Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Brian Doyle
Article 13 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the April 4, 2007 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
o o o
Young at Heart
Brian Doyle has always been a kid at heart.
You know the stories, the 'young narrator' novels tumbling out over the last 30 years - 12 in all, almost too many to name - Hey, Dad!, Up to Low, Angel Square, Easy Avenue, Covered Bridge, Spud Sweetgrass, Oh, Boy! And now his latest, Pure Spring. Where did this fictional world come from?
Imagine a boy lying in his bunk bed, listening in secret to the grownups talking - all those Irish aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins from his father's family, hailing back to 1840, up in Low. There he absorbed the cadenced sound of tale-telling that passed for normal conversation.
"They couldn't help themselves. Their speech was extraordinary, coloured by natural imagery that felt like poetry to me. Even as a boy I was conscious of its uniqueness. From the age of nine I was secretly writing, copying down everything I heard. I think of myself as bearing witness, giving evidence, trying to capture the narrative torque of an oral tradition that was still alive when I was growing up."
For two weeks in the summer of 1940, when he was five, Brian stayed alone with his sister Fay, then 13, at the family cabin north of Low. It was in this eternal time of sunlight and freedom, of spending hours in the rowboat or wandering down to the neighbouring farm, that Brian learned to read. Without running water or electricity, life slowed to the pace of the nineteenth century. Ever after, the mysteries of language would be steeped in nature, to come alive in his later love of Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas.
For a boy who never really left the Hills, Brian's life has been as colourful as his characters. After a scrappy youth growing up in Ottawa's Lowertown, Brian went on to Glebe Collegiate where he was nominated for Head Boy. The Vice Principal took his name off the list, calling him a show off and a bum who would never amount to much. A star gymnast and football player, Brian was already secretly sending his stories out to magazines and writing steamy love letters to the various girls in his life. The walls of his room were decorated with rejection slips but he had good company, reading Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Shakespeare and Dickens.
By 1957, armed with a Journalism degree from the new Carleton College, Brian worked for a time at the Toronto Telegram. Then, after a short stint teaching, he began an M.A. in Literature at Ottawa U. His first short story came out in the spring issue of Fiddlehead literary magazine in 1960.
After writing a paper, "Cooling It", offering new perspectives on teaching reading and writing, his teaching career took off. Soon he joined the summer faculty at Queen's University, encouraging teachers to be more innovative. Back home in Ottawa, he was appointed Head of the English Department at his old alma mater, Glebe Collegiate, where for over 30 years he became known for his annual theatrical satires - most written by Brian and scored by his musical colleague, Stan Clark. He was always in trouble with the authorities for trying, and achieving the impossible - this kid 'who would never amount to much'.
In between he wrote his novels, long-hand, early in the morning. In 1978 a small publisher agreed to take him on. Hey, Dad! began the cycle of 'young narrator' fiction that has garnered so many awards and become his trademark. Even now he rises early to greet the dawn with a few good hours of writing under his belt before the day begins.
"You have to write every day. It's a muscle - like any physical training. You've got to stay in shape if you want to reach the zone."