About the Author

Kim Stafford has taught since 1979 at Lewis and Clark College, where he is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute and co-director of the Documentary Studies program. He also serves as the literary executor for the estate of his father, William Stafford. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Oregon, and has worked as an oral historian, letterpress printer, editor, photographer, teacher, and visiting writer in communities and colleges across the country, and in Italy, Scotland, and Bhutan. Stafford has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft; Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford; and most recently 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, an account of his brother's death by suicide, and the struggle of a family to understand, and to live beyond that event. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children. Robert Michael Pyle is the author of eighteen books, including Chasing Monarchs, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, the recent poetry collection Evolution of the Genus Iris and the Pharos Editions' Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land, 30th Anniversary Edition. A Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim fellow, he is a full-time writer and naturalist living in the Willapa Hills of southwestern Washington.