Jeff Stilwell excels at the unexpected. Not content with his midwestern roots, he found ways on the cheap to explore the wider world including selling gummy bears in high school to visit the Alps of southern Germany. To pay for college, he worked a slime line as a head chopper in the clammy tundra of Alaska.
His thirst for adventure next took him to Asia where he studied the martial arts and Asian philosophy while exploring exotic locales including the Himalayas and the lands of Lord Jim, even surviving a squall in the Gulf of Siam.
He met and wooed his wife, jewelry designer Manya Vee there, winning her heart by following her to Java. Upon returning to the States, they founded an art gallery just north of Seattle. She taught him to gallop bareback at the family farm in the storied Yakima Valley, the inspiration for his first novel Fighting for Eden.
Together, they became award-winning artzos, creating numerous public service events in the arts including one of the largest Art Walks in the Pacific Northwest, a celebrated murals collection, and a live music scene where Stilwell performed stand-up comedy every Friday night.
His flair for the dramatic led him to write and stage fifteen plays in and around the Seattle theatre scene. His works earned numerous sobriquets such as “an intense dramatic comedy you don’t want to miss...an uninterrupted 90-minute power pack with something to say” for One Tile Short and “a trip and a half in a little more than a hour and a half through an Alice-like wonderland and a half; ground-breaking in ways more than one,” for Teacup Tipsy.
A self-taught illustrator, Stilwell created his cartoon character Thrashin' Jack to help explain the origins of god in an illustrated work, Here and Now: A Whimsical Take On God.
Ever restless, he once completed a solitary 750 mile hike from Stevens Pass in Western Washington to end, a Biblical sounding forty days later, at Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park. He has even run for Congress. If it’s big, Stilwell has dreamt it, attempted it, or achieved it.
