Living in Paris for a winter and a spring and waking each morning to a view of Notre Dame, David Oates is led to revise his life story from one of trudging and occasional woe into one punctuated by nourishing and sometimes unsettling brilliance. In The Mountains of Paris, he offers a technique of reimagining one’s life story that might be available to anyone.

The present tense of the book takes place during the seasons he spends in Paris, sharing an artist’s residency. It is a rare opportunity to consider what it means to be human, through time-stopping moments with music, art, and deep history. The past tense of the book offers memories that intrude into the bustle of Paris life: a Billy Graham crusade at age thirteen, a mountain pass, a love, a loss.

In long years of mountaineering Oates fought the self-loathing which had infused him as the gay kid in the Baptist pew. In The Mountains of Paris, he ascends to a place of wonder through intense, personal narrative encounter with the strangeness of being alive. In his searching, luminous, and inimitable prose, Oates invites readers to share the sense of awe awakened by a Vermeer painting, or the night sky, or the echoing strains of music fading down a Paris street, lifting the curtain on a cosmos filled with a terrifying yet beautiful rightness.

David Oates writes about the arts, nature, and urban life from Portland, Oregon. He is author of four books of nonfiction, including Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature (OSU Press). Recent essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Orion, and have won nonfiction awards as well as Pushcart Prize nominations. He teaches the Wild Writers Seminar workshops, and was Kittridge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana.

“I love this book. It’s beautifully written, with lushness and yet craft. Oates can really write. He’s a poet. His style is mature and quite, quite fine. When Oates promotes the idea that we should ‘be present to mystery,’ we should ‘allow it,’ I say yes.”
—Chris Anderson, author of Light When It Comes: Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything and The Next Thing Always Belongs
 

“Clearly and beautifully written, lyrical, poetic, and imaginative in style . . . I was drawn into how intensely particular and honest Oates was about his spiritual journey growing up and into adulthood. His range of knowledge about the natural world, art, music, literature, political history, philosophy, and religion makes the book unique in its reach.”
—Gretel Van Wieren, author of Listening at Lookout Creek: Nature in Spiritual Practice