Sundeen Receives 2023 Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award
Mark Sundeen teaches in the University of Montana environmental studies program. He is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine and the author of four nonfiction books, all set in the southwest desert. As a journalist and literary essayist, he has written for The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure and a host of other publications. One of his essays appeared in The Best American Essays 2020.
In 2016 Mr. Sundeen was the first long-form reporter to embed in the Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock, North Dakota, where he spent four months reporting on the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. His articles on environmental matters have covered a wide range of topics, including the work of rhino protectors in Namibia, the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline in Utah, profiles of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and the Udall family dynasty, and other subjects.
His application to the Ellen Meloy Fund, “Man in a Can,” focuses on the plight of the Colorado River, viewed through lenses both journalistic and literary. The essay, “Man in a Can,” recently published in Outside Magazine, presents the tale of forensic experts trying to determine the identity of a human skeleton found in a barrel in the rapidly receding Lake Mead. The dead man, killed by a gunshot, had been dropped in the lake around forty years ago.
Mr. Sundeen wrote of his proposed book, “This is a murder mystery, which morphs into an elegy, an exploration of our shared grief for a dying planet — and the sorrow of losing those we love.”
He continued: “The project expands into a memoir of my decades in the Colorado River Basin, as a kid raised in Los Angeles, a Canyonlands river guide, a reporter on water politics, and a father. It explores my own dependence on the Colorado’s waters, both in a practical sense — I have drunk the stuff since childhood — and as a wellspring of spiritual refreshment. From the fourth floor of the Albuquerque hospital where both my sons were born — where the first died in our arms — I could look down at the cottonwood bosque along the Rio Grande, red silty water pumped across the divide from the San Juan River. It’s in my veins, the veins of my children.”
Mr. Sundeen plans to use grant dollars provided by the Ellen Meloy Fund to continue his research into the astonishing discoveries being made as the lake level continues to fluctuate, approaching the dead pool. He is fully aware that the vision embedded in his project offers a departure from much well-known desert writing.
He said, “While much desert literature focuses on the natural world, this project includes the perspective of the cities where some thirty-six million humans dwell, from the hospitals of Albuquerque to the suburban lawns of LA to the casinos and fountains of Las Vegas.”
When he learned that he had received the award, Sundeen had this to say: “What an honor to be included on this list of some of my favorite writers, favorite people. I’ve been swirling around the Moab eddy for most of my adult life, three decades now, and I return for inspiration to the Colorado Plateau both in the flesh--like now as I strap the oars to the truck and head off for the San Juan River—and also in my imagination, on those dark Montana mornings when I awake with red grit in my teeth.”