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Introduction

One of Ellen Meloy’s obituaries said her days of wandering began in the dry foothills of California. She left the desert for many years, following her father’s work for the federal government. Ellen graduated from high school in London. She studied in Florence and Rome and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She worked as an illustrator and as an art curator in Baltimore and San Francisco.

Most of us came to know Ellen when the desert reclaimed her in Utah. She and her husband Mark made the tiny town of Bluff their home. In the really important ways, she never ever distinguished herself from all the other settlers of the West. Ellen said most people come to the desert for something else and then they strip themselves of everything but water and their thoughts. At some point, she said she crossed that threshold of absence in the desert. She looked beyond the austerity and found the place packed. Maybe that’s when she started writing.

I met Ellen when she wrote essays in the 1990s for our radio station, KUER, an NPR affiliate in Salt Lake City. She would make the drive up north every so often to read a new batch. They were funny and beautiful and almost always surprising. But after she died in 2004, those tapes just sat there on a shelf. And we realized that was a shame. So, we decided to share them. I’m sure Ellen would resist the attempt to corral those stories into a theme, so we’ve simply organized them into the seasons of the years she spent in that desert and left it at that.

She would probably tell you to read them in any order you want, so do that. Think of these pages as a discovery you made of someone sassy and wise who died before her time.

Doug Fabrizio

Salt Lake City, Utah