Brian Doyle

David was a man after God's own heart . . . What does it mean to be someone "after God's own heart?" David, King, psalmist and shepherd, gives us a picture with his own life. In many ways he is an extraordinary role model, a man who was fully human but exceeded expectations and pointed others towards God. While the other side of David is most ordinary showing a life filled with destruction, chaos, tragedy and his personal struggle with sin. How then did David become the national hero of God's chosen people? Why is he the one character in the Bible described as "a man after God's own heart?" David's life offers hope to all of us. It shows that God can do extraordinary things through ordinary men and women. And David offers an insightful perspective on what it means to be truly a man, to become like David-men after God's own heart. In this study David will delight and disappoint you. At times you will desire to be just like him while at others you will want to turn and run! The Life of David is one of the most colorful examples of manhood in all of Scripture. You will be introduced to select key characteristics of David's life but unlike David, we have time to make our lives right before God and to lovingly lead our homes. This interactive study features eight weeks of individual study materials with a leader’s guide and suggested teaching plans at the back of the book.

Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plover is the story of their adventures and misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls Pacifica. Hounded by a mysterious enemy, reluctantly acquiring one new resident after another, Declan's lonely boat is eventually crammed with humour, argument, tension, and a resident herring gull.

In Children and Other Wild Animals, bestselling novelist Brian Doyle (Mink River, The Plover) describes encounters with astounding beings of every sort and shape. These true tales of animals and human mammals (generally the smaller sizes, but here and there elders and jumbos) delightfully blur the line between the two.In these short vignettes, Doyle explores the seethe of life on this startling planet, the astonishing variety of our riveting companions, and the joys available to us when we pause, see, savor, and celebrate the small things that are not small in the least.Doyle’s trademark quirky prose is at once lyrical, daring, and refreshing; his essays are poignant but not pap, sharp but not sermons, and revelatory at every turn. Throughout there is humor and humility and a palpable sense of wonder, with passages of reflection so true and hard earned they make you stop and reread a line, a paragraph, a page.Children and Other Wild Animals gathers previously unpublished work with selections that have appeared in Orion, The Sun, Utne Reader, High Country News, and The American Scholar, as well as Best American Essays (“The Greatest Nature Essay Ever”) and Best American Nature and Science Writing (“Fishering”). “The Creature Beyond the Mountain,” Doyle’s paean to the mighty and mysterious sturgeon of the Pacific Northwest, won the John Burroughs Award for Outstanding Nature Essay. As he notes in that tribute to all things “sturgeonness”:“Sometimes you want to see the forest and not the trees. Sometimes you find yourself starving for what’s true, and not about a person but about all people. This is how religion and fascism were born, but it’s also why music is the greatest of arts, and why stories matter, and why we all cannot help staring at fires and great waters.”

Prose poems, chants, litanies, simple songs, cadenced prayers, brief bursts of rhythmic observation, elegies to little moments that are not little at all in the least whatsoever—welcome to the melodic world of Brian Doyle’s “proems,” swirling with voices unreeling tales, souls telling stories, moments photographed with ink. Accessible, easy to read, blunt, brief, and sometimes unforgettable, “these are not poems,” says the author, “but life set to the music of poetry.” In A Shimmer of Something, Brian Doyle’s characteristic humor and sincerity combine to make this collection a delight to read. From his conviction that miracles breed ripples that do not cease, to his lack of faith about the life of an elderberry bush, to the amusing story of a friend’s experience of driving the Dalai Lama to Seattle, to the humorous experience of his second Confession, to an intimate story of love and loss, Doyle’s lean stories of spiritual substance inspire, entertain, and captivate.

First published in 2002. This volume is part of the New Accent series looking at English and popular culture, language, policy, fiction and democracy. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change; to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

In this poignant and startlingly original book, Brian Doyle examines the heart as a physical organ—how it is supposed to work, how surgeons try to fix it when it doesn’t—and as a metaphor: the seat of the soul, the power house of the body, the essence of spirituality. In a series of profoundly moving ruminations, Doyle considers the scientific, emotional, literary, philosophical, and spiritual understandings of the heart—from cardiology to courage, from love letters and pop songs to botany and Jesus. Weaving these strands together is the torment of Doyle’s own infant son’s heart surgery and the inspiring story of the young heart doctor who saved Liam’s life.First published in 2005, The Wet Engineis a book that will change how you feel and think about the mysterious, fragile human heart. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Dr. Marla Salmon, dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing.

Welcome to the peculiar and headlong world of Brian DoyleÆs fiction, where the odd is happening all the time, reported upon by characters of every sort and stripe. Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldnÆt be. Funny, piercing, unique, memorable, this is a collection of stories readers will find nearly impossible to forget: ... The barber who shaves the heads of the thugs in Bin LadenÆs cave tells cheerful stories of life with the preening video-obsessed leader, who has a bald spot shaped just like Iceland. ... A husband gathers all of his wifeÆs previous boyfriends for a long day on a winery-touring bus. ... A teenage boy drives off into the sunset with his troubled sisterÆs small daughters…and the loser husband locked in the trunk of the car. ... The late Joseph Kennedy pours out his heart to a golf-course bartender moments before the stroke that silenced him forever. … A man digging in his garden finds a brand-new baby boy, still alive, and has a chat with the teenage neighbor girl whose son it is. ... A man born on a Greyhound bus eventually buys the entire Greyhound Bus Company and revolutionizes Western civilization. ... A mountainous bishop dies and the counting of the various keys to his house turns… tense. ... A man discovers his wife having an affair, takes up running to grapple with his emotions, and discovers everyone else on the road is a cuckold too. And many others.

