The late Oregon writer’s novel “Mink River” is a sinuous stream of words as music. Can its lush language be adapted for the theater? JUNE 26, 2018 // OREGON ARTSWATCH // MICHAEL N. MCGREGOR Language, says Portland director Jane Unger to explain why she spent two years pursuing the stage rights to Brian Doyle’s loquacious and widely beloved Mink River, a …
“I was honored to talk. I was smiling the rest of the day at the interesting mix of speakers—the different speeds and approaches. I take refuge in the inarguable fact that I am not a speaker at all, not a performer or a lecturer or a wise person, which is hugely freeing, because I can …
I’ve been a Northwesterner for quite a while, more than half my life, but Jack Cady got here long before me. He was born in Ohio in 1932, served in the Coast Guard in Maine, conscientiously objected to the war in Korea, graduated from the University of Louisville in Kentucky, drove trucks and did other …
As I read this wonderful novel I was reminded of things forgotten, like rivers singing and time spent alone on river banks in mossy shade dripping with salmon berries, our family crow who also spoke (one of the main characters in the book is a very philosophic crow), and northwest characters that are both familiar …
My favorite book of 2011 was Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.
Today, lucky readers, is Day 3 of 28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List. Brian Doyle Day! Doyle was the first author to submit his list to us—within hours of our asking. That stream of consciousness thing he does, that’s for real. He even provided his own headline. He wrote his bio, too: “Brian Doyle …
Brian Doyle’s first novel, Mink River, published to critical and bookseller acclaim earlier this year, is set in a small town on the Oregon Coast called Neawanaka. An unusual novel, it has no main character but is rather a woven narrative encompassing the stories of many characters, including Irish-Americans and Native Americans, as well as …
We were surprised and intrigued (not to mention briefly taken with the dramatic possibilities of uncovering a literary scandal) when we stumbled upon news about a new book the other day. Rodale has published The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart by Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon, M.D, a book that is receiving …
“Brian Doyle loves words; big words, small words, fancy words, plain words, exotic words, domesticated words, adjectives, verbs and nouns especially, and because he loves words he piles them up in great juicy heaps of phrases and paragraphs and sentences and pages and whole books and makes delicious stories with them, stories about impossibly possible …
