2025 Award Recipient - Lucas Martin

BLUFF, UT –  The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers has chosen Lucas Martin of Bend, Oregon, as the recipient of the twenty-first annual Desert Writers Award. A grant of $5,000 will support work on his book project, provisionally titled “Juniper Moonscape.”

Mr. Martin, a Virginia native, moved to Bend several years ago when his wife Ingrid, a chemist, landed a job there. The two of them began hiking areas of the vast sagebrush steppe desert of central and eastern Oregon, developing a deep love for those underappreciated terrains. Eventually, Lucas became a wilderness survey intern for the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a Bend-based nonprofit dedicated to the conservation of remote high desert landcapes.  Mr. Martin said that it was his survey work on Steen’s Mountain with its extraordinary night skies, which cemented his desire to stay and write about Oregon desert ecosystems.

“Juniper Moonscape” chronicles Mr. Martin’s struggle with the onset of epilepsy, which began to manifest in the years following his relocation to Bend. 

He wrote, “After four years of exploring, hiking, camping and working in this strange mix of arid volcanic highland and broken-steppe desert I began regularly suffering clustered focal seizures in my left temporal lobe. I began forgetting the desert bit by bit, one seizure at a time.”

Diagnosis led to successful treatment, but Lucas’s recovery has been halting. “I’ve spent two years since slowly recovering, repairing, normalizing,” he wrote. “My memories aren’t gone, but some are murky or thin, some fractured; they are out of order in time and on the map, jumbled on the floor, misplaced in some corner or closet. I find them under chairs, or pressed like flowers between the pages of an old book – but mostly I find them out in the desert. I’m writing about Oregon’s high desert as a means to repair my damaged memory of it.”

Mr. Martin intends to use the Meloy Fund grant to visit, and revisit, a series of landscapes across the badlands of eastern Oregon. He contemplates a book in five parts, each focusing on a different sector of the desert. He explained, “The essays progress loosely along a northwest-southeast trending line while my memories become ever more connected, so that the reader is led simultaneously deeper into geographic isolation and narratorial confidence.”

Lucas’s work has appeared in Seattle’s Northshore News, where he was a daily reporter, as well as Astronomy magazine. His January 2022 feature article focused on a little-known amateur rocketry site near the desert hamlet of Brothers, Oregon. A nonprofit organization known as Oregon Rocketry operates a launch site where amateur rocketeers are allowed to fire devices 50,000 feet above the earth. Mr. Martin shares Ellen Meloy’s fascination with deserts as places to experiment with powerful and sometimes exotic technologies. Ellen’s 1999 book, The Last Cheater’s Waltz, chronicled a history of nuclear technology deployment across vast stretches of the Southwest.

The Oregon high desert near Lucas’s home is distinguished by the vastness and drama of its night skies. In fact, the Oregon Outback, covering much of eastern Oregon, is the largest designated dark sky sanctuary in the world (https://darksky.org/news/outback-dark-international-dark-sky-sanctuary/). Over more than two decades of annual grant-making, the Meloy Fund has never selected a writer of the Oregon high desert as its winner. Lucas is the first. 

Upon receiving word that he had won the Ellen Meloy Award, Mr. Martin responded with a reflection on his first encounters with her work, “After my first big dose of Ellen while reading The Anthropology of Turquoise, I’ve had to take her cautiously, in ten- and twenty-page spurts and pauses; her voice is captivating, contagious. I read a bit and think there’s no way I could write deserts this subtle, precise, pigmented, then I breathe deep and read a page or two more and return to my notebook to try again. Ellen inspires me always and again to try.”

In addition to the award winner, the Meloy board named two 2025 Runners-Up: Camille Lefevre of Sedona, Arizona, for a project titled “In Situ”; and Eleanor Whitney of Yucca Flats, California, for “Total Loss.”

A group of six Meloy Fund board members along with two guest readers comprised the 2025 Awards Committee.  The board members included Leanne Benton of Estes Park, Colorado; Michael Branch of Reno, Nevada; Edie Lush of London, England; and Don Snow of Walla Walla, Washington. Sarah Gilman and Ashley Lodato, both of Winthrop, Washington, served as guest readers. (Gilman has since joined the board of directors.)

The Ellen Meloy Fund supports writers whose work reflects the spirit and passion for the desert embodied in Meloy’s writing and in her commitment to a “deep map of place.” Before her untimely death in 2004, Meloy published four books, numerous articles, and radio commentaries. Her last book, Eating Stone, won the John Burroughs Association Medal for 2007.  An earlier work, The Anthropology of Turquoise, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

More information about Ellen Meloy, the Fund for Desert Writers, and the annual award can be found at http://www.ellenmeloyfund.com.