Like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyle’s stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There’s a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there’s an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it’s thinking…It’s the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.

Another Way the River Has collects Robin Cody’s finest nonfiction writings, many appearing for the first time in print. Cody’s prose rings with a sense of place. He is a native speaker who probes the streams and woods and salmon that run to the heart of what it means to live and love, to work and play, in Oregon.His characters—from loggers to fishers to cowboys to the kids on his school bus—are smart and curious, often off-beat, always vivid. Cody brings the ear of a novelist and the eye of a reporter to the people and places that make the Northwest, and Northwest literature, distinctive.

Words with Teeth presents a dual argument, of which the first part is composed of establishing metaphor as the primary reading strategy for approaching Biblical Hebrew Poetry, and the second part of applying the said strategy to a heterogeneous group of psalms known, in rather Victorian English, as the Psalms of Imprecation. This volume first introduces the reader to the phenomenon of metaphor and how it interfaces with the Hebrew poetic text. It then offers an historical/exegetical review of the reception of the Psalms of Imprecation, ranging from their exclusion on theological grounds to their acceptance on psychological grounds and the various shades of curiosity and revulsion in between. The main body of the book represents a close individual reading of the Psalms of imprecation, using metaphor as a reading strategy. It will conclude, in agreement with Adele Berlin, that metaphor in Biblical Hebrew Poetry is the flip-side to parallelism, that parallelism frequently provides the structuring basis upon which non-structuring metaphor is grounded, and that metaphorical speech provided the psalmist(s) with a way of speaking the unspeakable about God and her relationship with human persons.

In the sequel to the award-winning Boy O'Boy, it's spring in post-World War II Ottawa and Martin O'Boy has finally found a true home with Grampa Rip. Martin's also found a job, working for the Pure Spring soft drink company. Best of all, he's in love with beautiful Gerty McDowell. But everything's not perfect. Martin lied to kindly Mr. Mirsky, Pure Spring's owner, to get the job. Grampa Rip's brain increasingly goes missing. There's that mysterious, yet oddly familiar, man in the park. There are also Martin's memories, the sudden appearance of famed Soviet defector Igor Gouzensko, and Martin's shady boss, Randy. And worst of all, Randy is robbing Gerty's grandfather, and he's forcing Martin to be his accomplice. Martin's happiness, sense of duty, and love for Gerty collide. Can he find his way through these dire developments? Brian Doyle's fast-paced plot and vivid characterizations, along with the lively colloquial dialogue and period detail, create a rich historical portrait that confirms the author's place as a master storyteller.

After witnessing a murder on the coldest day of the year, Spud Sweetgrass becomes the target of both Detective Kennedy of the police department and the murderer himself. Reprint.

Epiphanies & Elegies is a collection of delightful, accessible poems shot through with wonder, humor, faith, and Irish Catholic heritage. Brian Doyle has injected each piece with perception, insight, and compassion. These spiritual works contain the voice of a father, a husband, a man openly in love with his family, and proud of his heritage. Doyle illuminates seemingly ordinary, everyday events in poems that will immediately touch with the reader with their truth. These warm and insightful pieces are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant takes on the small wonders and inevitable tragedies of life. This book is a delightful addition to the world of spiritual and inspirational writing.

A family car trip across Canada brings Megan and her dad face to face with how sad and happy growing up can be.

When Ryan's dad runs away from home because of the change of life, Ryan is sent to spend the summer with his aunt in Peggy's Cove. He goes fishing, almost gets into big trouble and learns a lot about tourist behavior, but most of all he misses his dad and hopes he'll come back soon.

A self-described wine doofus spends a year in a small Oregon vineyard, chronicling the creative and chaotic labor as the winemakers chase after the perfect pinot noir.

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year, the Geoffrey Bilson Award, the Ruth Schwartz Award, and an ALA Notable Books List selection Martin O'Boy's life is not easy. His beloved Granny has just died, his pregnant mother and father fight all the time and his twin, Phil, is completely incapacitated. Martin is the one his mother counts on. But life in Ottawa's Lowertown is not all bad. He has his best friend, Billy Batson (a.k.a. Captain Marvel), the movies, his cat Cheap and there's the glamorous Buz from next door, who is off at the war.As the war comes to an end with the bombing of Hiroshima -- on Martin's birthday -- Ottawa is in a state of turmoil. Returning soldiers, parties, fights and drunks fill the streets. It would all be very exciting, except for one thing. In their endless pursuit of more funds Martin and Billy have joined the church choir -- as summer boys. And the organist, Mr. T.D.S. George, is awfully fond of Martin. But Martin, despite his hardships, has a pure soul and his Granny's love, Billy's friendship, Buz's imminent return, and even his mother's reliance on him, which help him to deliver a kind of justice to Mr. George, and to heal himself and others.

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award Young Tommy and Baby Bridget, the girl with the trillium-shaped eyes, discover that living, healing and dying are not always what they seem. And they make that discovery with the help of a wonderful cast of characters, including Crazy Mickey, Frank and the Hummer. Award-winning author Brian Doyle spent the summers of his boyhood in the Gatineau Hills, the setting for Up to Low.