Ivan Doig's parents about three years before his birth in 1939.
Obituaries for Ivan Doig were few and mostly weak. This one by Jeff Baker is closer to satisfactory. It was in The Oregonian. After all, Portland has Powells and is one of the places Montana writers go “next” when the winters get to be too much. In fact, sometimes I think the Montana writers have disappeared from Montana and re-grouped in Portland.
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Ivan Doig always cared about getting it right. The Seattle writer, who died Thursday of multiple myloma, was a stickler for the right word and the right detail in every sentence of his 16 books. Close enough wasn't good enough.
One of Doig's early jobs was for the timber industry.
Doig's first book, his memoir "This House of Sky," was a finalist for the National Book Award. Doig said in a 2006 interview that he stopped his freelance journalism career to devote himself to the book and that he rewrote the first two pages 75 times, reading them aloud to get the rhythm just right.
"I wanted to work with the boundaries of language," he said. "I'm never going to be Yeats, where he has everything working just right in a poem, but I was determined to try to get that feeling in prose."
He got it. Here's the first two paragraphs of "This House of Sky":
"Soon before daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother's breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped.
"The remembering begins out of that new silence. Through the time since, I reach back along my father's tellings and around the urgings which would have me face about and forget, to feel into these oldest shadows for the first sudden edge of it all."
A book about adventure, like soul-searching.
Doig's next book, "Winter Brothers," is my favorite. He used the journals of explorer James G. Swan, who came to the Northwest from Boston and spent much of his life on the Olympic Peninsula, as the basis for his own explorations. Doig called the book "a journal of a journal" and a book about memory and finding a place to invest your life.
Doig turned to fiction and had one success after another: "The Sea Runners," the trilogy about the McCaskill family that began with "English Creek" and concluded with "Ride with Me, Mariah Montana." He wrote a second memoir, "Heart Earth," and returned to the Montana he loved often in his last few novels. His publisher said there's a completed novel, "Last Bus to Wisdom," that will be published in August.
-- Jeff Baker
503-221-8165
This was the book that struck the chord.
Mr. Doig passed away while living in Seattle, but he was Montana through and through. He was part of the wave of Big Sky writers who left their marks on American literature in the late 20th century: Norman Maclean, Tom McGuane, Doig, Wm Kittredge, and native son Wallace Stegner. back in the day, "move to Montana and write a novel" was on some folks' bucket list.
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I’m going to piggyback on these quotes. I remind you that I’m living in Valier where Doig went to high school with my step-daughter and that we both attended Northwestern University 57-61 -- he in journalism and me in theatre. I’ve briefly chatted with him over the years but we didn’t really know each other.
Though Doig wrote a lot about Montana, he got out as soon as he could. He shared the values of his high school teachers and in those days, growing up in Portland, so did I. He wanted a dignified, scholarly life and he got it, partly due to the support of Carol, his wife. But adjustments had to be made, as is necessary for any writer dependent on sales. In that sense he did well enough to build a nice home near Shoreline Community College, not in Seattle Proper. Through his last years his eyes gave him a lot of trouble but -- like everything else -- he stubbornly worked on through such obstacles. I admired him and his work and enjoyed some of the books I rather disrespectfully called “pinafore epics.” That is, classroom hi-jinks played off against 19th century small town developments, mostly the industrialization of the West. He did them well.
About music and a black singer.
“Prairie Nocturne” was more my speed and, of course, “Winter Brothers.” When I got to the last page of “This House of Sky,” I called him at home -- as one could do in those days -- with a trembling voice and wet face. He was very kind. It is the book that will endure because it is so real.
In pursuit of Doig reviews, the logical place to begin is his own website, of course, but I also looked at some of the various lists that used to be maintained by people like Sue Hart and Annick Smith. I find them a bit shocking -- many deserving people missing. I’ll follow up on that tomorrow.
Doig had a popularity that is interesting to think about. When he did a reading at Powells in Portland, I challenged him about why he didn’t write about Blackfeet. After all, the life-changing “sheep stampede” happened just out of Heart Butte a ways. He was startled but quickly recovered, saying that his friend Jimmy Welch was covering that subject.
