About my writing
Books
The Little Lucky: A Family Geography
By Gail Wells. "When you live in an old house, the remodeling and rehabilitating never end. I guess the same is true when you belong to a family." A memoir.
The Only Woman
in the Room:
The Norma Paulus Story
By Norma Paulus with Gail Wells and Pat McCord Amacher. "The Only Woman in the Room is an authorized biography that relies heavily on oral history. The strands of her story were gathered and woven together by two writers who, like Norma, are storytellers first and foremost. ... A lively and authoritative account of Norma Paulus's life and times, one that evokes her voice and is faithful to her legacy."
The Tillamook: A Created Forest Comes of Age
By Gail Wells. "The Tillamook opens readers' eyes to what forest can mean and does mean to people who live, work, play, and study in a manipulated and revitalized landscape."
With Grit and By Grace: Breaking Trails in Politics and Law
By Betty Roberts with Gail Wells. "With Grit and By Grace is a fascinating look into the campaigns of a pioneering woman in American politics."
Lewis and Clark Meet Oregon's Forests: Lessons from Dynamic Nature
By Gail Wells and Dawn Anzinger. "Disturbance and change is the story line. The lure of the Lewis and Clark experience, especially Clark's journal entries, offers a great backdrop for reflection on Northwest forests 200 years ago."
A History of Rosboro Lumber Company
By Gail Wells. "How a hardworking lumber company survived and thrived into the twenty-first century ... an engaging history of one of Oregon's longest-running family lumber companies."
Selected essays
"The possibility had been gnawing at her since the first grandchild came. The new parents, daughter and husband, brought the baby home to a tiny house in a town three hundred miles away from her. Visits were short and sometimes tense. The baby didn't sleep much. Nobody slept much."
From "A Temporary Insanity," p. 67 in Aging: An Apprenticeship, edited by Nan Narboe
"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful, ancient forest, soft-floored, light-dappled, draped across the rugged canyons of the Tillamook country, in Oregon's northwestern corner. Its trees--Douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar--were immense, three to seven feet thick. Then one day their came a big fire."
From "How to Create a Forest," in The Great Northwest: The Search for Regional Identity, edited by William G. Robbins
"I want to explore what I perceive to be the intellectual threads that make up a philosophy of nature-based spirituality, discuss where these ideas come from, and suggest ways in which they might promote or hinder effective environmental action. From my early Bible training I remember the epistle of James, where he says, 'Faith without works is dead.' What kind of works are coming out of Cascadian-style faith in nature?"
From Chapter 14 in Cascadia, the Elusive Utopia: Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Douglas Todd