Why This Place?

Epicenter, an organization based in Green River, Utah published this highly anticipated Why This Place?: A Future-Forward Retrospective book in 2023. “In this book, we reflect with our friends on some of the work we’ve done in Green River, what we’ve learned, and why this might matter to people anywhere else. The book began as a conversation between friends on Maria Sykes’s porch on a Friday afternoon in 2020. The early days of the pandemic, though incredibly challenging, gave us the gift of time to reflect, while simultaneously, our collaborators were also given this time to reflect — allowing the conversation to grow larger across Zoom, Google Docs, and phone calls. What resulted was over 200 full-color pages of essays, interviews, illustrations, and poetry.”

I designed the front page of this publication and other additions to the articles, interviews and poetry as part of my work with Epicenter in 2022-2023. Future visions, desert dreams, bird watching, antelope gazing, and ammonite-hunting near the Swell amongst other activities greatly inspired my design process with this publication, as well as various conversations about deep-time space, dinosaurs, and desert seasons with Jason Dilworth, a brilliant designer and my collaborator on the early stages of this project. Check out ruralandproud.org for more cool projects run by my friends Maria, Kenny and Zoe over at Epicenter, including the continuation of the Pearl Baker Park Project. Support Epicenter and buy a copy of this publication here.