Watershed - by Joel Long (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Watershed is a powerful collection of essays which focus on the Great Salt Lake and its beauty, its fragility, and its changing landscape in the face of climate change. Throughout the first essay, water serves as a symbol, a kind of reassurance. Alongside the water there is focus on the life around the lake (the birds, the microbes, even the hope we can draw from mud). While this is focused on a specific landscape, the essays also give a sense of the narrator and their life. The writing is beautiful, refreshing, and intimate in the sense that it speaks of the place as it is-- its beauty, its struggle, its ugliness. The use of questions throughout is also thought-provoking and forces the reader to consider the landscapes around them that they call home. These essays tell stories of this place penetrating the author's life in its sublimity, its grief. The Salt Lake Valley, the wetlands, the lake, and the canyons surrounding the lake are deeply ingrained in the personal, and the personal is inextricable from the land.

Review Quotes

"Here is a world of wild wonders--bison, pelicans, microbialites--an exaltation of miraculous beings all thriving in or near the sacred waters of the ever-shrinking, dangerously-compromised Great Salt Lake. Hymns of praise, songs of mourning--these essays expose intimate loss and environmental desecration entangled with Joel Long's irrepressible joy, his curious mind and exuberant heart, capacious enough to embrace every vulnerable creature, every potent entity, every stranger he encounters." --Melanie Rae Thon, author of If Fire Could Find Us, among others

"There is true sadness in these essays. Also, true beauty. Bring such truths together, thanks to mind-blowing metaphors, acumen for the patterns of natural life, and deep knowledge about place, Long nearly breaks us. But then, he takes us to the water's edge where perspective lengthens and we find we can knit ourselves back together." --Nicole Walker, author of How to Plant a Billion Trees: Child Trauma and the Healing Power of Nature

"In this stunning debut collection of essays from poet and wildlife photographer Joel Long, he asks: 'How do I know the difference between who I am and what I see?' Each essay brings us deeper into the Utah landscapes that shape his life, his memories, and his relationships. Part nature writing, part memoir, part elegy for our endangered world, Watershed demonstrates how careful attention can transform both sorrow and wonder into enduring art. 'We turn from what is beautiful, ' he writes, 'but a taste remains on the tongue, a sweetness that lasts...I am made new by every glance.' And so are we." --Brenda Miller, author of A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form

About the Author

Joel Long's book of essays Watershed is forthcoming from Green Writers Press. His chapbook " The Onaqui Horses of the West Desert" was published by Moon in the Rye Press Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance and Knowing Time by Light were published by Blaine Creek Press. He lives in Salt Lake City.