Jeff Wallach

Jeff Wallach is a rarity. He is a creative writer who makes an incredibly satisfactory living by commercial writing. And he specializes in commercial writing on topics he loves: golf, travel, outdoor recreation, and the environment. His first book, Beyond The Fairway: Zen Lessons, Insights, and Inner Attitudes of Golf was published by Bantam in 1995. Blue Heron published What The River Says: Whitewater Journeys Along The Inner Frontier in 1996. He has written over 300 articles, essays, and reviews for Outside, Sierra, Travel Holiday, E Magazine, Men’s Health, Rodale’s Scuba Diving, Money, Town and Country, Sunset, Lear’s, Diversion, Trilogy, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Golf Illustrated, National Golfer, Links, Discover, Popular Science, etc. He is an editor of America’s Greatest Resorts and a contributing writer of Petersen’s Golfing.

Jeff has taught writing at Milton Academy, Lewis & Clark College, and the Oregon Graduate Institute. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Vassar College and a Master’s in Writing from Brown University.

Golf and outdoor recreation are ODD areas of interest for a New Yorker. He went west to Oregon, stayed a while, then returned to live for years on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Luckily, some kind of major cataclysmic epiphany rocked him to his soul and brought him back to Portland where he bought a house and settled down.

While still living in New York he spent a season as a whitewater river guide on Idaho’s River Of No Return, which is how he came to write What The River Says. The book is "a river-guide’s summer of inner exploration and discovery. It is a journey to challenge both the body and the spirit, revealing to those who test the river’s steep descent, their own ragged edges, and finally, their focused center.