Rohini Walker didn’t start writing until she landed in the Mojave high desert. She’d left London in 2013, and the place did the rest. “The landscape of the desert singlehandedly inspired and energized me to start writing,” she says, “and everything I’ve created after that has been a homage to that.” That’s the whole origin story, and once you’ve read a few pages of what she’s made since, it tracks.
The most visible piece of her output is Luna Arcana, the print periodical she co-founded and edits out of Joshua Tree. It’s an arts and literary journal with a clear sense of where it lives. The desert isn’t a backdrop in its pages. It’s the whole organizing principle. Walker and Martín Mancha, who share creative direction, use the publication to document what the Mojave draws out of the people who end up there, through writing, illustration, and photography pulled from the creative community that’s settled across the high desert.
What separates Luna Arcana from the usual take on desert culture is how seriously it takes the place itself. The journal leans into the occult side of arid terrain, the unseen forces Walker and her collaborators believe the desert draws out of the people who gravitate to it. That’s a lot to put on a landscape, but spend enough time around Joshua Tree and the claim stops feeling abstract. The people who stick around tend to come back changed.
The other half of the journal’s focus is more grounded. Luna Arcana spends real time on the conservation and permaculture work happening in and around Joshua Tree, the kind of quiet, hands-on effort that doesn’t usually get magazine treatment. Humility is a word that comes up a lot in the project’s framing, and it’s earned. The work is about learning to operate inside nature’s cycles instead of on top of them, and pushing back against what Walker calls the prevailing paradigm of dominating, depleting, and degrading.
Walker describes the broader mission as a push toward what Joseph Campbell called a global mythology, one that ties people to the planet instead of just to their own tribe. It’s an ambitious idea for an independent print journal printed locally by Hi-Desert Publishing Co. in Yucca Valley. But Luna Arcana doesn’t flinch from it. Walker points to Chief Seattle’s 1852 letter to the U.S. government as part of the foundation the journal is built on.
Right now there’s a new zine out, and a book is on the way. The masthead is small. Mancha handles art direction and graphic design, and he and Walker share creative direction. The current issue is available on the Luna Arcana site, and the ongoing documentation work lives on Instagram.
Beyond Luna Arcana, Walker keeps up a steady output of her own. She consults, writes independently, and runs a personal Substack called The Immateria. Her professional services and writing portfolio live at rohiniwalker.com, and her personal instagram is over at @moonshinewalker.
The through line in all of it comes back to her own words. Everything she’s made since 2013 is, as she puts it, “a homage to that” first encounter with the desert. More than a decade in, that homage is still being written.
