JOHN DANIEL

Featured November 19, 2005

“John Daniel has quietly established himself as one of the premier writers on the West Coast,” critic John Murray wrote a few years ago in the Bloomsbury Review, and Daniel’s newest book, Rogue River Journal, more than confirms this estimate. 

In the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, Daniel writes passionately about life and the environment of nature and spirit, using language that is “muscular and true.”  He is the author of eight books of memoir, poetry, and personal essays.  His work has won him a Pushcart Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, two Oregon Book Awards, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. 

In November of 2000, after the presidential election but before the final results had been handed down by the Supreme Court, John Daniel climbed into his pickup, drove to a remote location in Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon, and quit civilization.  The strictures were severe. He would isolate himself in a cabin sure to be snowed in, intent on hearing no human voice but his own until spring thawed the road.

This experiment in solitude was an attempt to clarify his identity while pursuing daily life without the distractions of the world at large and many of the comforts of ordinary domesticity.  Thoreau’s Walden and Journal with him for inspiration and instruction, Daniel meditated every day and kept a journal, writing about the experience of solitude.  And he had other work to do:  to come to terms with his dead father, and to relive the troubled passage of his late teens and early twenties in the 1960s, when he dropped out of college, dithered over the military draft, and lived as a hippie in San Francisco and Portland.
 
These narratives weave together, and the result, Rogue River Journal, is a remarkable memoir of the joys and tribulations of solitude, the haunting legacies of a father, and the mysteries of growing up.
John Daniel lives with his wife, a couple of cats, and usually a packrat or two in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.

http://www.johndaniel-author.net/