The Salt Lake Papers ― From the Years in the Earthscapes of Utah

Once again cast in the companionable style of journal entries and notes that readers enjoyed in Lueders’s 1977 creative nonfiction classic The Clam Lake Papers, this new investigation into language and ways of knowing follows the author’s move from the north woods of Wisconsin to the Intermountain West of Utah.

The Salt Lake Papers is divided into two sections by location and time. Book One reflects the central geophysical presence of the Great Salt Lake, in view from Leuders’s home and the University of Utah campus where he studied and taught. Researched and composed during the 1980s, it is published here for the first time. Book Two begins with his retirement to the “earthscapes” of the Torrey–Capitol Reef area of southern Utah and contemplates the Colorado River system. Hydrology thus provides both the physical and the metaphysical basis for the author’s reflective insights and for the natural flow of his advancing thought.

Beautifully written, The Salt Lake Papers, in varied ways, speaks to the necessity of the humanities in the modern age. At its heart, Lueders’s small book of intellectual musings explores place and the ways landscape shapes what is observant in each of us.

Edward Lueders is a jazz pianist, WWII veteran, poet and retired professor from the University of Utah. He is the author of The Clam Lake Papers: A Winter in the North Woods and The Wake of the General Bliss: A Novel of World War II, and the editor of several volumes, including Writing Natural History: Dialogues with Authors.