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 |
| Website | |
| paulahuston |
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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 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.
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.
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