Mission

Capitol Reef NP

Torrey House Press (THP) seeks to increase awareness of and appreciation for the land, history, people, economy, and cultures of the Colorado Plateau and the American West through the power of pen and story. We publish books of literary fiction and creative nonfiction that relate to the West.

The Colorado Plateau is home to 29 national parks and monuments and 26 wilderness areas within its 130,000 square miles.  It’s arid and sparsely populated country–harsh, wild, dramatic, beautiful, and delicate. There is little privately held land here, and nearly all of the land that is not in parks, monuments, wilderness areas, or tribal property, is under Bureau of Land Management or National Forest Service control.  These red rock deserts and mountain forests belong to the public: all Americans as well as the people who live here.  However, land managers remain tied to outdated legislation that perpetuates century-old practices that disrupt and damage the landscape.  Ranchers,who generally struggle financially, would break federal law if they sold their grazing permits to willing and able partners who are standing by right now, ready to buy and retire those permits. The area’s first strip mine awaits final approval despite a myriad of environmental and local safety concerns.  Yet even small changes of hearts, minds, and policies could make a big difference to the land and all the people who love it.

To make that difference, to influence policy and change viewpoints, folks have to know about this place.  We could talk about grazing allotments, rural economies, water laws, carbon sequestration, and even bio-diversity until we and everyone else turned blue in the face.  Better, we think, to tell stories, and in the fabric of the pages present an understanding of the West’s wonders that is not possible through rants and raves or other forms of “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

While many writers have chronicled the West, most have conveyed the experience of the land through natural history writing and other nonfiction genres.  There is not much fiction–yet.  In the West’s tradition of Emerson and Thoreau stand Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Brady Udall and a few others.  There is plenty of room for more writers to tell the stories of the Colorado Plateau and the West, and THP is here to help both published and new writers share their best fiction and literary nonfiction with the rest of the world.