Interviews
Answers and Questions: Lee Gulyas Tries Heroically to Interview or at Least Effectively Interrupt, Just for a Second or Two, for Heaven’s Sake, the Garrulous, Chortling Essayist Brian Doyle
Lee Gulyas
In May of 2006, Bellingham Review editor Brenda Miller and I went to the Bellingham International Airport to pick up the renowned author Brian Doyle. We waited and waited and wondered if he had somehow missed the flight, and then after every last passenger had cleared the tarmac and collected their baggage, off in the distance came a bespectacled man with his head turned to the sky, dawdling and gawking at the airport’s resident swallows in their loopy, swirling aerial feeding. His visit to Western Washington University was for a reading and a discussion with Brenda Miller’s creative writing class, Spiritual Autobiography; the students had just read his book Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies, a collection of essays about faith, life, mystery, and family. But before that, we were good enough to give him lunch and a beverage and he reciprocated by sitting in Brenda’s bucolic backyard in the midst of spring and eventually answering a few questions. Mr. Doyle lives in Portland, Oregon and edits the University of Portland’s renowned Portland Magazine. His last book is The Grail: A Year Ambling and Shambling through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World, and most recently, Epiphanies & Elegies: Very Short Stories, a book of poems.
Lee Gulyas: In 2001 a friend of mine gave me an issue of Preservation magazine and said, “Hey, there’s a piece in here I think you would like. It’s about a church in Portland.” That piece, of course, was about more than just the extraordinary tiny wooden chapel at the University of Portland. The essay contained elements I find in all of your work, loss, humor, awe, and a constant, curious probing of the unknown; it was a great introduction to your writing. I’m interested in what you choose to explore, and how and why you start a single piece.
Brian Doyle: O lawdy, what I choose to explore and how I stutter into an essay, those are Big Questions, and I grin, because all I do is wander around curious and open-mouthed and gaping at the million miracles and try to catch a few by the tail and pull them out of the holy swirling air and explore them a bit before I shuffle off the mortal coil. I mean, a couple of years ago I sat down and looked at the subjects of my essays in recent years and it was riotous incoherence: owls, basketball, diapers, Blake, dolls, sins, wolverines, hagiography, espalier, puppies, soccer, Robert Louis Stevenson, the tenor sax, bin Laden’s bald spot (which looks like Iceland), pinot noir wine, cardiology, dirt…it was a joke.
LG: How do you start a new piece?
BD: Well, I carry two pens, my father was a newspaperman and abjured me to always carry a backup pen in case of emergencies, and I always have scraps and shards of paper somewhere on my person, so when somebody says something astounding, which happens about every four minutes if you listen, or I see something amazing, which ditto, I immediately make a note, which is crucially important, because those little scrawls are for me sourdough starters for essays and poems, you know? Then I get myself to the computer as soon as I decently can and poke the line and see what happens. The great Australian writer Helen Garner says pieces announce themselves within the first three paragraphs, which I find to be true, sort of—I can usually tell if a story wants to be an essay or a piece of fiction or a poem. Though I don’t really write poems—they are more proems, I guess. My friend Pattiann Rogers, who is a glorious Real Live Poet, says my poems are rhythmic accidents, which makes us laugh. Anyway I just start typing, trying to tell a story, and things go downhill from there. I better give an example—a friend of mine in Boston was just telling me that he died a year ago, had a heart attack and died on the beach, and was resuscitated a few minutes later, wrenched back into this sphere, and that he really and truly felt himself leave his body and drift into what he says was a totally calm warm place with stars. None of the bright lights and holy beings beckoning or anything, but just stars, I was happy as a clam, he said. Now, a guy tells you a story like that, wouldn’t you take maniacally good notes and then scamper as fast as you could to ye old typewriter?
LG: Without a doubt. And speaking of old typewriters, your dad was a model as a writer?
BD: O yeh, he’s a lovely old typewriter, my da, clear and concise and calm, a grand storyteller altogether, and a man of wonderful grace and dignity and humor. I learn much from my dad still about being a man. He does a monthly column still for a Catholic newspaper in New York and he’s a better writer than ever. He’s written two books and I still learn from the man every time I read a piece of his, the easy grace, the quiet firm tone, the dry humor. He was a great teacher, though he hardly ever said a word, because he gently showed me that really fine writing was about stories, and it had nothing to do with style and lyricism and flash and etc. My dad was also a real blunt guy and his advice for me as a writer was admirably direct: get a job, learn to type fast, sit your ass in the chair every day, and learn to be quiet. He used to say that if you wanted to be a writer you need utter only three words: Really? Then what? and otherwise listen with ferocious attention, for stories rush past by the thousands if we can only see and hear and smell them. Writers are just mostly really curious souls who can type fast. Plus my dad and mom absolutely insisted that all their kids read like maniacs, and our house was crammed floor to ceiling with terrific books, and really as you know one of the best ways to learn about fine writing is to read it—to hear how masters put stories and voices on the page.
