Occupation Author Genre Nonfiction, Fiction | Nationality American Spouse Michael Huston | |
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Born Paula Dahl
April 25, 1952 (age 64)
Minneapolis, Minnesota ( 1952-04-25 ) Period 1983 - present (first published novel - 1995) Alma mater California Polytechnic State University Books Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Pr, The Holy Way, A Land Without Sin, A Season of Mystery: 10 Spiritu, Forgiveness: Following Jesus Int | ||
a land without sin by paula huston the novel s background
Paula Huston (born April 25, 1952) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and creative nonfiction writer.
Contents
Author paula huston s approach to writing
Life
Paula Huston was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the eldest of five children of Lyle and Solveig Dahl, and grew up in Long Beach, California, where she attended Millikan High School. She married her first husband a year after graduation, and in 1973, they moved to the San Luis Obispo area, where she began writing and publishing short stories. Her daughter, Andrea, was born in 1977, and her son, John, arrived in 1978. Divorced in the early 1980s, she married Michael Huston in 1985. With his encouragement, she enrolled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in her mid-thirties, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in British and American Literature, going on to teach in the Cal Poly English Department for the next twelve years. In 1994 she became a Catholic, and in 1999, a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate (a vowed lay member of the contemplative monastic community of New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur).
Her first novel, Daughters of Song, was published in 1995. In 1999 she helped design and implement the California State University Consortium Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, in which she taught for the next three years. When the program ended in 2002, she took an early retirement from Cal Poly to become a full-time writer, speaker and retreat leader. She currently serves as a creative nonfiction mentor for the Seattle Pacific University MFA program. She and her husband live on four acres on the Central Coast of California, where they keep chickens and bees; maintain fruit trees, a raised bed vegetable garden, and an olive orchard; and spend a lot of time with their four young grandchildren.
Work
Before her conversion to Catholicism and subsequent vows as a contemplative oblate, Huston wrote literary fiction for fifteen years, often with artist protagonists or themes involving art. Her first novel, Daughters of Song—a book that James Bready of the Baltimore Sun said was the "best book yet" about life at the famed Peabody Conservatory—is a coming-of-age story about a young piano prodigy. Huston’s short story "Pilgrimage" involves a lonely woman reconciling herself to the cold relationship she always had with her famous and now-dead pianist father. "The Cattle Raid of Cooley" features a literature professor who struggles with, and at times acts upon, sexual fantasies about his students.
Post-conversion, she began using the techniques of literary fiction to write about religious faith. In her first project, Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments, she and co-editor Tom Grady asked seven prominent literary writers, including novelist Ron Hansen, poet Paul Mariani, novelist Mary Gordon, and essayist Patricia Hampl, to each contribute a long personal essay about one of the Catholic sacraments. In its starred review of the collection, Publishers Weekly said, "For Catholics, this volume is a treasure. For those outside the Church, the essays reveal, as no catechism ever could, why Catholics are drawn to these ‘signs signifying grace.’" Convinced there was an audience for literary writers of faith, Huston went on to write six books of spiritual creative nonfiction, including The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life, a narrative account of the spiritual practices she learned from her association with the monks of New Camaldoli. A Catholic Book Club main selection, The Holy Way prompted Doris Donnelly, reviewer for America, to say, "Paula Huston has much in common with Kathleen Norris and Henri Nouwen, two major stars in the constellation of contemporary writers on the spiritual journey… she appears to have the integrity, insight, and originality necessary to make her own important contribution as a credible witness to what happens when God is chosen as the center of one’s life".
In 2013, she published her second novel, A Land Without Sin, about a hardened young battlefield photojournalist seeking her missing priest brother in the jungles of Central America. Novelist Valerie Sayers, writing for Commonweal, said of the book, "A Land Without Sin succeeds in considering the thorniest problems religious believers face--atrocity, despair, the nature of evil--without moralizing or over-simplifying. It’s deeply engaging and impressive in its range, and for the most part it manages to keep its many narrative balls spinning gracefully. Perhaps most crucial to its success is a full and intelligent probing of an atheist’s perspective--narrated by a complex, sharp, and dynamic female voice whose rue and wit inject healthy doses of irony and skepticism as needed".
In Huston’s One Ordinary Sunday: A Meditation on the Mystery of the Mass, she returns to narrative spiritual nonfiction to explain the historical roots and theological meaning of each element of the Catholic Mass. Poet and biographer Paul Mariani writes of the book that Huston has managed to "capture in a single summer Sunday Mass what millions of Catholics and those interested in Catholicism have experienced many times over . . . Her worries are our worries, her doubts our doubts, her convictions our convictions, beautifully rendered and surprised by joy. . . To say I loved this book would be an understatement."