Brian Doyle

Click to look up this book
in our library catalog. 

Brian Doyle Biography

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon, and a 2008 recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Portland has earned five consecutive national gold medals as the finest small-circulation university magazine in the United States, and won the 2005 Sibley Award from Newsweek magazine as the finest university magazine, bar none. Which we crowed about for a couple days and then slogged back to work. Portland has been graced over the years with work by Barry Lopez, Andre Dubus, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Hoagland, Cynthia Ozick, Edward O. Wilson, Ian Frazier, Mary Gordon, Colm Toibin, Pico Iyer, Tony Hillerman, Jan Morris, James Carroll, Sallie Tisdale, Bill McKibben, Joseph Epstein, Mary Lee Settle, William Stafford, David James Duncan, Ursula Le Guin, and Rick Bass, among many other fine writers.
“A great magazine, the finest spiritual magazine in the United States,” Annie Dillard has said of it, without prompting or remuneration (yet) by the editor. Fiiiiine woman, Annie Dillard.
God is Love, an anthology of the best spiritual essays and poems from Portland Magazine, was published in 2003 by Augsburg Fortress Press in Minnesota.

Brian Doyle is the author of ten books:

• Mink River, a “sprawling Oregon novel.” “This is a Great. American. Novel.” (Cynthia Ozick). Oregon State Press, 2010.
• Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices (One Day Hill, Victoria, Australia, 2008), a collection of “proems, poems, stories-as-told-to-me-in-startling-fashion, voices, shreds of tale, shards of adventures, spoken notes…”
• Epiphanies & Elegies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), a collection of “proems, very short stories, voices, rhythmic tales, sort-of-poems…”
• The Grail: a year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world (Oregon State University Press, March 2006) – a cheerful fan’s notes about how wine is actually made, a sort of wine for dummies or Wine 101, starring a father-and-son winemaking team in Oregon.
• The Wet Engine (Paraclete Press, 2005), “a headlong heartfelt chant and song and expedition to the seat of the soul, the pumping station of the body, the power house, headquarters, headwater, fuse-box, crossroads, the crucial battery, the mysterious extraordinary moist relentless fragile holy human heart; and notes on how it works and doesn’t work, and what it means, and how we use it so easily and casually as a metaphor for the extraordinary loves and pains that course through us like muscular rivers; and explorations of doctors and nurses and surgeries and the hearts of hummingbirds and whales and worms; and agony and atresia and courage and cardiology and blood and pulse and ebb and flow and prayer and people and the pain and poetry of the chambered muscle that drives us humming and weeping and hopeless and hopeful through the intricate countries of our days.”
• Spirited Men (Cowley Publications, 2004), a collection of eleven long essays about literary and musical storytellers from William Blake to Robert Louis Stevenson to Van Morrison;
• Leaping (Loyola Press, 2003), a collection of essays in what Cynthia Ozick calls “the jubilantly idiosyncratic and laughing language of love”;
• Saints Passionate & Peculiar (St. Mary’s Press, 2002), a collection of “brief excitable headlong essays” for teenagers about saints;
• Credo, a collection of essays about believing in many things (Saint Mary’s Press, 1999); and
• Two Voices (with his father, Jim Doyle), a collection of their essays (Liguori Publications, 1996).
  
  Books may be purchased for $14 at:
    •  Jefferson County Library
    •  Art Adventure Gallery
    •  Mail Copies and More
    •  Warm Springs Museum
  Available for checkout at the library.