LG: And your touchstone writers, lodestars, compass points, hearthstones, heroes?
BD: Robert Louis Stevenson above all—I think he was the greatest writer in our language, and he wrote so many forms so beautifully—novels, stories, essays, poems, letters, travel, memoir, biography, politics, sociology, history—the only thing he did poorly was plays, probably because he was so intent on trying to make money with his plays. Twain, Bellow, Annie Dillard, E.B. White, Jan Morris, Frank O’Connor, Bernard De Voto. When I am really feeling clogged and stupid as a writer I usually go read Twain’s essays, anything by Stevenson, White’s essays, and especially Jan Morris, who to me is just the most lucid clear limpid graceful writer alive. Her sentences always somehow wake me up again to the sheer clarity of a good piece of writing. When I feel really clogged and stupid and tonguetangled and muddled I read Jan Morris for the sheer clarity and lucidity and limpidity of her prose. And Annie Dillard, who is a kind of a genius. I am afraid to read her novel because I love her nonfiction so. And Ian Frazier, who always makes me grin but there’s a bone of real poignant mercy and gentle attentive prayer in his work, seems to me. David James Duncan, another writer who makes me laugh but under the grinning is a roaring huge heart for pain and prayer. Barry Lopez, Cynthia Ozick, Edward Hoagland, all masters, I think. Tim Winton and Helen Garner and Martin Flanagan and David Malouf in Australia. Roddy Doyle and Nuala ni Dhomhnaill in Ireland, Katie Grant in Scotland. One of the things that used to drive me nuts but I finally gave it up was the gnawing thought that there must be a hundred writers in other languages who would blow my mind if only I could read them which I cannot and never will; I can read a little Gaelic, enough to paw through glorious poets like Nuala and the late great Flann O’Brien, but other than that I can barely understand my native tongue. This reminds me when I was in Australia a couple years ago a small girl informed me that I spoke American and not English at all, which is true. Bright kid, that one. Her name is Lola. She’ll go far. I predict she’ll be prime minister.
LG: Do you often find that you don’t actually know what you’re writing about until you’re done and you’ve read it over?
BD: O yes o yes o dear yes. And I might note for younger writers that sometimes I think not being sure what you are writing about is a very good idea; that the more sure you know your theme and topic and approach ahead of time, the less salty and funny and bony and substantive the piece will be. The quintessential piece like that for me was an essay called “The Meteorites,” which began cheerfully as a simple litany of all the weird jobs I’d had (driving a bus where all the kids mooned passersby, working in a bakery climbing in and out of pots, summer camp counselor, etc.), and spun out to become a piece about Summer, the smell and feel and spatter of Summer, and then I discovered, when the end of the essay came to me one day, that really it was about love. It wasn’t about falling head over heels with a beautiful woman, although that happened that summer and really mattered, but about learning to love from two little boys, who were the best of friends and loved each other’s company with that unadulterated, unselfconscious, untrammeled, open-hearted, joyous, extraordinary electric affection that makes you grin and weep at the same time it’s so powerful and sweet and direct from the hand of the Maker, you know? I sat there at my desk, having written the final scene with them, and wept and wept. It was a stunning feeling, to have something yanked from you that you did not know was there. It’s certainly one reason writers write, to dimly find the shape of their own hearts. As you know.
LG: You said once that a reader accused you of writing about nothing but love…
BD: Guilty, I guess, although I think the word love is like the word God or patriotism, so used and abused that it’s lost its salt. I suppose I would say that most of what I write seems to be about grace under duress, which seems like the great human story to me. Also laughter, which is both holy and a marker of holy. It’s no accident, I think, that the greatest spiritual visionaries are often those with roaring senses of humor—Meher Baba, the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, Peter Maurin, so many rabbis, the Christ—I mean, Christ’s quirky addiction to odd metaphor alone carries a lot of the New Testament, you know?
LG: Projects on the stove?
