An Intermittent Interview With Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle, award-winning editor of Portland Magazine, essayist, and short story contributor to LAR #6 told us he had time to answer a few questions because he’d “just turned over a Big Honking Oregon Novel to the publisher.”
That pronouncement led to the first question: “I don’t recall seeing a Doyle novel before (if I’m snoozin’ on this one, please accept my apology) WHAT GOT INTO YOU?”
Brian loves all punctuation marks except the period and the apostrophe—but that’s a story for another day. Anyway, here’s what he had to say about the BHON:
Heh heh. What got into me was partly the beginning of the novel is partly how I courted the Lovely Mary Miller more than twenty years ago and I swore to her I would finish it before I died which now that I am 400 years old I figured I better finish it; and also over the years as an increasingly mad essayist and proemist I got increasingly interested in voices and how language can run away with realities and how there are lots of realities and how braided voices are a great way to tell stories; and a lot of my friends got help them are fictioneers and they kept mooing about how freeing ands fun it was to write fiction; and pretty much every time I wrote a short story I realized afterwards it was a voice unspooling with all sorts of stories some of them true and some of them truer than true; and this country, the truer than true, which is what we call good fiction, began to look pretty damned interesting; and while I was always terribly intimidated at the thought of writing a Big Honking Novel, I finally realized, after my two nonfiction books that were written a tiny piece at a time, that I could write a NOVEL that way, duh, which I did, and just sent it to the publisher, which I am leery to identify until they reluctantly say, ok, we’ll do it, because I am superstitious, and Catholic, and weird, and I hate to tempt fate by any kind of hubris, amen. BD
And here are some other places you can read Brian’s work:
Epiphanies & Elegies: Very Short Stories