Doig was quite like Norman Maclean, whom I knew just briefly when I went back to the University of Chicago. In fact, you could make a case that Doig was born old. But as a writer he had the same experience as Jimmy Welch -- that he would NOT be able to write profitably about anything except the first category he was put into. And the story would always be about the author, not what the author saw and thought. This has been especially hard on women writers.
Doig was quite like Norman Maclean, whom I knew just briefly when I went back to the University of Chicago. In fact, you could make a case that Doig was born old. But as a writer he had the same experience as Jimmy Welch -- that he would NOT be able to write profitably about anything except the first category he was put into. And the story would always be about the author, not what the author saw and thought. This has been especially hard on women writers.
Ivan Doig
If books are published according to the publisher’s opinions of what would sell, which is often influenced by whether the writer promises to promote, then they will drift to commercial standards. Sex, drugs, violence, and Butte. Doig would do Butte. He would promote. He would stay in the profitable category.
My own albatross has been Bob Scriver, because he fought the hidden forces that corrupt Western art -- pretty much the same ones that corrupt Western literature. His reputation overwhelms mine. The big advantage of that is that no one knows much about me and has no suspicion of what I actually write -- not even the ones who read my “lead” blog, “prairiemary.” I do not “do” Butte. Among other things, I do East Slope, High Prairie, sex and neurology. But I don’t publish. To the people of Valier, that means I’m only an old lady they see at the post office, which suits me fine.
Butte, Montana
I reflect on what Ivan would have written if he didn’t have to sell. Maybe in fact he did have another body of work stacked up somewhere. I’m pretty sure that one of the things we shared was the belief that writing should be saved on paper. People in the PNW are a little cavalier about using up trees since there are so many. (Maybe that’s true of writers as well.) He did have the poetic impulse and came close to poetry in his prose.
My idea of Montana writers, like “Old Mac Maniac”, is Norman Maclean, Tom McGuane, Doig, Wm Kittredge, and native son Wallace Stegner, though I tend to think of Richard Hugo before Wm. Kittredge, whose roots are in Eastern Oregon. But I don’t discard the women writers nor the Gothic writers nor the genre writers. I resist some of the contemporary “romance” novels but not people like Kari Lynn Dell, who knows rodeos from being in them. Among the privately published books are some powerful stories, some about frontier sexual abuse of female children that might disenchant those businesswomen in Great Falls who are so enamored with playing brothel.
Ivan and Carol Doig on the right.
September, 2007.
Each year, the Center of the American West presents the Wallace Stegner Award to an individual who has made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore, or an understanding of the West. This year, the Center bestowed this award on Ivan Doig, the acclaimed author of This House of Sky and eleven other internationally acclaimed books. During his visit to the University of Colorado campus, Mr. Doig demonstrated the hardworking, attentive qualities that made him a National Book Award nominee and the ideal candidate for this award. He engaged students, faculty, and community members on a wide range of topics, balancing insight with wit. His visit culminated in an award ceremony that featured a conversation with Patty Limerick and Charles Wilkinson before a packed house at the University of Colorado Wolf Law Building. Mr. Doig talked about writing: its craft, its demands, its inspirations, and its rewards. Along the way, he commented on the West as a literary backdrop. As Mr. Doig noted, "If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it'd be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life."
Each year, the Center of the American West presents the Wallace Stegner Award to an individual who has made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore, or an understanding of the West. This year, the Center bestowed this award on Ivan Doig, the acclaimed author of This House of Sky and eleven other internationally acclaimed books. During his visit to the University of Colorado campus, Mr. Doig demonstrated the hardworking, attentive qualities that made him a National Book Award nominee and the ideal candidate for this award. He engaged students, faculty, and community members on a wide range of topics, balancing insight with wit. His visit culminated in an award ceremony that featured a conversation with Patty Limerick and Charles Wilkinson before a packed house at the University of Colorado Wolf Law Building. Mr. Doig talked about writing: its craft, its demands, its inspirations, and its rewards. Along the way, he commented on the West as a literary backdrop. As Mr. Doig noted, "If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it'd be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life."
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