Dr Mischa Willett is a poet and academic. His publications include Phases (2017) and The Elegy Beta (2020), and he was the editor of Philip James Bailey’s epic Festus (2021). His essays, translations, and poems appear in a wide range of venues and mostly concern themselves with the nexus of faith, culture, and education. A practicing Anglican, he is Assistant Professor of English and Writing at Seattle Pacific University and also in its MFA program in Creative Writing.

Regarding Buechner, he writes:

I’m indebted to Frederick Buechner for so many things. He gave to me the vision of the writer’s life that I now occupy. He taught me how much it is possible to do in an essay, in a sentence. He helped me to love the Bible again, when, for a while, I thought I couldn’t. But mostly I owe him because he extended his hand across the country to pull me out of a morass of contradictory impulses and battered belief structures I’d cobbled together after a period of religious deconstruction. The letters he sent to me as a young poet kept me around in more ways than one. 

 

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THE BUECHNER REVIEW [‘23-‘24]