Watershed is a powerful collection of essays which focus on the Great Salt Lake and its beauty, its fragility, and its changing landscape in the face of climate change. Throughout the first essay, water serves as a symbol, a kind of reassurance. Alongside the water there is focus on the life around the lake (the birds, the microbes, even the hope we can draw from mud). While this is focused on a specific landscape, the essays also give a sense of the narrator and their life. The writing is beautiful, refreshing, and intimate in the sense that it speaks of the place as it is— its beauty, its struggle, its ugliness. The use of questions throughout is also thought-provoking and forces the reader to consider the landscapes around them that they call home. These essays tell stories of this place penetrating the author’ s life in its sublimity, its grief. The Salt Lake Valley, the wetlands, the lake, and the canyons surrounding the lake are deeply ingrained in the personal, and the personal is inextricable from the land.
