Grants and Programs Coordinator, Tiera Rainey, sat down with local author Caroline Tracey to discuss her new book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, which comes out on March 17, 2026. Caroline, a 2025 ARPA Artist Grant Recipient, reflects on how spending a decade tracking vanishing salt lakes across continents in many ways mirrored her own personal journey.
Tiera Rainey (TR): What inspired you to write Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History?
Caroline Tracey (CT): Salt Lakes came about after I graduated from college. I was doing a lot of road trips around California and Nevada. I knew I was interested in environmental history and how the region had come to look the way it does now. I was curious why things look the way they look. I was really surprised when I was driving around to see A LOT of salt lakes. I did not know these really existed beyond the Great Salt Lake (in Utah), but I visited the Salton Sea and Owens Lake and some of the smaller dry lakes in Nevada, and I just couldn’t believe there were so many. It piqued my curiosity, and it set off about ten years of obsession with salt lakes.
TR: Are there any salt lakes in Arizona?
CT: Yes, Willcox Playa. It’s mostly dry in the winter, but it does sometimes fill up.
TR: Out of curiosity, out of all the environmental phenomena to write a book on, why salt lakes in particular?
CT: Fair question; I think I was really drawn to them aesthetically. I found them so surprising. That you’d be driving in the desert and suddenly you’d see this very bright blue lake. I learned later that they are particularly bright in the landscape because of the salts that are suspended in the water. They reflect the sun really well. As I started to do public readings and talking to people, I also learned that salt lakes are kind of important for indicating the health of the water system. So, with something like the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the fact that it’s shrinking is because there is overuse of the rivers that feed it. So salt lakes coalesce the issues within the broader system. And that means that helping to conserve salt lakes has an impact well beyond them.
TR: Do you mind going into more detail about some of the personal journeys you underwent during the span of the book?
CT: There are two key points to it. One is a queer love journey. When I started the book, I had a college boyfriend whom I was with for seven years. And by the end of the book, I actually met and married a woman. That is one of the personal arcs of the book. The second one is a little more conceptual. When I was writing the book, I just had this feeling of “adriftness.” So, one of the things I was trying to sort of answer for myself was, “How do you develop a sense of home?” For me, looking at salt lakes as these really unusual ecosystems and places that are under threat helped me answer some of those questions for my own life.
TR: How long did it take you to write this book from initial idea to finished manuscript?
CT: I guess I would say, 10 years start to finish. Obviously, not full-time. I was working and working harder on the book at certain times [more] than others. It just moved sort of slowly through various stages, starting with me writing different essays…thinking “oh, I’ll try and write an essay collection.” And then, noticing this theme of salt lakes, and thinking maybe we should make that more prominent in the book. Then, finally, going through the process of getting a literary agent and revising a proposal that could be sold to publishers.
TR: Can you tell us more about how your 2025 ARPA Artist Grant impacted you as a writer?
CT: The grant was really beneficial because when I turned in Salt Lakes, I had just run out of money. The ARPA grant was really helpful in getting me to move on to the next thing. At first, when I was trying to find the “client” for the project, I was like, “How do I do that?” And then I ended up working with the Border Chronicle, which has just been amazing. They’ve ended up keeping me on to do more work with them. They were really open to the idea of doing something that blended environment and culture.
My four ARPA grant essays were really similar to the work in Salt Lakes. For the first essay I did for the grant, I wrote about the artist Karima Walker, who lives here in Tucson and had, at the time, an installation at MOCA. I also interviewed scientists about the Santa Cruz River. So, I was able to do what I really like doing, which is to combine more literary and essayistic writing with reporting on science and the environment.
