‘Trespass’ Selected for 2009 Orion Book Award

NORWOOD – Wright’s Mesa author Amy Irvine received two very large feathers in her cap this month. The Ellen Meloy Fund announced on March 20 that she was chosen as the recipient of its fourth annual Desert Writers Award. And last week, Irvine was informed her book, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, was selected to receive the 2009 Orion Book Award.

Published in 2008 by North Point Press, Trespass is the autobiographical story of Irvine’s migration into the desert outback of southern Utah’s red rock country after her father’s suicide.

In her book, “Amy Irvine composes a staggering litany of trespasses great and small in Utah's red rock country,” writes Orion Book Award selection committee chairperson Donna Seaman. “As she braids together threads of Mormon history, family stories, and tales about her work for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in her elegiac memoir of dissent, Irvine unveils the interconnectivity of life; the fact that everything matters: every cow and every coyote, every blade of invasive cheat grass, every human being, every dam, every hole drilled into the desert, every betrayal. For Irvine – passionate, imaginative, furious and visionary – language is a ladder out of the silencing cave of despair.”

According to Irvine, Seaman had become an advocate of her work after reviewing Trespass and ranking it among the top 10 environmental books for 2008. “The first time I ever actually talked to her was last week,” she said. “I was driving to Telluride to take my daughter skiing, and I got this phone call from Seaman saying, ‘I wanted to be the one to personally inform you that you have won the Orion Book Award.’ I had a completely undignified response, like I was on The Price is Right or something.” Laughing, Irvine recalls how her daughter started crying because she was screaming so much.

Orion is a bimonthly magazine devoted to “the need for ecological awareness and a new relationship between people and nature,” according to an Orion Society press release. “The Orion Book Award is conferred annually to a book that deepens our connection to the natural world, presents new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieves excellence in writing,” it continues.

Nominations for the award were made by advisors, writers, editors, and contributing editors of Orion, who considered over 60 books published in 2008. A panelist of five judges made the final decision, including Seaman, Roger D. Hodge (editor, Harper's Magazine), Scott Russell Sanders (Staying Put, Writing from the Center), Susan Straight (Highwire Moon, A Million Nightingales), and H. Emerson Blake (editor-in-chief, Orion).

Trespass was among five finalists for the award, including The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Books); The Bridge at the Edge of the World, James Gustave Speth (Yale University Press); Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Lies, & Power, Ginger Strand (Simon & Schuster); and Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams (Pantheon Books).

Irvine will travel to New York City on April 15 where she will be presented $3,000 at an open-to-the-public celebration of the award at the Reeves Gallery on West 24th St. Each Orion Book Award finalist will receive $500.

The Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award represents a much more personal honor for Irvine, who was close friends with the Bluff, Utah author before her untimely death in 2004. Meloy published four books, numerous articles and radio commentaries, and she was a recipient of the John Burrows Association Medal for 2007. Meloy was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her book Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit (2002), although she was probably best known for her work Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River (1994), according to Irvine.

“Ellen was a mentor of mine and is actually featured in Trespass, toward the end. So this award has profound personal meaning for me,” she says. In fact, while writing the book, Irvine was struggling with organizing the personal part of her story with the broader narrative. One night she had a dream about Meloy and Terry Tempest Williams – another personal friend and mentor of Irvine’s. The two were teaching a classroom of students and Ellen was standing in front of the blackboard, while Terry twirled around the room – “which kind of epitomizes the difference in their writing styles,” says Irvine. “I woke up with a distinct sense of the proportions for my book… based on that dream,”she says.

Irvine submitted a chapter from Trespass along with a proposal for her next project for the 2008 Desert Writers Award, for which she became a finalist, but did not win.

Entrees are submitted anonymously, but it is mostly published writers that apply for the award, she says. It is the only award she has submitted for because “It just seems like a natural fit.”

The Desert Writers Award supports writers whose work reflects the spirit and passions for the desert embodied in Meloy’s writing and in her commitment to a “deep map of place,” something Irvine relates to profoundly.

This year, “When I reapplied, I think it was a much stronger proposal – a much stronger project,” says Irvine.

2009 awards committee member Ann Weiler Walka writes, “Amy Irvine explores her bonds with her native terrain – the marks her people have made on the country and the ways the landscape shapes her – in elegant and often surprising language that is rich with imagination, humor and emotion. Her intensity and intelligence have created a deeply layered map of home. In her new project she intends to extend the atlas.”

Guided by Jungian archetypes, the lives of resident animals and the findings of drill rigs and coal miners, Irvine’s new project, Terra Firma, will “go deep,” charting a “subterranean diagram… add[ing] a new perspective to the way we see ourselves in relation to such sacred space.”

The Ellen Meloy Fund has awarded Irvine a cash prize of $2,000 toward her new project, allowing, in her own words, “forays to the increasing number of drill rigs, uranium mines, and coal seams in southeastern Utah,” while allowing her the “time and quiet to write.”

More information on the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers, visit www.ellenmeloy.com. The Orion Book Award announcement may be found at www.orionmagazine.org. Copies of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land are available in local bookstores and libraries.