Westmont Magazine All's Well That Ends Well

After teaching Shakespeare for 35 years, Paul Willis still gets choked up at the end of a play. This fall — his last semester at Westmont as a professor of English — he felt emotional exploring “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in an environmental literature class. He has taken students to see it at an outdoor theater in Topanga Canyon, where trees grow out of the stage. “It’s the first play for many of them, and it’s fun to be part of that,” he says.

When he earned his doctorate at Washington State University, Paul wrote his dissertation about the forest in Shakespeare. He later published four novels in his eco-fantasy series, “The Alpine Tales,” including “No Clock in the Forest,” a title taken from “As You Like It.”

The outdoors plays a huge role in his life and in his essays, fiction and poetry. Paul built a trail through undeveloped areas of the Westmont campus to get students off the beaten path. His book of essays “To Build a Trail” reflects on this experience. “People need a place to get away,” Paul says. “Someone walking your trail is like someone reading your book. Making the trail grew out of my need to create something.”

For years, he led a wilderness trip in the fall for incoming students with his brother, Dave Willis ’74, a guide and activist fighting to preserve wild and wooded land in Oregon. Paul’s poetry captures his reflections on his many hiking and camping trips in the Sierra, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, the Santa Barbara back-country and other untamed places.

Each January, he hosts the annual Los Prietos Readings in honor of the life and work of poet William Stafford on the site of Stafford’s service as a conscientious objector at a Civilian Public Service Camp in the Los Padres National Forest during World War II.

Paul also travels with Westmont alums and parents to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival to see and discuss three Shakespeare plays in the three days. “It’s fun to get adult responses to Shakespeare,” Paul says. “I already knew what college students think.”

In addition to teaching a variety of courses in English literature, Paul led creative writing classes as the curriculum expanded to include lower- and upper-division creative writing, poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. He especially relished working with students one-on-one for creative writing tutorials. “Some of them have gone on to get a Master of Fine Arts and make

As a college student, Paul felt distant from guest writers who came to campus. He has purposely connected visiting writers with Westmont students, bringing them into class, hosting receptions for them in his home and dining out with students and the visitors. He invites students to read their work at these gatherings and recruits writers 10 years out of Westmont to speak “so students can see themselves.”

“When our own two kids got to be college age, I began connecting with students in a different way,” he says. “Maybe a little bit more tenderness crept in.”

Paul appreciates small classes. “We’re lucky we can fit people around the table,” he says. “You don’t stay in teaching unless at some basic level you’re for other people. I’m for the students, and I think they believe that. I should probably ask them.

“I love teaching and connecting with students. We discuss overwhelmingly decent and beautiful literature; I inhabit it and help them respond. I’ve learned to get out of the way to hear their response — but I sometimes still lapse into monologue. It’s such a precious, vulnerable and formative time of their life, and I feel privileged to be part of it.”

In 2008, the Tea Fire demolished his home in Las Barrancas, the faculty housing adjacent to campus. The blaze consumed his extensive library and a lifetime of unpublished work and intellectual property. “I was trying to carry on, but a group of senior English majors could tell I was traumatized and reached out to me in caring, appropriate and intentional ways,” Paul says. “I still get choked up about that.”

When they heard about his loss, the local poetry community donated books — a total of 26 boxes. Sorting through them helped him begin reconstructing a library.

Three years after the Tea Fire, a neighbor on Coyote Road who had rebuilt her home suggested a community reading. “I organized one for all-comers in Hieronymus Lounge,” Paul says. “Seventy-five people crowded in, mostly from the larger community, for two full hours. They read poems of their own or by others and briefly shared their experiences of the fire. We had everyone from local high school students to Clark Halls Westmont students to Mountain Drive residents to Mt. Calvary Monastery monks. It was one of those community moments that felt magically inclusive.”

As Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate (2011- 13), Paul connected with local people in new ways. “It’s a little like being a secular chaplain,” he says. “I wrote poems for the start of City Council and read poetry at civic meetings. Earlier, a pastor would have shared calming, quieting words calling people to a higher potential. Today, people in the arts fill this vacuum. I felt honored, as former laureates have been outstanding poets indeed.”

Paul and his wife, Sharon, a former Westmont nurse, will stay in Santa Barbara. Now a nurse practitioner, Sharon works for the Westside Neighborhood Clinic. They’ll spend more time with their son, daughter and three young grandchildren. Paul will continue writing poetry and meeting annually with the Chrysostom Society, a small group of Christian writers that includes Philip Yancey, Richard Foster, Daniel Taylor ’70 and John Wilson ’70. He is co-editing an Advent anthology with Leslie Leyland Fields, another member of the society and mother of Noah ’13 and Micah ’26 Fields. He will undoubtedly read more poetry.

And he will be grateful for his time teaching students at Westmont, which became the place he belonged. In “The Place,” from “To Build a Trail,” he wrote, “This is the place, Ruth Kerr. This is still the place that the Lord has chosen.”