In Remembrance of Brian Doyle
Eight years ago this week, Oregon author Brian Doyle passed. I was fortunate enough to meet Brian and hear him read once and that was enough to influence my life as a reader, writer, and person. In his honor, our drift boat carries the same name as one of his novels — The Plover.
Brian was a truly prolific writer in this sense: “marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity.” As David James Duncan put it, “My great friend Brian Doyle… was 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 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.”
Go into any Pacific Northwest book store and you’ll find his titles in any number of sections: fiction, non-fiction, short stories, essays, spirituality, nature, and more; Google his name and you’ll find plenty of his essays online from various magazines and outlets. Inspired by him and his writing, I wrote this essay a few years back.
I could never pick a favorite essay or passage of his, but one that sticks out is the piece “Fishing in the Pacific Northwest: A Note.” It begins:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, goes the proverb most hilariously attributed to Maimonides, who wouldn’t know a fishing pole if he woke up and found it murmuring alluringly in the bed with him, but teach a man to fish and you have bent his mind permanently towards hatching schedules, and caddis-fly casings, and the meticulous use of the pinion feathers of young hawks for complicated trout lures, and the epic grumpiness of mature salmon on their way upriver in pursuit of romantic entanglements in streambeds, and what the word redd means, and how to keep a sharp eye on osprey for which fish they are hauling out of the river and where they are hauling them from…
Click here to read the whole essay, which was published in his book Eight Whopping Lies and Other Stories of Bruised Grace, published in 2017.
Thanks, Brian, for everything.
