corner and Rogue River Journal

“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: The Solace of Nature and Moral Ground, Ethical Actions for a Planet in Peril

“Let this book take you (perhaps shrunken as I am by life in town) far out to listen with Waterston’s keen intelligence at remote Oregon places. This book accelerates the seeker’s life, offering concise accounts of local character, rutted roads, resonant silence, and unfolding mystery.’” - Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft