I remember your anger after I woke up screaming from a nightmare. I was seven, had just experienced my first California earthquake, and had been having nightmares about it for days. You got me paper and crayons.

“Draw a picture of what you think is going to happen,” you command.…

My real fear is undrawable, unspeakable: the ground not a solid thing, solidity not to be counted on, earth that can move and writhe and open up to swallow me, and you, and all of us. That is my dream, my fear.

— excerpt from Nothing to Be Afraid Of by Heather Quinn

Heather Quinn, Minnesota-based writer, photographer, filmmaker, and Portland State University alum, is the recipient of the 11th annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize for This Is How You Disappear, a book-length essay about the California desert.

The prize, established in 2014 by Bend-based author and poet Ellen Waterston, honors literary nonfiction that celebrates desert landscapes across the United States. As part of the award, which was announced Aug. 15, Quinn will receive a $3,000 cash prize and discuss their work at the prize ceremony to be held Sept. 25 at the High Desert Museum in Bend.

The event will feature award-winning author Dan Flores, who has spent his career exploring the connection between people in the West and the natural world. He will give a talk titled The Coyote Is the Dude, the Dude Abides, and the Adventures Continue during the ceremony. Guest judge for the prize, Beth Piatote, author and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, will also attend.

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“We are honored to welcome our outstanding winner Heather Quinn and award-winning authors Dan Flores and Beth Piatote to this year’s Waterston Desert Writing Prize ceremony,” Dana Whitelaw, executive director of the museum, which adopted the Waterston prize program in 2020, said in a release. “Their passionate exploration of the natural world aligns perfectly with the prize’s mission to celebrate and elevate desert landscapes through the power of literary nonfiction.”

Quinn, who earned their master of fine arts degree at PSU, lives in Minneapolis with their husband and two daughters. They are a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar. Quinn approaches nonfiction from a journalistic background — blending personal narrative, reporting, and historical research to explore trauma, ecological collapse, and memory. Their work focuses on the Salton Sea, an ecologically and socioeconomically vulnerable area in the Southern California desert. Quinn has been documenting the region through writing, photography, and film for a decade.

Ellen Waterston, who is midway through her two-year term as Oregon’s Poet Laureate, called Quinn’s winning piece “fearless writing that skillfully enlists the landscape of the Salton Sea as backdrop to their quest for understanding.”

The runner-ups for this year’s prize are Taylor Luck, a journalist living in the Middle East who writes about a region in upheaval, and Charles Hood of Palmdale, Calif., whose submission, Desert Fire, delves into the role of fire in Western American deserts.

Tickets to attend the Waterston prize ceremony are $10 general admission, with museum members receiving a 20 percent discount.