Many of Bill's poetry books were published by presses he operated, first Blue Oak Press and then Castle Peak Editions. He published other writers through these presses. Climb to the High Country, however, was published by W.W. Norton, as was what is probably is best achievement in the novel-form, Medicine Calf, an historical novel based on the life of James Beckwourth, a "mountain man" of both African American and Native American heritage. A pass through the Sierra Nevada mountains is named after him.
Bill had a gift for writing narrative poetry that reflected his fierce love of the wilderness.
He also wrote several novels in the "western" genre but focused not on cowboys and gunslingers but mountain explorers and Native Americans.
To a degree, Bill did the impossible: He taught for 50 years at a community college (Sierra College, in Rocklin) but still managed to be a prolific writer. He was still on the faculty of Sierra College--the Nevada County branch--when he died. For several years, he team-taught a course with his brother, Dick Hotchkiss, who is a master ceramicist.
I took literature courses from Bill at Sierra before I moved on to U.C. Davis. They were terrific courses, and Bill liked to heap on the reading. He read drafts of several early poems I wrote. We kept in contact over the years; we last exchanged emails a few months ago.
Bill earned a B.A. at U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon.
Bill also served as the literary executor of William Everson (Brother Antoninus), who was, peripherally, part of the Beat Movement. Both Everson and Hotchkiss viewed themselves as the literary "children" of Robinson Jeffers.
So raise a glass of wine--I think he preferred red--to Bill Hotchkiss, teacher, poet, novelist, publisher, editor, and advocate for the wilderness.
Some books by Bill:
Medicine Calf
Pawnee Medicine (American Indians (Dell))
Who drinks the wine
The Graces of Fire and Other Poems
Yosemite
Climb to the High Country: Poems
