Rani Ban/The Falcon English professor Suzanne Wolfe teaches Modern Fiction in Demaray Hall on Friday. Wolfe is also the co-founder of Image journal.

One of the first things you notice when you take a class from Professor Suzanne Wolfe is her intense passion for what she does. As she lectures from classic novels, such as "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway to more contemporary ones such as "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy, her excitement, as she walks back and forth across the room restlessly, speaking fervently with a fiery British accent, is palpable and invigorating.

There's no question that this is a woman who is in love with her work, and she affirms it.

"For me, the lifeblood of a university is in the classroom," Wolfe said. "I love teaching. I love being in the classroom. To me, that's what teaching is...sharing things I think are amazing with my students."

Suzanne Pierce attended Oxford University in England, where she met her future husband, Greg Wolfe, in 1981, who was also a student there. They married in 1984 and moved to the United States.

Their first child, Magdalen, was born in 1985, and over the course of the next decade or so they bounced around the country as Wolfe taught at a couple of different colleges, from Christendom College in Virginia to Friends University in Kansas, having two more children--Helena and Charles--along the way. Their youngest son, Ben, was born in 1995, and Wolfe took a break from teaching to co-author books with her husband and raise their children in Pennsylvania.

From there, they flew all the way to the other side of the country to teach at Seattle Pacific University in 2000, and Wolfe has taught here as an English professor ever since. Her husband Greg works here as well as the publisher and editor of Image journal, which he co-founded with Suzanne back in 1989.

"We actually sort of did it backwards," Wolfe said. She and her husband wanted to found a Christian artist's colony, a place where Christian writers could come to write and learn. Before they could, though, they "needed a flagship--a publication."

So, they began the quarterly journal, whose purpose was to connect faith and the arts. It has grown exponentially in size since, featuring work from a wide variety of artists and writers, from Elie Wiesel, author of the Nobel Prize-winning book "Night," to Eugene Peterson, who wrote the critically lauded contemporary interpretation of the Bible, "The Message."

Wolfe wanted to be a writer since the age of 3 and has been able to read for just as long.

"'Nebuchadnezzar' was the first word I read at the age of 3. To me, [the word] looked like a city in the desert. I wasn't able to tell time until I was 12 or 13 [though]," she said, laughing. "Don't ask me why."

In 2004, she published her first book, though she actually began writing it more than a decade earlier.

"It was going to be published [back then]," Wolfe said. But all it did was sit "in a box in my basement for 10 years."

Eventually, in the late 90s, she was asked by a publishing company to write a book about motherhood and prayer, to which she responded with a vehement, "No, thanks!" She laughed as she recalled the moment. "I was so busy doing mothering and praying, that I didn't have time to write about it!"

Instead she dug up her old novel from the basement and did a massive rewrite, eventually titling it "Unveiling." It is about a woman named Rachel working on restoring a piece of art in Rome. The idea of restoration was inspired by late medieval artists Modigliani and Van der Weyden, and the book came together in Wolfe's mind in as a "not-conscious kind of fusion."

It began as "not so much an idea as an image," Wolfe said. She had to do a lot of research on the book, so she looked into the "almost scientific mode of restoration....[It] became...a kind of metaphor for...talking about how we sometimes need to strip away the layers that have accreted on ourselves. My central character is restored through restoring."

She is currently doing research for another novel as well: a first-person fictional account from the perspective of St. Augustine's concubine.

It's a very difficult process, she said, partly because of what a prolific writer Augustine was, but also because of the concubine herself.

"Nothing is actually known of the concubine," Wolfe said. "I have to research all the way around, and the gap that's left is her."

Unfortunately for Wolfe, her teaching demands take up a lot of her time, slowing down her research and writing process.

"Like anyone who writes," she said, "I'm conflicted between teaching and writing. That's the tension in my professional and creative life...that I haven't found a resolution to that. To teach, I need to go into the world. To write, I need to leave it."

In the meantime, aside from still wanting to found a Christian artist's colony with her husband, which they plan on naming "Stillpoint" after a poem by T.S. Eliot, she'll continue to teach at SPU.

As with any professor who loves his or her job, Wolfe's students are also very important to her. She smiles as she recalls one of the greatest impacts on her as a teacher.

"Last spring, I got the coolest compliment to my teaching when a student in my Lit and Faith class...tattooed 'Grace Through Nature' [the theme of the class] on their arm."

"I love teaching," she said again, emphatically. "No matter how exhausted I feel on any given day, I feel a jolt when I walk into the classroom. I think the day I don't feel that is the day I should retire."