Brian Doyle was one of Oregon's most prolific authors. His 28 published works span a variety of topics, from essays on the Pacific Islands and spirituality to novels which featured non-human characters.
Oregon Art Beat
Related: Oregon Author Brian Doyle Dies At 60
Award-winning Oregon Author Brian Doyle died at his home Saturday after a months-long battle with cancer. Doyle, 60, was a prolific author of essays and novels on a variety of subjects. His 28 published works put him in a category of extraordinarily prolific writers. Once he got started, there was no stopping him. He sometimes published two, three, even four books in one year. A fearlessly inventive storyteller with a confident prose style, Doyle published novels, essays, short stories and more. One gets the sense Doyle’s writing process opened door after door in a sprawling mansion of ideas. Here are a few titles to get you started.
"God is Love: Essays from Portland Magazine" (editor, December 2002)
An instructive survey of voices and ideas that galvanized and influenced Doyle, these are among the essays he curated as editor of the University of Portland’s flagship alumni magazine — a post he held for 26 years. Andre Dubus, Barry Lopez, Cynthia Ozick, Terry Tempest Williams, and others weigh in. You’ll find struggle here, but also celebrations of everyday sacraments of family and community that lay so close to Doyle’s heart. Publishers Weekly writes, “This collection reads like a mesmerizing love song to the complex and sometimes unwieldy religion of Christianity.”
"Mink River" (October 2010)
A lovingly-imagined Oregon coastal town of Neawanaka is the tapestry in which Doyle invents a cast of fascinating characters, celebrating the unsung dramas of life in a faded timber town. Author David James Duncan, who was good friends with Doyle, praises its “hauntings and shadows, shards of dark and bright, usurpations by wonder, lust, blarney, yearning, are coast-mythic in flavor but entirely bardic at heart. I've read no Northwest novel remotely like it and enjoyed few novels more.”
"The Plover" (March 2015)
Hobo sailor Declan O’Donnell’s sails solo across the Pacific, fighting a losing battle to maintain a sense of solitude. Doyle gives us an irresistible cast, including the goofy, cantankerous Declan, a mysterious child snared in the grip of grief, pirates, Polynesian bureaucrats, and more. Doyle’s longtime friend Hob Osterlund writes, “Brian has a magic ability to understand animal voices, worries, loves, fears and appetites. Somehow, word by word, run-on sentence by run-on sentence, we all come to love each other more, all because of this one man's passion for small honest stories.”
"Children and Other Wild Animals" (October 2014)
An exercise in Doyle’s great range, these stories chronicle encounters with all manner of species. Some work was previously unpublished; other essays appeared first in “The Sun,” “Utne Reader,” “High Country News,” and “Best American Essays.” The Iowa Review took the occasion of this book to proclaim Doyle “a Townes Van Zandt of essayists known by those in the know.”
"Martin Marten" (April 2016)
Interwoven stories from the lives of two youngsters living on the slopes of Mount Hood: a young teenager named Dave who is on the cusp of leaving his bucolic forest life behind, and Martin, a pine marten (martens are weasel-like mammals) on his own adventure. When this novel took the YA prize at the 2016 Oregon Book Awards, judge Deb Caletti wrote, "Doyle has crafted a classic — a timeless book that lets a reader disappear into a full and gentle world."
“Chicago, A Novel” (March 2017)
One part coming-of-age tale, one part love note to one of America's great cities. Kirkus Reviews writes, "Page follows page of evocative writing as Doyle celebrates 'the shopkeepers and cops and nuns and bus drivers and carpenters and teachers who composed the small vibrant villages that collectively were the real Chicago.'"
“The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson” (March 2017)
A fascinating premise: Doyle imagines a young Robert Louis Stevenson killing time in San Francisco, captivated by a seasoned sailor’s tales of traveling the world. In doing so he contemplates the power of stories and the legacy of one of the world’s great literary lights. Jenny Davidson, writing for The New York Times Book Review, declares, “I doubt Doyle would object to my suggestion that for those who don’t already know Stevenson, his own stories will be a better place to start than this book. But Doyle offers a salutary reminder of the greatness of the tales spun by Hawthorne, Kipling, Conrad, Stevenson and others of that ilk, and I was won over despite myself by his loving reconstruction of an era of storytelling now lost.”
