About Sacred Elements Press

Every book begins with a vision. Our series originated with an incredible artist and human being from Cortez, Colorado, named Sonja Horoshko. She was the one who imagined our first two collections into being.

Sonja was simply a force of nature – a human being who overflowed with art, with passion, with humanity. She was surely among the staunchest friends my wife Tina and I found in this little corner of the Southwest, and along with so many others, we mourn her recent passing.
Talking to Sonja, even on the phone, which I often did, was like walking in a shiny summer rainstorm, her ideas free-associating from here to there in vivid brightness, one story spilling into another story, punctuated by inquiries into the very nature of life itself, possibly with a digression or two on the value of community, of friendship, of writing, of art, of the power of creativity. Her conversation overflowed with inspiration and with compassion.
Her love for landscapes and the earth itself was earnest and ever-present, much of it, I believe, shaped by innumerable joyous experiences at Hovenweep, which she carried within her and celebrated on perhaps a daily basis. Her love for her family and her personal past and Ukrainian origins was permanent. The bond she shared with her partner Ed Singer was deep and powerful and gratifying to behold. 
She was a powerful and disciplined artist and an equally bold and vibrant writer. But as excellent as her own work was, and it was indeed exceptional in every way, her love for art and literature led her to express a generosity toward other artists, writers, and creators that was unparalleled in my experience. 
Over the years since, she invited many, many others to participate in creative ventures that she herself had nurtured into being. All of this was because Sonja never cared a nickel for self-aggrandizement. For her, it was all about the work itself and the community that nurtures it. Her support and love for young artists and writers was a fine thing to behold. She championed them, listened to them, and respected them.
I will close this remembering of our dear friend with a few of her own words in FERTILE. Sonja deserves her own last word:
SOTO VOCE
She sits alone at the horizon on the west side of a busy highway. From a distance, this spare high desert mountain is broad at the base, not too steep or high. It feels whale-like, monstrously solid, and impenetrable, something quietly ever-present, self-absorbed, pulled inward, preoccupied with grabbing beauty from the sunlight.
“Awesome!” passengers whisper as they glance at her and drive on.
They are correct. She is. Seasonal shifts of light, diurnal swings slowly change the configurations that dress her body. Wait six months, or twelve. Watch her gaping canyons emerge from black shadows where they rest half the year and always return after the swelling sunshine rolls away from the rock faces subsuming again into shade, crossing her body, back and forth, engaging us in the slow motion, primal, nascent radiance of the kind unveiled when this mountain birthed from a heaving urge inside Mother Earth many millions of years ago.
She is a mountain living in relation to sun, moon, and star patterns, effortlessly creating her own splendid self again and again on Earth.
When we look at telescopic images of solid planetary surfaces elsewhere in our solar system, like our current interest in Mars and Earth’s moon, we see the raw wildness, the musculature found there that is so similar to our home planet.
“Awesome.” We reverently respond. The congruities to our own geography astonish us – a little older, worn down, smoother, dusty and bare, sure, but rocky, reddish-gray, mesa and canyon-like feel familiar and perilously similar to this mountain I am meeting for the first time.
The mountain is quiet.
It is elegant.