Troglodytes of Whimsy and Mercy

 

Brian Doyle, writer. Age 60. Dead of aggressive brain tumor discovered only six months earlier. 

Stark details, and all too familiar. They don’t say anything about who Brian was. How he wrote in a way that made grown men drool and old women swoon clutching their rosaries. How he touched the lives of thousands of people who knew him or read his words. He was reverent and irreverent, often in the same sentence. Insightful. Optimistic. Funny. Stuffed full of heart and faith. An artist with words that stunned with their lyrical beauty.

Brian and I corresponded lightly over his last couple of years. This is not important because I suspect he did this with many people. He was generous in this way.

My introduction to him began when I stumbled over his essay “Playfulness” in River Teeth Journal. I really liked it but, at that point, I didn’t spark to his name. I liked it so much that I began paging through my other journals and Best American anthologies to see if he had written anything else. He was in most of them, too, and I had dog-earned those pages, but not remembered his name.

I thought this was funny, so I wrote about it and sent Brian a copy to make sure it was okay to publish. I figured he was a big fish in the essay world and I didn’t want to piss him off. He wrote back, no caps: “o gawd that made me laugh.” With his blessing, the piece was published by Burlesque Press. 

(“Dear Famous Writer” https://burlesquepressllc.com/2014/01/14/dear-famous-writer-by-mark-liebenow/ )

At the University of Portland, where he worked as editor-in-chief of the Portland Magazine, he also did things like sponsor the “Brian Doyle Scholarship in Gentle and Sidelong Humor.” As a nod back for all the times he made me chuckle, I made donations to his cancer fund from the Brian Doyle Cricket Club, then the Hedge Trimmer Hobbits of the Who Dunnit. the Ambidextrous Thinkers of America, the Hairy Kloggers of Laughter and Light, and finally the Troglodytes of Whimsy and Mercy.

Our last correspondence was over a manuscript on the spirituality of nature I had written. I sent it to him, he suggested places to submit it, and offered to write a promo when the time came.

Brian knew the darkness of humanity, but he also celebrated its great, creative, and wondrous joy. He held fiercely to his faith in things unseen, believing that, even in the midst of the cruelest tragedies, the holy was still present, and its mystery holds us up until we are able to walk on our own again.

Now and then we discover someone who writes what takes our breath away, who props us up on bad days when we are sliding into despair, and who makes us believe in goodness again. And then they’re gone. They’re always gone too soon.

“Writing is a time machine,” Brian said. I suppose that is why I write about cancer, grief, and dead people, having lost friends, parents and a wife, because writing keeps them alive. Brian said, “writing gives death the finger.” So it does, and so do I.

© 2025 Mark Liebenow