High Desert Journal is a literary and visual art magazine dedicated to further understanding the people, places and issues of the interior West. Its pages help define this region in literary and artistic terms, and represent a collection of work that charts the changes of a distinctive, unique region. High Desert Journal is one of the first publications to give readers another way to understand and think about the high desert: through the stories and images that spring from the memories and imaginations of writers and artists.

Published twice a year, High Desert Journal invites submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, memoirs, interviews, essays, book reviews, letters to the editor and visual art. It accepts work from residents of the region working with any theme and from anyone living outside the region creating work with high desert themes and elements.

To contact the High Desert Journal, send email to information@highdesertjournal.com or call 541.419.9836

Staff

Elizabeth Quinn: Managing Editor
Elizabeth started her career as a fiber artist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. This career continues today as managing editor of High Desert Journal, weaving together stories and images into layers of place. Elizabeth grew up near Bend, Oregon where she rode the bus back and forth on Highway 97 gazing east out the shaky bus window wondering what kind of desert lay beyond. She is bored when not creating, moving or reading. She works to find balance in it all. And loves her family fiercely.

Charles Finn: Editor
Before joining the journal Charles taught English as a foreign language in Hiroshima, Japan, hid out in the woods of British Columbia, Canada, learned the art of deconstruction in Potomac, Montana, and wrote. A self-taught woodworker and proponent of “living little” he lived for many years in an 8' x 12' cabin of his own making with no running water or electricity. Turning a questionable lifestyle and even more questionable life into a somewhat answerable business he began A Room of One's Own, building “microhomes,” one-room wood cabins constructed entirely out of reclaimed lumber and materials he salvaged from taking down old barns and buildings. Originally from Vermont he now lives in Bend, Oregon with his wife Joyce Mphande and their two cats Pushkin and Lutsa. He has published in over 50 newspapers, journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Sun, Open Spaces, Silk Road, Northern Lights, Wild Earth, High Country News, Writers on the Range and Silk Road. Charles' book of 29 non-fiction wildlife essays Wild Delicate Seconds will be published by OSU Press in the spring of 2012

Thomas Osborne: Graphic Designer
Thomas has been with High Desert Journal since its inception, designing all 12 issues, a total of 620 pages. His other work includes print design for clients in the arts, and assignments from businesses and nonprofits of all kinds – from recreation to agriculture. Thomas has a BFA degree from the University of Washington School of Art and lives in Terrebonne, Oregon.

Catherine Jones: Outreach Coordinator
Catherine directs outreach and development for High Desert Journal from Missoula, Montana. Her work includes building relationships with readers, retailers and funders. For five years she was program manager for The Cabin, a literary center in Boise, Idaho. When not promoting High Desert Journal, Catherine writes and teaches. In 2010, she was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the recipient of an individual grant from the Montana Arts Council. She is on the board of directors of the Missoula Writing Collaborative.

Krista Gower: Intern
Kristen is High Desert Journal's 2010 fall intern and full time student at OSU Cascades where she is working toward her Bachelors of Arts in Liberal Studies. She lives in Brothers, Oregon with her Husband Kevin and dog Dave. Her hobbies include making art, reading, traveling and watching funny stuff on TV. She also keeps a dream journal, is really good at winning stuff from radio stations, never forgets anyone’s birthday and likes her eggs over-easy.

Board of Directors

Greg Druian
Greg came to Oregon in 1967 to attend graduate school in Eugene. After completing a PhD in Comparative Literature, he moved to Portland and worked as a writer-editor, trainer and product developer for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Having become proficient using PCs while at the NW Lab, he struck out on his own as a computer consultant specializing in database development and administration.  In 2003, the lure of retirement became too strong and he moved to central Oregon where he lives with his wife Janice of 39 years, and Stella, his dog of three years. Greg likes in no particular order: books, the Wallowa Mountains, cooking, evolving the landscape around his house, wine, reflecting on human foibles (especially his own) and traveling with Janice and Stella.

John Keys
John moved to Bend, Oregon in 2008 after many years living and working in the Washington, DC area. Originally from southwestern Ohio, John is a lawyer, arbitrator, photographer specializing in landscape, wildlife and travel images and owner of a small stock photo agency. He has become a seeker of the interior West.

Sandra Anderson
The road of Sandra's life started in Kansas, went on to New Jersey, back across the country to the Northwest and California, ultimately taking her to Hawaii for more than 20 years. Coming back to the mainland, switching flip-flops for snowshoes and outrigger canoes for a dogsled, she fell in love with the landscape of the interior West where she has lived in Bend, Oregon for the last 14 years. Her path continues to take her in new directions in her artwork, while her husband and their two married children provide an anchor and keep adventure alive. Her day revolves around creating ceramic sculpture and writing, as well as long daily walks with her Akita, Aka, – her spirit guardian. Sandra's role as a High Desert Journal board member serves to focus her attention on the richness of the central Oregon environment, affording conversations and observations that connect her to an ever-widening understanding of the terrain that holds the past as a bridge to the future.

