Bio

Paula Huston wrote literary fiction for more than twenty years before shifting her focus to spirituality. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Daughters of Song (Random House 1995), which the Baltimore Sun called "far and away the best book yet" about life in the classical piano world at Peabody Conservatory. Nominated for the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco's Gold Medal for Best First Novel, it was also chosen by the Christian Science Monitor for its first "Novelist's Debut" review and selected by the Music Book Society and Performing Arts Book Club. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary quarterlies, including American Short Fiction, North American Review, Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Story, MSS, and Image, and were twice selected for the Best American Short Stories list.

Her first nonfiction project, Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments (Dutton 2000), was an attempt to bring literary artists together around a spiritual theme. She and co-editor Thomas Grady invited well-known fiction writers and poets to write a personal essay focused on a particular sacrament. This Catholic Book Club selection included original work by Ron Hansen, Patricia Hampl, Paul Mariani, Murray Bodo, Katherine Vaz, Mary Gordon, and Andre Dubus, in addition to Huston’s own contribution entitled "Matrimony." Signatures of Grace appeared on the Boston Globe's annual "Dean's List," earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and spent weeks near the top of Amazon.com's New and Notable Christian Book List.

Her book The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyola Press 2003) grew out of her longtime association with a contemplative monastic community in Big Sur and her struggles to incorporate some of their practices into her own busy routine. In this highly personal narrative, which Merton scholar Robert Inchausti has called "one of the best applications of the lives of the saints to contemporary experience" that he has ever read, she returns to the ancient Christian disciplines of solitude, silence, fasting, chastity, frugality, manual labor, and hospitality in search of a way to free her life of unnecessary distractions. The Holy Way, a Catholic Press Association award-winner and Catholic Book Club major selection, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and a bronze medal from Foreword Magazine for Book of the Year in Religion.

By Way of Grace: Moving From Faithfulness to Holiness (Loyola Press 2007) offers a contemporary revisiting of the great Christian virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, humility, faith, hope, and love, Since a healthy practice of the virtues depends so heavily on clear spiritual vision, Huston draws upon the lives and work of the doctors of the church particularly known for their writings on contemplation.  Novelist Ron Hansen describes By Way of Grace as “an amazing, lovely, important book . . . . that may become a classic.”   Poet and essayist Paul Mariani adds, “Paula is surely on her way to becoming an indispensable  guide and vade mecum for the complex, wondrous, and marvelous journey” of the Christian spiritual life.

Huston’s most recent book, Forgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving (Paraclete Press, December 2008), takes a hard look at Christ’s shocking injunction to forgive without measure.  She asserts that forgiveness is central to Christianity, and that, according to Jesus, it is not merely an option but a requirement.  Yet nothing is harder than forgiving those who have deeply wronged us or who have hurt the people we love.  What about the requirements of justice?  Doesn’t forgiving those who do evil encourage more evil acts?  Huston looks at these and other burning questions regarding forgiveness through the lenses of psychology, theology, and personal narrative, suggesting specific ways we can forgive parents, spouses, and community and can begin to seek forgiveness for ourselves.

She is currently at work on The Year of Living Catholicly, a traveler’s diary about the cultural immersion experience she began fifteen years after converting to Catholicsm, and Pilgrim Heart, the story of her solo trip around the world in search of holy people.

Huston is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and has served on the National Screening Committee for Fulbright Awards in Creative Writing. She taught writing and literature at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and served as a core faculty member of the California State University Consortium Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program for many years before leaving academia to write fulltime.

A Camaldolese Benedictine oblate, Huston is married, has four grown children, and lives in rural Arroyo Grande, California.