DAVID JAMES DUNCAN

Featured March 19, 2007

David James Duncan is the author of the novels The River Why, and The Brothers K, and the story/essay/memoir collections, River Teeth, and My Story as Told by Water. His works have won a Lannan Fellowship, the 2001 Western States Book Award for Nonfiction, a National Book Award nomination, two PNBA Awards, an honorary doctorate from University of Portland, the ALA's 2003 Award (with Wendell Berry) for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom, inclusion in four volumes of Best American Spiritual Writing, and many other honors.

His latest book is God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right. "The book is a collection of what I call 'churchless sermons' united by my belief that the way of life preached and embodied by Jesus in the Gospels is meant to be an example to Christians," says Duncan. "I chose the title God Laughs and Plays because in my day-to-day life as a human being, and in my imaginative life as a writer, the best deeds and work spring out of a spirit of play."

David speaks out all over the West on issues such as wilderness, endangered rivers and salmon, the U.S.-crucified children of Iraq, the writing life, the non-monastic contemplative life, and the nonreligious literature of faith. David lives with his family on a Montana trout stream, where he is at work on a novel set at the confluence of Asian mysticism, American mountains and rivers, and the love between a man and a woman, titled Eastern Western.