| Ellen Meloy is a vital yet relatively unnoticed nature writer who wrote with humor and concern about the desert Southwest. This full-length study adds her work to the critical literature on nature writing. Ellen Meloy called her writing a "deep map of place." This study examines Meloy's four major works (Raven's Exile, The Last Cheater's Waltz, The Anthropology of Turquoise, and Eating Stone) from the perspective of that map, through which Meloy cultivates an intimate and erotic awareness of place. In this study, I observe how Meloy's relationship to place shifts and evolves through her four books. In Raven's Exile, Meloy writes with intimacy about her explorations of Desolation Canyon in Utah. In The Last Cheater's Waltz, she maps an intimate geography with a variety of places, only to feel in the end that "place" as an intimate partner has cheated on her. In the series of essays that comprise The Anthropology of Turquoise, Meloy cultivates a sensual, instinctual, and erotic understanding of place by using a rich and colorful palette throughout. In Eating Stone, Meloy's final book, she is more meditative and spiritual as she spends time with desert bighorn sheep. Using intimate, erotic, and relationship metaphors, Meloy expands the boundaries of place writing and stretches our understanding of place itself. |
