Paula Huston | |
|---|---|
 Paula Huston | |
| Born | Paula Dahl April 25, 1952 Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Cal Poly San Luis Obispo |
| Period | 1983 - Present (First published novel: 1995) |
| Genre | Nonfiction, Fiction |
| Spouse | Michael Huston |
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| paulahuston | |
Paula Huston (born April 25, 1952) is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and creative nonfiction writer.
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 San Luis Obispo, California, 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, who had two daughters of his own.
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 was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. 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 served as a creative nonfiction mentor for the Seattle Pacific University MFA program from 2011-2016.
Raised Lutheran, she left the church when she was seventeen, but returned as a Catholic in 1994. In 1999, she became a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate, a lay member of New Camaldoli Hermitage's community of monks in Big Sur, California. [1] She served as co-director of New Camaldoli’s oblate formation program from 2015-2022, and as president of the Chrysostom Society, a national organization of literary Christian writers, from 2016-2019.
She and her husband live on four acres on the Central Coast of California. They have five grandchildren.
For fifteen years before she became a Benedictine oblate, Huston wrote literary fiction, often with artist protagonists or themes involving art. Her first novel, Daughters of Song, was a coming-of-age story about a young piano prodigy. [2] As her interest in religion deepened, she switched to spiritual writing. In Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments, she and co-editor Tom Grady invited various authors including Ron Hansen, Paul Mariani, Mary Gordon, Patricia Hampl, Katherine Vaz, and Murray Bodo to contribute personal essays on the Catholic sacraments. Huston went on to write seven books of spiritual 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; By Way of Grace: Moving from Faithfulness to Holiness, about the cardinal and theological virtues; Forgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving; Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew the Spirit; and A Season of Mystery: 10 Spiritual Practices for Embracing a Happier Second Half of 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. In 2016, she returned to narrative spiritual nonfiction with One Ordinary Sunday: A Meditation on the Mystery of the Mass, an explanation of the historical roots and theological meaning of each element of the Catholic Mass. In 2021, she published a history of New Camaldoli Hermitage entitled The Hermits of Big Sur.
She has been a regular contributor to Give Us This Day (Liturgical Press) since 2011, writes essays for a series called Seton and Culture (St. Elizabeth Seton Shrine), and has done numerous interviews for blogs, magazines, radio shows, and podcasts.
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Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
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