ELLEN MELOY FUND for Desert Writers
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| Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild | 
EATING STONE HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION: On January 14, 2006, the Board of the National Book Critics Circle selected the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards for the publishing year 2005 in the categories of fiction, general nonfiction, biography, autobiography, criticism and poetry. The winners will be announced on March 3 at the organization's 32nd annual awards ceremony in the Tishman Auditorium at the New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY, at 6:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. A gala reception follows directly at the New School and costs $40. Ellen Meloy Fund board member Verlyn Klinkenborg will participate with the award nominees who will read from their works on Thursday, March 2, at the Tishman Auditorium, at 6:00 p.m. This is also free and open to the public. The National Book Critics Circle is the country's leading organization of book critics and book review editors, with some 500 members. It was founded in 1974 to honor book criticism in all media, and to create a means for critics, reviewers and their editors to communicate with one another about their profession. The NBCC website is bookcritics.org.
Anne Walka on Arizona Public Radio talking about Eating Stone, Ellen Meloy, and reads an excerpt from the book. (Audio file)
Eating Stone is included on Outside Magazine reviewer Bruce Barcott's list of favorite books for 2005. Read or listen to his reviews on the NPR website (featured on Living on Earth). Eating Stone is included in the list of 100 "best and most influential" books of 2005 by Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. REVIEWS
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By Ellen Meloy
About EATING STONE: For four seasons, Ellen Meloy kept company with a group of desert bighorn sheep she called the Blue Door Band; EATING STONE: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (Pantheon Books/September 13, 2005/$26) is a record of that year, written in Meloy's characteristically graceful and good-natured prose, as 'spirited and intelligent, as vivid and vibrant as the land itself is dry and spare' (Boston Globe). Desert bighorn sheep are animals whose natural territory continues shrinking with the development of the West, who suffer from attacks by wild predators as well as from domestic sheep diseases, who often seemingly become extinct in one area, only to reappear years later. Tying together observation with scientific study, mediation with detailed description, Meloy brings to life the world of the bighorn sheep—the personalities of the rams and ewes, the sight of lambs jumping five feet straight up, the steepness of the canyon walls that the sheep run down with gravity-defying lightness. She helps transport part of the Blue Door Band to a separate canyon, so that if something happens in one place, the other sheep might still survive. She eats a ram that has been killed, and writes "the taste of meat lingers on my tongue. Rain and river. Bedrock to soil to plant to milk to bone, muscle, and sinew. I am eating my canyon. Eating stone." With humor and compassion, Meloy reveals the essential relationship between animals and humans, the deep bond created by history and evolution—alongside her sadness that the world of the wild is fast ending. "Animals give us a voice," she writes, "They map a world we want to live in. Without them, we are homeless."
Online bookstores featuring Eating Stone:
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BOOKS: Raven's Exile | The Last Cheater's Waltz | The Anthropology of Turquoise | Eating Stone
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FROM THE BOOK JACKET
"Ellen Meloy's Eating Stone is an incomparable work of power, beauty, wisdom, tenderness, and great humor. This book reminds me of what it is I love about reading great books: time stops, and a deeper understanding, a deeper way of being, inhabits the reader. Ellen is missed deeply, and all the more so when reflected in the beauty of these pages." —Rick Bass, author of Caribou Rising
"In nearly every writer's life, one book stands out from the others. While all of the books might be fine, one proclaims the writer’s energy and passion, all of her heart and all of her soul. Eating Stone is that book for Ellen Meloy. It is her prayer, her elegy, her song for mountain sheep and for all of life in this wondrous, breakable world."
—Nora Gallagher, author of Practicing Resurrection and Things Seen and Unseen
"If you are lucky enough to glimpse the bighorn sheep, invisible and nearly invisible along the ledges and against the rocky hillsides, and if you are watching from a very great distance, you may see her, a lanky wind-whipped woman, moving among the herd, touching flanks, taking notes. And when we have lost the bighorn sheep forever—through destruction of habitat and other thieves—they will still reside here, as shimmering holograms in Ellen Meloy's moving story of the Blue Door Band." —Jo Ann Beard, author of The Boys of My Youth
"Through the lens of mountain sheep, Ellen Meloy looked on the earth and saw that it was good. About her fellow humans, she was less pleased, yet compassionate and wry. There's fire in this prose, the energy of a writer in love with language and with our stony, watery planet."—Scott Russell Sanders, author of Hunting for Hope
"In telling the story of a lost flock of mountain sheep, Meloy leads us through that 'spellbound threshold between humanity and the rest of nature.' There, in the radiance of her patient, enthralling observation, we encounter the mortality of the natural world, that increasingly familiar place where 'deep landscape falls farther and farther away, always at the point of loss.' —Honor Moore, author of Red Shoes
"Read Ellen Meloy's Eating Stone and you'll want to run out to buy every other book she wrote before her sudden and unexpected death in November, 2004. The artist and writer's books have won several literary awards, and time will likely show her to have been one of our finest natural-history writers. Her knowledge of the natural world is deep, and her prose breathtakingly beautiful and often startling. Here she leads us through the history of desert sheep from the Pleistocene onward, their predators, behaviour, and the points where their lives intersect with those of humans as evidenced in prehistoric petroglyphs and tribal myths." -- Annie Proulx
"Meloy, like the best naturalists, is a keen observer of the landscape and the habitat it provides . . . She is concerned with the impact of the loss of the wild on humans' ability to exist, once wondering if losing species will 'leave us brain damaged.'" —Publishers Weekly