About
We kept driving back to the dry country. This is where we put what we found.
DESERT is an independent field journal about arid landscapes, architecture, craft, and slow travel. No parent company, no algorithm to feed — just a small team, a few notebooks, and a stubborn belief that the desert is the most misread place on the map.
How this started
DESERT began, unglamorously, as a shared folder. Three of us — a writer, a photographer, and an editor who had all, separately, fallen for the same stretch of dry country — kept trading notes, images, and half-finished essays that had nowhere to go. The travel sites wanted listicles. The design magazines wanted furniture. Nobody wanted the thing we actually cared about: the slow, specific, unhurried account of a place most people only ever cross at seventy miles an hour on the way to somewhere greener.
So in early 2024 we made the folder public and gave it a name. The rule was simple and hasn't changed: publish only what we would want to keep. No filler, no schedule for its own sake, nothing we didn't go and see. If that means some months are quiet, so be it. The desert doesn't perform on demand either.
What we believe
- The desert is edited, not empty. What looks like nothing is usually something you haven't learned to read yet.
- Slow is a feature. We report at walking pace and we publish when it's ready. The good stuff rarely happens on a deadline.
- Place is specific. We write about real ways of building, cooking, dyeing, and navigating — not a generic "desert vibe."
- Keep it human. Every piece is reported and written by a person who went there. Nothing here is generated on your behalf by a machine.
Who makes it
DESERT is made by a small, deliberately un-corporate team. We keep the masthead short and the roles honest:
- Renata Solveig — Editor & writer. Handles land, light, and slow travel. Has walked more of the basin than she'll admit.
- Idris Ferreira — Writer at large. Craft, architecture, and the people keeping desert trades alive.
- The field desk. A rotating handful of photographers and local contributors who make sure we're getting it right on the ground.
We're intentionally independent and reader-supported. The newsletter is the heart of the whole thing — it's how we reach people directly, without an algorithm deciding whether you get to see what we made.
Say hello
Story tip, correction, or a place we should go? We read everything. Reach the desk through the contact page, or start with the newsletter and reply to any issue — those replies come straight to us.