Death Valley

The team at Wolsak and Wynn, gems all – Noelle Allen, Ashley Hisson, Emily Dockrill Jones – have been professional, detail oriented and open hearted. If you’re a lucky writer, you work with an editor who feels the intention of your book, and desires to bring that intention into better focus. Paul Vermeersch has been that editor. His smarts, sense of play, work ethic and artist’s eye raised the level of Death Valley many notches. There are people who believe you, and people who believe in you. My husband, Dennis Lee, believed in me, and the book, as I ghosted along in the work. I am grateful for his bedrock love. I first laid eyes on the American Southwest desert area known as Death Valley in 1994. I trekked there on eight hiking and photography trips, letting the desert tell me how to tell its story. Two photography exhibits, early in the game, fed into this quest. I saw American Ground Zero, the photographs of Carole Gallagher, at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1994. Gallagher spent years photographing downwind victims of the Nevada atomic bomb tests and collecting their stories. In Barcelona in 2004 I saw an exhibit of photos by Michael Martin, Deserts/Desiertos, which galvanized my sense of the desert as soul oasis. As I wrote, my desk companions were the photographs of Shōmei Tōmatsu, who documented life in Japan, especially in Okinawa, and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. I have used quotations from the King James Version of the Bible in chapters 3, 10, 15, 20, 29 and 34. They are in italics.