Great Salt Lake Collaborative - Great Salt Lake Anthology

Consecrate/Desecrate

The Great Salt Lake Collaborative is a Solutions Journalism collaborative of well more than a dozen Utah organizations working together to share stories about Great Salt Lake and ways to protect our city’s dying namesake. As part of the Collaborative's work, the SLCC Community Writing Center facilitated a call for submissions for the Great Salt Lake Community Anthology.

Writers of across a myriad of genres, photographers, and artists using all genres and mediums submitted their written, visual, and performative stories about the Great Salt Lake to the anthology. We were thrilled to receive well over 200 submissions from creators all over Utah and some outside of the state. The culmination of this effort is the Great Salt Lake Anthology, which we've titled "Consecrate/Desecrate."

To make something sacred is to bring it in to oneself and, in turn, to let yourself become a part of it. The stories, poems, pictures, and artwork contained here are a testament to that idea. They revere the Great Salt Lake for what it once was, and they decry what may happen to it in the future. Above all, they exemplify what the Great Salt Lake is: An inextricable part of this environment, of Utah, and of every one of us who lives here beside it. This anthology serves as a reminder that we do not exist separate from the natural world, we are a part of the natural world. To harm the lake is to harm ourselves, to become the agents of our own desecration. The Great Salt Lake’s salvation lies within our unity, our perseverance, and our ability to honor that which is as much a part of us as we are of it.

““I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.””

– excerpt from Boy Breaking Glass by Gwendolyn Brooks

“Gradually, the dust
becomes the rose light
of autumn.”

– excerpt from Consecration by Susan Stewart

The works on this page are a collection of multimedia, audio, and long-form stories about the Great Salt Lake that were submitted for publication in the anthology. This space on the GSL Collaborative's website functions as the digital publication of these dynamic works. Thank you to all of the writers and creators who trusted us with their works and for sharing their stories about the Lake in an effort to save and restore it.