Headlight Herald interview with Brian Doyle

Back to LO Reads 2012

Portland author Brian Doyle visited the Rowboat Gallery in Pacific City on Saturday to read from his novel, Mink River. Headlight Herald reporter Mary Faith Bell caught up with Doyle before the reading and sat on a bench outside the gallery in the rare sunshine and asked him about Mink River, which is set in the fictional coastal town of Neawanaka, “very probably in Tillamook county,” as says Doyle, smiling. The following is excerpted from that interview, as well as an initial online interview.

Q: What inspired you to set Mink River in a fictional town in Tillamook County? Do you have a local connection? History here? It seems clear, reading the novel,  that you have a real love of our salty, wet, timbered, stoical, wild, artistic, sometimes holy blue-collar communities; did the story grow up around your love of the place?

A: The woman who married me and her family have a beach house in Tillamook County, and beginning 25 years ago, when I was courting the lass, I became utterly absorbed by the botany and biology and history and shaggy courage and moist humor and epic rain and roaring ocean and dense forest and vast slugs and rafts of berries in the coastal forests and meadows of your county. And I finally wanted to try and write it down – to write a town into being, sort of – a town on the coast, not big, not small – bounded by waters – a town that would somehow let me try to catch and sing and celebrate Oregon and Oregonness. Now, after that book’s been published and read, I think maybe I wanted to say thanks to Oregon for twenty years of wild gifts and hard grace.

Q: I love that the characters in Mink River are mostly Irish and Native American. How did that come about? Was it deliberate: you wanted to tell the stories of both cultures and layer them?

A: The Salish-speaking people, that was deliberate, yes. Those people spoke that language here for thousands of years, their voices and stories were alive in this air, and now they are gone, and only a few of their words remain on the land – Nestucca, Nehalem, Neahkahni, Neotsu -- thus the town name of Neawanaka in the novel, I wanted it to sound right.  There’s a good deal of the stories and culture of the Tillamook (or Killamuck, as Lewis and Clark called them) people in the book. I wanted to be true to them, and to resurrect some of their lives and stories, from sheer respect. The Irish characters and language in the novel, well, that’s me – I have always been a student of Gaelic, and my family’s real Irish, and it just seemed a rich vein to have the Irish diaspora wash up against the last vestige – the diaspora, as it were – of Salish-speaking people on the coast.

Q: Would it be accurate to describe the genre as magical realist fiction?

A: I guess, although I never thought of it that way at all while writing – I just wrote, and stuff happened. Moses for example (a talking crow) just started talking one day and he was so intelligent and subtle that he was fascinating, and he became a key player. In a sense he is the hero, maybe. I think he is my favorite character in the book – he’s a different soul, very thoughtful, with a huge heart. God knowsd who would play him if ever the book’s made into a movie. Brad Pitt in a crow costume, I guess.

Q: I sense that Neawanaka is not any one real community, but rather, a composite. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

A: I have received at least twelve letters from readers up and down the coast who are convinced it is their town, which pleases me greatly. In a real way, I hope it is everyone’s Oregon coast town. I’ve had people write and tell me I lived in your story. I love that. I have also received the wildest letters for this book. I got one letter from a reader upset that the novel ended – how dare it end? And one man wrote to tell me that his wife had fallen in love with a character in the novel, and it was causing a strain in their marriage. I’d laugh, but I feel a little morally responsible there.

Q: What are your favorite Oregon novels?

A: I think, with the maniacal list urge of the male human being, that the best Oregon novels are, in rough order, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion (although he could have used a good editor; Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which is really set in Oregon); David Duncan’s The River Why, Robin Cody’s Ricochet River; Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven; anything by Molly Gloss; Barry Lopez’s River Notes, which is really sort of a small stitched novel, perhaps; anything by Craig Lesley; and then maybe Mink River. I’d love for Mink River to just be mentioned in pub arguments about the best ten Oregon novels ever. I am sure right about here some readers will shriek H.L. Davis! Katherine Dunn! Washington Irving! Beverly Cleary! Chuck Palahniuk! M.K. Wren! To which I would respond Washington Irving, are you mad? And that sort of shrieking is why we have pubs in which to argue about books.

Q: Final question: You are the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, Oregon’s Catholic university, and much of your work has to do with Catholicism and spiritual search. Do you mind if I ask what role does the Catholic Church play in your life?

A: I am what you might call a thrilled Catholic – a guy absorbed by the human genius of the faith, not the corporate foolishness and cruelty of it. In the final analysis, I think, Catholicism is about attentiveness, about being alert to and celebrating the daily miracle, about witnessing and trying for grace, about being amazed by the holiness of what is alive. The world is stuffed with holiness wedded to great pain; being Catholic grounds me in attentiveness, makes my antennae sharper for the difficult joys of commitment, forces me to remember I am small and the divine gifts are beyond measure. It’s a complex church to be in, sure – people ask me how can I belong to a church in which thousands of children were abused? I suppose part of my answer would be how can I leave, when any effort I can make as a Catholic could fight that, stop that, protect and celebrate the miracle of children? It’s easy to quit things, but harder and often deeper to stay with the boat in a storm, seems to me. As my sister, a Buddhist nun, says, spirituality is the ocean, and religions are boats. Catholicism is my boat on that vast and crucial sea. And like many Catholics I am the first to shout that life is stuffed with sacramental moments; they don’t just happen in church, of course. Mink River, I hope, is stuffed with sacramental moments. That’s really what the book’s about: thorny grace, shaggy grace, grace under duress. That’s the great story of all of us, holding hands together against the dark. I suppose that’s what the book wanted to be about more than anything.