bill london

Neither Bill nor I can remember when we met. It’s not that Consulting Editor Bill London is forgettable. We’ve been mingling in the same town, sharing friends and causes and kids, for more than a decade. We can’t remember how our lives have gotten so entwined.

Bill moved with his family to Moscow in 1984, bringing his 6-year-old daughter Willow to school, and leaving behind 10 years of back-to-the-land living in an octagonal log cabin they built on 20 acres of Idaho forestland about 60 miles to the north.

We moved to Moscow two years later, when Meg was 5 and Emil was 1. Maybe it was Willow and Meg becoming friends that drew us together. Perhaps it was a common support of the local environmental organization that I founded in Moscow, the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute (www.pcei.org). Or it could have been meeting and talking at a party hosted by someone we both knew.

Bill is a writer. He started writing in the late 1970s, after their log cabin was built and he was searching for an at-home business he would enjoy. He started writing about whatever interested him, for a regional alternative magazine called Wellspring. Then in 1979, a friend of his gave him a tip — some logger was hurt by forest herbicide spraying. Bill followed up the story and uncovered a tragic tale of a U.S. Forest Service sub-contractor who was accidentally sprayed during a government herbicide test and then died of cancer several months later.

That story was the first of his to appear in mainstream media (in a front page series in the Moscow newspaper in June of 1980). Within a year, he was writing full time for several regional newspapers and then national magazines.

Bill says that writing was so fun that he never considered stopping. He has now written more than 700 articles for magazines and newspapers, as well as four travel guidebooks to the Inland Northwest region.

Unfortunately, all four of the books, which were written in the early 1990s, are now out of print, including my favorite, “The Umbrella Guide to the Inland Empire.”

He still writes a monthly travel destination column for our local newspaper (entitled Getaways) and occasional travel magazine articles, but now he spends most of his time providing advancement writing as well as marketing and media relations advice for various clients and his part-time employer, Washington State University. He still works out of his home, even though with Willow now 24, he doesn’t need to be there when she gets home from school every afternoon and needs a lap to sit on.

Besides the for-pay work, Bill continues to volunteer. For 17 years now, he has edited the Moscow Food Co-op Community News, our co-op’s monthly newsletter (available online at www.moscowfood.coop). For a dozen years he was the publicity director for the Moscow Renaissance Fair (www.moscowrenfair.org). He also is a co-founder of an unusually successful community e-mail discussion list, Moscow Vision 2020, vision2020.moscow.com.