Field Notes from the Grand Canyon : Raging River, Quiet Mind

On a writing assignment, award-winning author Teresa Jordan spent twelve days traveling down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. As has happened to so many who have visited the Grand Canyon, this intensely verbal woman found herself speechless; she was filled with awe the whole time.

She had brought along a small box of watercolors and stole away from her group each day to paint an illustrated record of her experiences. The results are these field notes from a re-enchantment with the world. She believes the sketchbook was the river's gift to her; in turn she offers the sketchbook to help us find the river for ourselves.

About the experience she later wrote, "I expected the canyon to astonish me. It exceeded my wildest imaginings by at least a power of ten . . . On the river I found myself drunk with visual excitement, engaged in a gluttony of looking . . . Often I would try to recall something I had seen on the river. Other times I would focus on something directly in front of me: a family of barrel cacti in the late afternoon sun, a single cube of zoroaster granite . . .trying to isolate, to understand, the purity of that particular gold of morning light on the ridge, or the muddy claret of the redwall limestone."

The first in a series of Sketchbook Expeditions, Field Notes from the Grand Canyon is the perfect giftfor yourself, or anyone you care about. The paintings are lovely, capturing the canyon's unmistakable luminosity, and the book is produced on special paper with the look and feel of a watercolor sketchbook. This stunning little gem will be a cherished souvenir for anyone who's been down the Colorado River, and an enticement for anyone who has yet to make this life-altering journey.

Teresa's words and images have taken me to a place I've long wished to go, in a way I never couldaboard the welcoming craft of her intelligence. I have been handed the quiet dazzle of her power of seeing. Even if I never go to that deep place, she has brought to me in precious form a hint of what has awaited me. A reader, I have been smuggled aboard. -- Kim Stafford, The Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College