Jennifer Babb
Originally from Pennsylvania, Jennifer Babb spent several years living and writing in eastern Europe where she met and later married a fourth generation Oregonian. Now an Oregonian herself, Jennifer works part-time as a web developer and full-time as the mother of two small children. She and the children are learning the central Oregon landscape together: skiing, biking, climbing, hiking and walking.

Andrea Baxter
Andrea arrived in Bend, Oregon with her husband and fellow adventurer Scott in 2006 after living ten years in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where she developed an abiding appreciation for low humidity, sagebrush and snow. When she is not working as a marketing consultant, she and Scott can be found being difficult to find.

Advisory Board

Sandy Brooke
Sandy received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Oregon in 1993. She has exhibited widely, including in the Tacoma Art Museum 2001 Northwest Biennial: Pleasure Craft, and in the National Drawing Juried Exhibition at the University of Utah. She is author of three books, Drawing as Expression, Techniques and Concepts (2001), Hooked on Drawing: Illustrated Lessons and Exercises for Grades 4 and Up (1996) and Hooked on Painting: Illustrated Lessons and Exercises for Grades 4 and Up (1999). She was the Project Producer for A World of Art - Works in Progress, a 10-part television series developed for The Annenberg/CPB Project in 1995-97, and was the Director and Producer for the segment on painter Milton Resnick. She is widely known for her work with K-12 teachers. She lives in Bend, Oregon with her husband, art historian, Henry Sayre.

Elizabeth Grossman
Elizabeth Grossman is a freelance journalist and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work on environmental, science and related policy issues has appeared in a variety of publications including the Washington Post, Salon, Mother Jones, the Nation, Grist, AlterNet, Earth Island Journal, DailyClimate, SolveClimate and Orion. Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, Watershed: The Undamming of America, and Adventuring Along the Lewis & Clark Trail and co-editor of Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion. Grossman has received support for her work from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Overbrook Foundation, Oregon Literary Arts, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Nation Institute and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She’s been a science journalism fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and received travel scholarships and fellowships from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Society for Conservation Biology, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources and the European Academy in Berlin.

William Kittredge
Kittredge grew up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon and farmed there until he was 33, after which he studied at the University of Iowa. He taught Creative Writing at the University of Montana for 29 years and retired as Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing. Kittredge has held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, received two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Awards for Excellence. He was winner of the Montana Governor's Award for the Arts, co-winner of the Montana Committee for the Humanities Award for Humanist of the Year and winner of the PEN West Award for non-fiction book of the year. He now lives in Missoula, Montana.

Judith H. Montgomery
Montgomery lives with her husband and Springer spaniel, Ruby, in the high desert of Oregon, where she also writes, teaches and gardens in defiance of deer. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, The Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, and Northwest Review, among other journals, as well as in several anthologies. She’s been awarded two fellowships in poetry from Literary Arts, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission to work on new manuscripts (Blue Field, Burning and Inter/View); residencies from Soapstone and Caldera; five nominations for Pushcarts; and first prizes in poetry from the National Writers Union, Portland Pen, Americas Review, Red Rock Review, Chaffin Journal, and The Bellingham Review. Her chapbook, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for poetry. She holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Syracuse University, and was poet-in-residence at Central Oregon Community College in 2005 - 2006.

Jarold Ramsey
Ramsey was born in central Oregon and grew up on his family's ranch there. He left the ranch to attend college and became an award-winning essayist and poet, as well as a published playwright and a respected authority on traditional American Indian literature. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Rochester and the author of Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country and Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of America and co-editor of The Stories We Tell: An Anthology of Oregon Folk Literature. In 2000, he moved back to the family ranch, north of Madras, Oregon.

Margot Voorhies Thompson
In her work Portland, Oregon, artist Margot Voorhies Thompson often uses natural motifs. Voorhies Thompson has received numerous awards and commissions; she is represented by the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, and her work is held in many private and corporate collections. She is a Board Member of the Northwest Print Council and has been a frequent instructor at Oregon College of Art and Craft and at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Her work encompasses calligraphy, collage and large-scale painting as well as printmaking.

Rich Wandschneider: Wandschneider is the founding director of Fishtrap Inc., an educational nonprofit that promotes writing and writers in the West in Enterprise, where he lives. Rich was elected to the board in winter 2009. He has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of the magazine since 2007. Rich is currently working to establish a Fishtrap Endowment. He writes a regular column for the Wallowa County Chieftain and has written for the Oregonian, High Country News, Portland Magazine, and High Desert Journal.

Terry Tempest Williams
Tempest Williams has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life.

Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Tempest Williams is the author of the environmental literature classic, Refuge - An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger - Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red - Passion and Patience in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her new book Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World, will be published in 2008 by Pantheon Books. In 2006, Tempest Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. In 2009, Tempest Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series on the national parks.

Tempest Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. She has also been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. An acclaimed lecturer on college and university campuses, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. She and her husband, Brooke Williams, divide their time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband, Brooke serves as field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.