"All true loves are full of quarrels, and these essays tangle through some of mine," writes Paul J. Willis. Candid, adventuresome, hilarious and soul-searching, Willis explores his conservative religious upbringing, his affinity for the Romantic poets, his lifelong avocation of mountaineering and his midlife understandings of faith and wilderness. Several of the twenty-one essays in this collection have appeared in publications such as Ascent, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004, The Best Christian Writing 2006, Books & Culture, The Climbing Art, Image, The Other Side, Redwood Coast Review, River Teeth and Summit. "Settle into the steady expectation of delight," says John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture. "Such is the charm of Paul Willis's splendid essays."
Paul J. Willis was born in 1955 and did most of his growing up in Corvallis, Oregon. In high school, he started climbing the nearby peaks of the Cascades, and a mythic version of these mountains became the soul of his first novel, No Clock in the Forest. A revised version of this novel, together with three sequels, has just been published as a single book, The Alpine Tales.
He first drafted No Clock in the Forest while pursuing his graduate degrees in English at Washington State University. He is now a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, where he teaches British Renaissance literature and creative writing.
During his years of teaching he gradually learned to write poetry, and now has two full-length collections, Visiting Home and Rosing from the Dead. His poems have been featured on Verse Daily and on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, and he was just selected as the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara for 2011-13. With his friend David Starkey he edited an anthology of American poems in response to Shakespeare, In a Fine Frenzy. (They were overwhelmed with submissions about Ophelia.)
The personal essay is also important to him, and he celebrated his fiftieth birthday with the publication of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild, chosen by ForeWord magazine as the best essay collection of 2005.
