This past Monday, I turned in 10 months of work.
For nearly a year, I have been working on a biography of the joyous writer Brian Doyle. (Published with Liturgical Press next Spring)
Brian found delight in herons and hair scrunchies and spatulas and somehow made them holy objects, conduits of God’s grace present in the world. His writing reads like prayers, so much in fact, that he often said “amen” at the end of each story.
Paying homage to his Irish heritage, Brian called himself a story-catcher, seanchaí in Gaelic, those charged with passing stories of folklore, myth and history through the generations. But Brian’s stories were not tales of old. They were those of here and now. Stories he might hear on a barstool or a bus stop or a church pew. Or a story he heard when he was very quiet, standing in an open field near his home as the wind rushed by. He wrote that he “lucked into work that had everything to do with listening and hearing stories and shaping stories and sharing stories.” He believed these stories saved lives. Both telling the story and listening to them was a holy thing. Words were “knives and caresses, to puncture lies and to heal what is broken.”
The language of these tales became their own story with their own “cadence and swing and rhythm and alliteration and long sprinting runs of words and sounds” The language was seeped both in his Gaelic inheritance and his Catholic faith. These two notes gave his work a musical harmony all its own.
But Brian didn’t write from the height of sanctity but moved adeptly between secular and sacred, publishing in both U.S. Catholic and America Magazine but also in Orion, American Scholar and The Sun. Religious and religious-phobic alike, read his work, and were filled with overwhelming gratitude and joy simply for being alive.
For a sample of Brian’s writing, spend a little time with his Epiphanies column for American Scholar. You’ll be glad you did. Or if you want to pick up one of his books, start with One Long River of Song, a wide collection of essays. My copy is so dogeared and flagged, it may fall apart. It is a common occurrence in my house for me to read one of these essays to a family member while they cook or before bed or from the other side of the bathroom door. You’ll find yourself doing this too.
Five years ago, Brian died of a brain tumor. His death left a hollow in the lives of his family, friends and in the literary world. Spending time with this man, through his writing, his stories and those who loved him and were loved by him, I see the lack of this lens in our literary landscape.
I could never write like Brian. He was a miracle that God gave to us as a gift. But I do want to look through that lens. And I want to look for others who do.
Which living writers take up that torch of wonder and delight in prayerful writing?
Oooh, Annie Dillard, Michael D. O'Brien, Naomi Shihab Nye, Aimee Nezhukamatathil. So many, so many - but none like Brian Doyle.
This post makes me crave this upcoming bio even more than before.
Yay, so excited! The poet Ross Gay holds high that torch of wonder and joy for me--though his writing is more secular.