Title: Leaping: Revelations and EpiphaniesAuthor: Brian Doyle
Essayist Brian Doyle is coming to BYU this week and he'll be visiting my Creative Nonfiction graduate seminar. In preparation for his visit, our class read Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies, a collection of musings, mainly on faith and fatherhood, but also (strangely enough) about 9/11.
One thing that I admire about Doyle's work (aside from his marvelous prose) is the way that he manages to write about his faith. He's a devout Catholic, and his religion infuses most of what he writes. In that way, he's similar to many of the Mormon writers I've encountered, who feel that they can't write essays about subjects that are close to their hearts without talking about religion. While Leaping was published by Loyola Press (Loyola is a Catholic University) and is now out of print, it doesn't feel that it was written for an exclusively Catholic audience. As a Mormon trying to write, I feel torn between writing for a Mormon audience, talking about things like Fast and Testimony meeting and Youth Conference without needing to explain them, and writing for a wider audience, where many of the small details about my culture will require explanation. I like that Doyle doesn't make excuses for being a man of faith, and seems to feel that his faith adds to his humanism rather than detracting from it.
I wish I could keep myself from harping on this, but the way Doyle doesn't use commas between lists of adjectives drives me crazy. If I were a more generous spirit I'd learn to understand his motivations, or at least appreciate his differences.
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