front cover of Bonelight
Bonelight
Ruin And Grace In The New Southwest
Mary Sojourner
University of Nevada Press, 2004
When upstate New Yorker Mary Sojourner reluctantly agreed to visit the Grand Canyon of Arizona, she little suspected that she was about to lose her heart to the beauty of the Southwest, or that she would shortly find a passion for the land, and a cause in protecting it. She has since gained notoriety as an environmental writer and as a grass-roots activist protesting the heedless development of the Southwest's increasingly precious and embattled open spaces. The essays collected here reflect Sojourner's journey from greenhorn to old-timer, from tourist to committed defender of the land and the human communities that share it. She writes of exploring the deserts, forests, mountains, and river rapids of the Southwest, and of her love for this austere and ravishing landscape; of family, friends, and lovers; of the ways that development is destroying the Southwest's fragile beauty; and of the greed and spiritual emptiness that motivate much of this development. There is humor here, and adventure, and the intensity of a writer who confronts the world around her with bold candor and a lover's tender gaze.
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front cover of Going Through Ghosts
Going Through Ghosts
Mary Sojourner
University of Nevada Press, 2010

Maggie Foltz is a fifty-five-year-old cocktail waitress in a rundown casino in the southern Nevada Mojave Desert. She spends her days serving drinks to lonely old folks playing the slot machines and her nights trying to escape her bitter past. When she befriends Sarah, a young Native American woman who is hired to cook in the casino coffee shop, her life begins to change. Maggie finds herself falling in love with a memory-haunted Vietnam veteran and warily begins to hope that together they can find peace. Then Sarah is mysteriously murdered, and Sarah’s ghost enlists Maggie to accompany her on a quest for the wisdom that she needs in order to move into the next world. The story ranges from smoky casinos into the harsh magnificence of the desert and the reservation where Sarah’s people are trying to preserve their culture and find their own place in a modern world that seems to want them to be either shamans or losers. Sojourner’s characters are compellingly real, and the Mojave setting has rarely been depicted as sensitively or truthfully. This is a memorable story of love, redemption, and solace, told by one of the West’s finest writers.

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