BD: Oddly, for all I cheerfully insult poets, who never get paid except in subscriptions to magazines they don’t really want and only get because they have two poems in them—a book of poems due out early in 2007, called Epiphanies & Elegies. Or “proems” is probably the better word. Very small stories set in stanzas, sort of. Hard to explain. My poet friends say the word poetry is about to be devalued forever. And I just finished a collection of longer stories, which are mostly voices telling stories, and I am sworn to finish a novel before I die, I promised my small cool wife I would do that so I have to, you can’t be swearing things to your wife and then blowing them off, very bad form, and then I would like to write a play and a film. I’d like to write one of everything, wouldn’t that be cool? Like Stevenson.
LG: You write at home, in the office, sprawled in a field gaping at the stars?
BD: Office, early in the morning. Too much chaos and hubbub at home. We have three children, so (a) I am the referee and (b) I seem to be making sandwiches all the time when I am home. My poor bride is a painter and has a homemade studio in the basement and she can hardly get any work done at all because of Mooommmmmm! all the time.
LG: Least you ever got paid?
BD: Well, I been paid Nothing a lot, but there’s a kick to having a piece Published that makes that fun most of the time, and really what you want to do is connect to hearts anyways, so zero dollars is okay especially when you are really a fan of the journal’s existence, and there are so many brave journals filled with really interesting bony writing that don’t have ten cents, like for example this one, and River Teeth, I like that, and New Letters, and Commonweal is a great Catholic magazine with about twenty cents to its name, and even glorious heroic magazines like The American Scholar are not going to pay you more than you need to buy a week’s sandwiches for those roaring kids. On the other hand people read them, and their hearts and heads are digesting what you are desperately, mutteringly trying to say about grace under duress and laughter as prayer and the miracle of the moment, and that connection seems exquisite and holy to me, so there you go.
LG: Do you sit down with a theme in mind, a bent, a point, a direction?
BD: Nope. Here let me issue one of those stupid, sweeping generalizations that should be shot from the air like a goose on steroids. Never sit down to write An Essay. Just sit down and Tell a Story. We all tell stories. We have holes in our heads and hearts that are exactly the right size for stories. Sermons, homilies, lectures, articles, advice, counsel, rant, they don’t fit our heart holes as smoothly and memorably as stories do. I can tell you endless numbers of facts and opinions about, say, September 11, but none of it will register like a story about, say, the couple who held hands and jumped, or the firemen who ran up when they should have by all sense and logic and reason run down, or the teacher who carried a child away on her shoulders through the gathering ash. Those stories you won’t forget. Stories matter more than anything. They have powerful bones, and we hand 'em one to another all the time—that’s what love is, and religion, and politics, and, you know, interviews.
LG: Best pro basketball team ever?
BD: 1986 Celtics with Bird and McHale and Bill Walton coming off the bench. I mean, all due respect to Michael Jordan’s Bulls, and the old Celts who ran off eight titles in a row, and the sprinting Showtime Lakers, and the old Lakers with Jerry West and Wilt, but my gawd, there was never a passing team like Bird’s Celts. Man, that was fun to watch. Plus I was young then.
LG: And now?
BD: Older than dirt. My kids ask if I voted for Lincoln. But I am, well, not wiser, but a thousand times more alert to sadness and grace in other people, far more attentive to pain and courage, to the loads people carry and the immense bravery and creativity with which they carry their loads; and that seems to me the great story to be told, not only by me but by us all. So much writing does not matter to me because it’s about the writer; whereas the writing that does matter, that connects, that has electric love in it, and respect and roar, is about other people and their stories and their grace. Perhaps it is a mark of maturity in a writer when he or she turns finally from trying to figure out and explain and define and assert and understand himself or herself, and looks carefully at other people, and is awed and astonished and agog and agape at the way so very many people are heroic and holy.
LG: Your sins as a writer?
BD: O dear, blessedly not as many as my sins as a man, which are legion. As a writer I have been accused of being addicted to run-on sentences, semicolons, lists, alliteration, and “passionate overwriting,” in a lovely phrase I heard once from a reader. To which I plead guilty on all counts. I think maybe in the end I am sort of addled by words and sounds and stories and the music of tales and how we tell them. I blame it on being American of Irish descent, see, oral cultures enamored of tall tales and jokes and lies and other forms of praise. Plus, I am a guy and so enamored of bad jokes and ludicrous statements issued with a straight face. Plus, I have small children and have been soaked in goofiness for fifteen years now. It’s made me a much better man.