David James Duncan is the author of the cult classic novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story collection River Teeth, the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist My Story as Told by Water, and the best-selling God Laughs & Plays. The release of his much-anticipated novel Sun House, which legendary editor Michael Pietsch “will immodestly call David’s magnum opus,” arrived with much critical acclaim, including this comment from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers (The Overstory): “The time, energy, focus, precision, invention, scholarship, fun, joy, love, courage, and compassion that went into making this novel boggle my mind. Just contemplating its creation is a spiritual journey in itself. Finding this kind of expansive refreshment at this most narrow-minded moment in history is a gift.”
Interviewed by Ian Curtis
Inscape Journal: How did your writing journey begin?
David James Duncan: I lost my brother when I was thirteen years old. He was my hero and my protector. We played endless games of baseball out in the front yard. He had a congenital heart defect as a child, and he had the seventh-ever open-heart surgery. When he was seventeen, the valve in his heart started closing. He was my closest friend in every way. After losing him, there was no teacher, no preacher, no person who was saying anything that made me feel better. This seminarian came marching down the hall with a Bible under his arm and, at this time, my brother had a staph infection, his chances of surviving were zero, and his doctors had abandoned him. This man grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Faith can move mountains. If you pray for your brother hard enough with a pure enough heart you can save his life.” Two years later, my brother died. The seminarian filled me with guilt for not having miraculously strong, mountain-moving faith. For about three years I didn’t have anywhere to put my grief, but then my German teacher in high school gave me a novel by Thomas Mann. The novel made grief beautiful, and it never occurred to me that loss could be made beautiful. It was so overwhelmingly healing and that was something that I wanted to do. That’s how I got started.
IJ: It can be hard for young, budding authors to tackle heavy and intense emotion, yet Sun House pulls off these emotions beautifully. Can you speak to the writing process of those scenes and how you portray them authentically?
DJD: I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve known a lot of people of who have died of cancer, some of whom were my very closest friends. I’ve also been around some deaths, and what I experienced is that, if you pay close attention, there are often small, wonderful things that happen. The first time that it happened was with my grandmother who had dementia for two years and then suffered a heart attack. She was in intensive care, she was dying, and my sister and I were each holding one of her hands. Somehow, her heart attack had cleared her mind, and for first time in two years she recognized me. While she was extremely religious and often told me I was going to hell, her last words to me were, “I love you, David.” That erased everything else. If you can stand to hang in there, often there will be some small, good thing.
IJ: Can you elaborate on the phrase you used in Sun House, “grand misadventure?” What made you gravitate towards this concept that encapsulates the book so well?
DJD: The character that expresses it best is Jamie. He calls the community that they start not an intentional community but an unintentional menagerie. He feels that it is very important because the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and he had seen that. Unintentionally, taking things as they come, as they are without some overpowering agenda, is a safer way to travel, especially within a community. It leaves room for grace.
IJ: What made you write about the harder and grittier aspects of life?
DJD: I started the novel off with something that is completely unanswerable—a bolt falling off a jet and killing a completely innocent girl thirty-five thousand feet below. But one of the advantages of a long novel is that I can have powerful scenes and powerful characters disappear for a while. Often, in real life, we’ll meet people that we really like, and we have a strong connection with, but we might not see them for twenty years and when we do see them again, it can be powerful. The unpredictability of those moments makes the story feel more real. For example, I know people that do hospice work, and they say that the person who is dying is often the one consoling the people that are there to console the patient. It goes the opposite direction. Those types of reversals fascinate me.
IJ: Sun House introduces this idea of people being strung together by an invisible string. Can you speak more about this idea?
DJD: The idea of soul threads comes from Sanskrit. Soul is ātman and thread is sūtra, which is also the thread that bound the pages of the great Buddhist sutras and have recently been called “soul thread.” My feeling is that if you really respect its power, you don’t claim it for yourself. It’s the soul’s own sutra. There’s something within that connects us to others that is deathless and immortal. You never let go of this thread. I had an experience when I was writing my first novel. Because I lost a brother, I came to writing for dark reasons. I wanted to write a novel that would tear the sutures out of a fresh facelift, but then something happened. I have always loved fly fishing since I was a kid and, suddenly, I was writing about fishing, and I couldn’t come to the end of it. It was ruining my dark novel, but I had to get all the fishing out of my system. But soon, I started writing it and a character appeared, and I had the first three hundred pages of my first novel, The River Why.
IJ: In part of the novel, a character needs to do “heart work” before pursuing a relationship with someone. How does it relate to writing?
DJD: Writing is almost only heart work. It feels like a spiritual practice. I’ve never wanted to lose that feeling, and I’ve lived my life in a way that allowed it to continue to be such. I wanted to ponder things that strike me as mysterious and that would feed me more or other things. For example, when my oldest daughter was not even four years old, we were floating on the Bitterroot River on a beautiful September day. We had just moved to Montana, and we came upon a deer that had probably been shot. When deer are in trouble, they often run to a river for safety, but this deer had only made it to the river’s edge. Her head was in the water and her eyes had turned a cloudy blue. I asked my wife, Adrienne, if the deer was dead and she said, “Yeah, she’s dead.” Then my daughter’s mind started spinning and she asked if Adrienne was going to die, and she said, “Yes.” She asked if I was going to die and Adrienne said, “Yes.” She asked if she was going to die, and Adrienne said, “Yes.” My daughter started shooting tears out of her eyes, and she started yelling “I don’t want to die.” Adrienne turned around and looked to me and I knew she was saying, “I know you’re a word guy. Help Celia.” So, I told my daughter that there was a part of her that never died and that was the soul. She grasped it immediately and was very soon just happily chattering.
IJ: What would be your advice to budding writers?
DJD: I’ve done a lot of hit-and-run teaching, and I’ve done several writing workshops where they turn western rivers into classrooms. Everyone on a multiple day float is a writing student. We team teach, and the rivers really help. During this, I offer a one-on-one with the students, and I often mention that our rough drafts won’t be good. We need to be patient with ourselves and give our work all the time in the world. We have tools that can help us, like wastebaskets. We can edit and throw away the early versions. I’ve found that if I pass through a draft multiple times, especially if I care about the core of the story, that I find better words. We just need to be patient, and we get better at that as time goes on.
