Brian Doyle - One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder

My great friend Brian DoyleBD to me for a quarter century, so pardon my addiction to calling him that stillwas always an unusually fast and proficient writer. But from the 2010 publication of his first novel, Mink River, until his fatal brain-tumor diagnosis late in 2016, he caught fire. During that period he published two collections of short stories, four collections of the prose/poem hybrids he dubbed proems, seven collections of the power-packed short memoirs, epiphanies, and reflections he too reductively called simply essays, and five more novels. Over the same span he edited Portland magazine, under BDs tenure the most heavily awarded alumni magazine in the country as he helped resurrect, for Americans, the ancient and invaluable genre we now call spiritual writing. It strains my sense of the possible to add that BD was simultaneously giving public readings and talks by the dozens, writing recommendation letters, visiting grade schools, high schools, colleges, and book groups to regale what amounted to thousands of people of all ages, writing rivers of the more entertaining emails on the planet, and privately mentoring, entertaining, and consoling more people than we will ever know. Like any good man or woman dedicated to compassion in a post-fact, post-democratic corporate state, he also kept busy annoying the hell out of a few worthy enemies. I cant resist adding that the typing portion of all these achievements was accomplished with precisely two fingers. I challenge the worlds pianists to see what they can do with the same two fingers.

Brians nonfiction appeared in scores of Americas finest magazines, won three Pushcart Prizes, and was regularly reprinted in every major nonfiction anthology in the countryincluding seven times in Best American Essays. His writing won many more honors than I have space to list here. But the responses from other writers, many of them renowned, are so remarkable I must include a few.

The great Ian Frazier said that Brian wrote more powerfully about faith than anyone in his generation. The peripatetic and contemplative Pico Iyer: Almost nobody has written with the joy, the galloping energy, the quiet love of conscience and family and whats best in us, the living optimism. Renowned albatross savior Hob Osterlund: He knew the strength of women without reduction, without fear or pretense, without the need to saint. The late Mary Oliver on his essays: They were all favorites. (And for a Catholic writer to have his work chosen for Best American Essays by Mary Oliver and by the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens bespeaks BDs extreme range of appeal.) We love him, writes philosopher and earth defender Kathleen Dean Moore: Brian gets fan mail, sure, but also love letters.People love his work, but more than that, they truly love him. We love him because he spreads his arms and lets us into his amazing mind and boundless heart.The moments he shares with us sing of adoration for all the whistling, sobbing, surging creation[and] by opening our hearts without breaking them he answers our deepest yearning for meaning. Which is joy. Which is gratitude.

How in heavens name did one man win such strikingly intimate praise? I would suggest that the extreme intimacy of his nonfiction was not only delightful but highly contagious. BD saw his stories as diving boards, not news reports. He was interested less in ostensible fact and nominal accuracy than in the bends and layers and implications and insinuations and shimmers of memory. Within those shimmers, he said, were the seeds of stories to which other people can connect.

A far less subtle feature of Brians sentence-making: when he intuited the approaching roar of a whitewater rapid in his imagination, he paddled steady on, refusing to portage round even the wildest water. The prose that resulted made timid readers feel as though theyd been thrown into a kayak and sent careering down a literary equivalent of Idahos Payette River during spring runoff. But sentences that alarm the timid by awakening them to the wilder possibilities of language are heightened, not inept. BD played fast and loose with sentence length, rhythms, grammar, alliteration, and diction to disburden a heart and mind burgeoning with empathy, quickness, joy, wit, and love of the sinuous riverine lewd amused pop and song of the American language. Calling a foul on such phrases is like disallowing certain three-point shots of BDs Golden State Warrior hero, Steph Curry, because they were launched so ridiculously far from the basket. If the ball goes through the hoop and if the sentence sings, both of them count, and Im giving BD himself the last word on this matter, his ten exclamation points included:

From: Doyle, Brian
Subject: a ha!!!!!!!!!!
Date: January 2, 2015 at 11:34:43 AM MST
To: David Duncan

Have you ever paid attention to Tolstoys language? Enormous sentences, one clause piled on top of another. Do not think this is accidental, that it is a flaw. It is art, and it is achieved through hard work.

Anton Chekhov

Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to quiet glories hidden in people, places, and creatures of little or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings. When he finished a nonfiction gem he stacked it in his study until he had built up a modest but serviceable book manuscript, which he mailed off without fuss, usually to very small religious publishers. Many of BDs friends, myself included, felt that by scattering his best nonfiction through thirteen modest volumes over the years, he prevented his nonfiction from winning the national repute it deserved. This, coupled with his financial fears for his family after his tumor was diagnosed, is why, shortly after his first devastating brain surgery, I asked BDs permission to consolidate, in a single volume, the kind of nonfiction that earned the extreme praise Ive quoted from friends, fans, and editors of magazines, with all proceeds to go to his family. Brian did not say yes. He said, Sweet Jesus, YES!Take whatever you want and tell whatever stories you want.