Having Everything Right Essays of Place

A collection of essays first published in 1986, Having Everything Right revolves around the history, folklore, and physical beauty of the Pacific Northwest. In terms of genre the book comes closest to books like Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow or the essay collections of Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry, books that blend personal vision and regional evocation. Stafford's essays in this tradition range from the direct exploration of "A Walk in Early May" to the abstract meditation of "Out of This World with Chaucer and the Astronauts," to the familial and social reflections of "The Great Depression as Heroic Age." Animating them all is the sense that there is joy in knowing the world-and the belief that true knowing brings, as Stafford says, "a change of heart." Stafford writes poetic and evocative prose as he reflects on such subjects as Indian place names, bears, and local eccentrics.

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.