BLUFF, UT – The Ellen Meloy Fund has chosen Amy Irvine as the recipient of the fourth annual Desert Writers Award.  A grant of $2,000 will support work on her upcoming book Terra Firma, a “vertical journey” into the Utah desert. Irvine was selected from a strong field of applicants.

The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers supports writers whose work reflects the spirit and passions for the desert embodied in Meloy’s writing and in her commitment to a “deep map of place.” Before her untimely death in 2004, Ellen published four books, numerous articles and radio commentaries, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and recipient of the John Burrows Association Medal for 2007.

“Amy Irvine explores her bonds with her native terrain – the marks her people have made on the country and the ways the landscape shapes her – in elegant and often surprising language, language rich with imagination, humor and emotion,” says Awards Panel member Ann Weiler Walka. “Her intensity and intelligence have created a deeply layered map of home. In her new project she intends to extend the atlas into unknown territory.” 

A wilderness advocate for many years, Irvine writes “I am a daughter of Deseret.  Colorado Plateau and Great Basin provinces combined have defined my family history; we have been weathered by its topography, its resources, its religion... There is nowhere else I could live, nothing else I could write about.”  The Los Angeles Times suggested that her book Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land – the recipient of the 2008 Orion Book Award –  “…might well be Desert Solitaire’s literary heir.”    

Embarking on a new book, Irvine writes that in Terra Firma she intends to “go deep.” Guided by Jungian archetypes, the lives of resident animals and the findings of drill rigs and coal miners, she aims to “plot the points of a subterranean diagram – charting the vital, relatively unknown layer of the vast map of Deseret” and posing metaphors for our own psyches.  She adds, “Such a dive will add a new perspective to the way we see ourselves in relation to such sacred space.”

The grant from the Ellen Meloy Fund will allow Irvine “forays to the increasing number of drill rigs, uranium mines, and coal seams in southeastern Utah,” as well as the time and quiet to write.

Announced March 31, 2009

…in the desert there is everything and there is nothing. Stay curious. Know where you are—your biological address. Get to know your neighbors—plants, creatures, who lives there, who died there, who is blessed, cursed, what is absent or in danger or in need of your help. Pay attention to the weather, to what breaks your heart, to what lifts your heart. Write it down.                    

~E.M.  November 2004

Ellen Meloy's sudden death on November 4, 2004, sent waves of shock and sorrow from her red rock home in Bluff, Utah. She contributed a sensual lodestone, a shining river cobble to the literature of natural history, science and the southwest. A world of readers, friends and family seek to illuminate and honor her legacy of words through a memorial fund, established to empower other writers with a place in the desert.

All good writing finds voice in place and experience; really good nature writing lives in the field. Ellen Meloy breathed the desert air and wrote. Her voice was strong and sure because her inspiration was direct. Ellen was widely recognized for her excellence, which gave birth to four books, all collections of essays, largely about human connections to wilderness, deserts and rivers. No river trip, hike or car camp was complete without her journal.

Ellen had a successful writing career in the desert through her perseverance as a lone eagle free-lance writer. She was fortunate to achieve recognition and support herself, her passion and her lifelong love affair with the Colorado Plateau.

Giving to the Fund

The Ellen Meloy Fund offers a yearly award of $2,000 to an individual of similar passion and desire to write about the desert from the desert. The level of support and number of awards will increase as the principal of the fund develops through effective fundraising and investment.

Most of the funds will be raised from individuals; all donations are tax deductible. Arrangements can be made to accommodate personal financial situations, including gifts over time. Contributions of $100 or more will receive either a hardbound first edition of Ellen's Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Anthropology of Turquoise, inscribed by Mark Meloy, her husband, or a CD with 22 of Ellen's Utah Public Radio commentaries. Please specify which item you would prefer (the book or the CD).

To make a contribution to this fund, please send a check in any amount payable to "Ellen Meloy Fund" and mail to:

Ellen Meloy Fund
D.A. Davidson and Co.
P.O. Box 1677
Helena, MT 59624

We accept credit card donations through PayPal. Click on the PayPal button to make a secure credit card transaction.

We welcome your involvement in this critical addition to the field of nature writing and in sustaining the legacy of Ellen Meloy.

Applying for a Grant

The Fund seeks to support writing that combines an engaging individual voice, literary sensibility, imagination and intellectual rigor with desert literacy to add new perspectives and deeper meaning to the body of desert literature. We seek writing that uses rich language to transform raw experience into art.

The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers endeavors to send willing and talented people out to the desert to write. This annual grant assists writers of literary nonfiction with expenses related to spending creative time in a desert environment.

The anticipated benefits are huge: enriching writers with the enduring powers of the desert and providing readers with knowledge of and a passion for desert places. That education is the meat of protection. No law, regulation, claim or movement proceeds without the stories that promote and inspire.

In early 2007, the board of the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers revised the guidelines for the annual award. Changes are as follows:

• The annual award has been increased to $2,000.
• Literary or creative nonfiction proposals only. No fiction or poetry proposals will be considered.
• Proposals must be submitted via email no later than December 31.
• The award will be announced the next April.

Go here for detailed, current application guidelines.

The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers is a nonprofit organization with tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3).