Where the Crooked River Rises: A High Desert Home

There is an otherness to the high desert, something momentous and sacred in the purity of the silence. In this compelling collection of personal essays, award-winning poet and author Ellen Waterston illuminates the people, places, and landscape of Central Oregon's vast high desert.

In "Where the Crooked River Rises, " Waterston reveals the blessings and challenges of decades spent as a rancher and town resident in a place that "has been, and remains," her touchstone and crucible. The high desert is Waterston's teacher, and she describes its lessons with grace and care, inviting readers to look at their own lives through a lens of wide-open spaces, sagebrush and juniper, pumice and rabbit brush.

Ellen Waterston is the author of Between Desert Seasons, Poems; I Am Madagascar; and Then There Was No Mountain, a memoir selected by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books in 2003 and a finalist for Foreword Book-of-the-Year and WILLA book awards. She is founder and president of the Writing Ranch and founder and director of The Nature of Words. Waterston ranched in Oregon's high desert for nearly two decades before moving to Bend, Oregon.