Regarding Willingness: Chronicles of a Fraught Life

2020 Montana Book Award Honor Book

"(These) stories should be required reading." -Montana Book
Award Committee

Tom "Harp" Harpole was a horse logger working from remote
mountain camps and living in wall tents until an accident suggested a change of
lifestyle. He took to his other avocation - writing, and studied abroad in
Ireland. He began publishing stories in periodicals such as Smithsonian Air
& Space, Sports Illustrated, Crocodil, Montana Quarterly, Whitefish Review,
and more. In 1986 his story "The Last of Butch" (Faber & Faber, London) was
selected as The Best Short Story in the British Isles. His work has been
short-listed for the National Magazine Award twice, and translated into six
languages. He has been a guest reader on NPR more than a dozen times. Harpole
writes in a voice that uses his natural wit and humor to shed light on a
life of stories that bring readers to the edge of danger. "Tom Harpole is what
you might call a thinking man's Evel Knievel," - Aaron Parrett, author of Montana: Then & Now

Certain magazines that assigned Harp feature articles knew early
on that he would try anything that involved physical/emotional risks. He
regarded himself as a Survivor's
Euphoria aficionado. His
willingness and perspective on dalliances with danger range from an N.F.L.
record, to horse logging, to skydiving with Russian cosmonauts, to getting a
black bear stoned, to his compassion as a volunteer EMT in rural Montana, to
protesting Gorbachev in 1990, to driving ice roads above the Arctic circle, and
more. This book is a collection of sixteen of his most popular stories.

In 1970, Tom (Harp) Harpole and his cousin Jerry put together a horse logging show in western Oregon through most of the 70's, while he studied for a Forestry Engineering MA at OSU. He got banged up falling timber in western Montana in the early 80's and he and his wife Lisa took the Work Comp settlement and headed to Ireland with their wee ones, Flannery and Derry. Harp studied Latin, Greek, and English writing and was selected to be the first American to participate in the Irish National Writer's Workshop. Two years later, back home, he began writing for a living at the age of 40 and did well, working for glossies such as National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian Air & Space, plus more. Magazine assignments took him to six continents over a twenty-three-year career. He also spent several hundred days, two weeks at a time, teaching writing workshops in 80+ bush schools all over Alaska.

Certain magazines that assigned Harp feature articles knew early on that he would try anything that involved physical/emotional risks. He regarded himself as a Survivor's Euphoria aficionado. His willingness and perspective on dalliances with danger range from an N.F.L. record, to horse logging, to skydiving with Russian cosmonauts, to getting a black bear stoned, to his compassion as a volunteer EMT in rural Montana, to protesting Gorbachev in 1990, to driving ice roads above the Arctic circle, and more.