Notes from an Urban Cabin #18 | Brian Doyle
I'm trying to remember the first thing I read by Brian Doyle.
It wasn't "Joyas Voladoras," his astonishing piece on hummingbirds and hearts, though that is probably consistently my favorite thing he wrote.
It wasn't "Leap," maybe the best thing written about holding onto hope after September 11, which you can read at Frontline's multimedia package "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," or on Medium along with six other pieces he wrote about September 11, or on YouTube, where you will also hear him reading it.
It wasn't "Being Brians," the kind of essay you admire and delight in and also wish you'd thought of, in which he contacts a bunch of other Brian Doyles and tells about them, and which I first read in Creative Nonfiction, and which he would probably tell me to use, that idea of contacting and writing about other Laura Browns, and to make it my own.
I don't think it was "The Meteorites," his beautiful essay about the summer he was a camp counselor, written about 20 years later and recalling (among many other things) a pivotal four-word sentence spoken to him by a little boy who seldom spoke, and which I first read in the 1998 Best American Essays, where he appears between Annie Dillard and Ian Frazier.
It certainly wasn't "Imagining Foxes," his 2013 piece in Brevity which, in less than 750 words, makes a case as strong as the many thousands of words in Last Child in the Woods for the necessity of childhood encounters in the the outdoors.
I don't know what was the first thing of his I read. But I think I can safely say it was the kind of writing that, after you read it, you look back at the writer's name and decide right there you will read everything by this writer that you can get your hands on. Essays, poems, fiction, doesn't matter. He's funny, he's big-hearted, he's an amazing observer, he uses elements of journalism in admirable ways, he experiments, he confesses without running into the ditches of confessional writing, he uses every emotion, he is exuberant with adjectives. You could probably pick a Brian Doyle paragraph out of a lineup.
I cried yesterday when I read that he had died the day before, from complications of treatment for a cancerous brain tumor discovered in November. I didn't know him (except in the way you feel like you know someone from reading his writing), never met him. We corresponded briefly a few years ago. I have friends who knew him, or who remember hearing him at the Festival of Faith and Writing a few years back. Many one degrees of separation.
“I’ll hear all laughter,” he told Oregon Live, when interviewed after his diagnosis. “Be tender to each other. Be more tender than you were yesterday, that’s what I would like. You want to help me? Be tender and laugh.”
His tumor was the kind that required surgery for doctors to know what they were dealing with. "It could be a tempest in a teapot," he told the interviewer. In case it wasn't, he also said this, not just to writers but to everyone: "Stories are holy and nutritious and crucial. Stories change lives; stories save lives. ... They crack open hearts, they open minds. It's more important than ever before to hold hands and catch and share stories of substance and grace and defiant courage and irrepressible humor. ... We could change the world if we told the right story."
He said as much in his novel The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World, in which he writes the novel Robert Louis Stevenson never got around to: "There is a story in every thing, and every being, and every moment, were we alert to catch it, were we ready with our tender nets; indeed there are a hundred, a thousand stories, uncountable stories, could they only be lured out and appreciated; and more and more now I realize that what I thought was a skill only for authors and pastors and doctors and dream-diviners is the greatest of all human skills, the one that allows us into the heart and soul and deepest layers of our companions on the brief sunlit road between great dark wildernesses."
So today (in addition to rereading some of his writing that I have at hand (and ordering more from the library (and wondering how he was able, in his 60 years, to write 25 books as a family man with a full-time job))), I am thinking about what stories I have to tell, and want to tell, and see around me but don't know enough to tell yet. I'm thinking about all the ones that got started and are waiting for their finishing. And what I do with my time. And what my aunt said the other day, which was sort of relevant in context but also very matter-of-fact, which also made it funny: "I'm going to be dead someday."
"What do you want to outlast you?" a writing editing coaching friend asked me a few years ago. "Why do you think anything will?" another writing editing friend countered.
To the second: because things do, whether we intend them or not. To the first: things that are, at their core, made of love, which has the longest half-life of any element.
From "Joyas Voladoras":
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.