Former high desert rancher Ellen Waterston writes of a wild, essentially roadless, starkly beautiful part of the American West. Following the recently created 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, she embarks on a creative and inquisitive exploration, introducing readers to a “trusting, naïve, earnest, stubbly, grumpy old man of a desert” that is grappling with issues at the forefront of national, if not global, concern: public land use, grazing rights for livestock, protection of sacred Indigenous ground, water rights, and protection of habitat for endangered species. Blending travel writing with memoir and history, Waterston profiles a wide range of people who call the high desert home and offers fresh perspectives on nationally reported regional conflicts such as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. Walking the High Desert invites readers—wherever they may be—to consider their own beliefs, identities, and surroundings through the optic of the high desert of southeastern Oregon.

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.

First full poetry collection by Ellen Waterston includes a number of selections from I AM MADAGASCAR, winner of the 2005 Willa Award from Women Writing the West. First edition trade paper. "The music of Ellen Waterston's language in BETWEEN DESERT SEASONS is touching and vibrant, fiery raw and refined, reined in and set free." -- Pattiann Rogers, author of WAYFARE "The poems in this collection search for a way beyond loneliness of self first by naming that loneliness and then by threading connections to the multi-layered world beyond the self..." -- Wendy Mnookin, author of THE MOON MAKES ITS OWN PLEA "Ellen Waterston gives us the key to her heart: mother, daughter, loyal friend, stubborn lover, fancy dancer, and it hurts so good." -- Linda Hussa, author of TOKENS IN AN INDIAN GRAVEYARD "Ellen Waterston's new poems come from years of living in a desert of high revelation... [Her] poems create an oasis for all of us -- a clear, remote, and vital spring, a woman's life beyond any macho western settler's museum or mirage." -- George Venn, General Editor of the Oregon Literature Series and author of WEST OF PARADISE