The subtitle Notes on Wonder steps on the toes of the lovely River of Song metaphor, eagerly interjecting this spoiler to tell us plainly what the book is really about. Doyle invites us to gape alongside him at glittering moments. Whether innocent or horrific, monumental or unsung, momentary or enduring, or all six of these together, he holds them up in wonder, packing an extraordinary amount of joy and pain and honesty and awe into remarkably short pieces, hewn from long rambly sentences, playfully turned phrases, and uncommon words carefully chosen to earn the reader’s attention.

Doyle’s voice is, for me, infectious. He bestows a mood of wise reflection, unhurried but not wasteful, a poet on his day off. His sentences meander, winding along to make claims and then modify them, burbling downstream in a flow that sounds more like thinking than speaking, lulling us into the unhurried comfort of a Sunday stroll, until we are surprised to see it end.

To mark our path, he draws from an ample supply of pristine phrases, as in this fragment:

“…drowsing between my alpine dad and willowy mother, in a pew filled with brothers seated with parental buffers so as to reduce fisticuffery…”

He loves precise and evocative language and savors surprise, but he loves his readers even more and so remains a gentle voice, always easy to follow.

Doyle does heavy lifting in short essays without feeling dense. He is plainly smart but not intellectual. He is both playful and serious. Despite the confident strokes and careful crafting, he retains a sense of groping, of feeling his way forward, just one clumsy stumble ahead of his reader.

His craft abounds in astonishing and often understated ways. But I am most impressed by how his heart is revealed. He pushes further than most into tender spaces. Consider this portion of his essay on humility entitled, “The Final Frontier”:

…but humble never really registered for me because I was not humble, and had no real concept of humble, until my wife married me, which taught me a shocking amount about humility, and then we were graced with children, which taught me a stunning amount about humility, and then friends of mine began to wither and shrivel and die in all sorts of ways including being roasted to death on September 11^th and I began, slowly and dimly, to realize that humble was the only finally truly honest way to be in this life.

So much is happening in here. Presenting humility by regretting his lack thereof opens this section with a playful sense of self-negation. The layered meanings send out poetic ripples, yet any pretension is undercut by a voice that would sound more at home on a porch than at a coffee shop open mic.

The smile which began for me at “was not humble” broadens at “married” and again at “children” only to evaporate in the terrific turn to death. The structure builds like a joke: the first observation is funny, the second amplifies the humor and establishes a pattern, so we can be surprised by the turn in the third. When he delivers the punch line, it is not comedic, but lands in the gut. And yet, this brutal end is where we see tenderness.

He doesn’t leave death in the abstract, nor drop us into a scene of sitting vigil beside a deathbed. Instead, he says “wither and shrivel and die” describing the sight of a close friend dying. Perhaps quickly in a fire or, like Doyle himself, slowly over months. The image suggests many visits, spanning multiple stories, each of which defines tragedy, displayed here with clarity through the eyes of a horrified friend who can offer only his presence and a willingness to bear witness. The surprising turn, visceral detail, and tear-filled, open-eyed gaze usher in a poetic range of connotations around the inevitable, natural end of all living things: to shed vitality and then life.

In arguing for humility, many might set up the folly of hubris. Or help us picture the contemptible sight of the proud and powerful. We would all like to be better than those fools, yes? Yet Doyle will not leave us taking humility as one more way to prove ourselves superior. Instead, he drains all pretense from the room and reminds us that in the end, there is nothing we can do to preserve our strength, stature, or status. We will all die. Between now and then, each day is a gift. He doesn’t exhort us to be humble. He shows us what humbled him and invites us to partake of the antidote.

It was a brain tumor that led to Brian’s death in 2017 at the age of sixty. As the end approached, Doyle blessed the effort of his good friend, David James Duncan, to compile four score of his best loved essays into this book. Duncan hoped they would provide some financial support for the family Doyle left behind, each purchase adding a drop to that stream. Yet the reader is the greater beneficiary, receiving these many pages of wonder, distilled and concentrated in the keen observations of a man who worked so hard to articulate “the only finally truly honest way to be in this life.”

The book: One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder

*An annotation is my attempt to explore some aspect of craft through an extraordinary work. I describe it more fully in: To Write Better, Read Better

Her reflection on this in The Situation and The Story didn’t come to my attention until after enrolling in an MFA program in creative writing (now hosted by Whitworth University). Filling out my application, I was skeptical that anyone could do anything to help me write the way I wanted. But the frustration of unsuccessful attempts to learn in isolation left me desperate enough to take the chance, committing the time (and tuition) required to enter this forge.

My application was accompanied by a portfolio. I wanted to scrawl across the cover letter: Just tell me what my problems are. If my character is too beige, my mind too pedestrian, or my soul too shadowed to generate interesting sentences, just say so. If all you can do is shake your venerated heads and shame me for neglecting Mrs. Brady’s lessons on diagramming sentences, so be it. Whatever. But please, no pussyfooting. Just tell me what I lack. (The faculty were nothing like I imagined they would be.)

Months later, I arrived on campus, braced for the knock-out punch condemning my bundle of inarguably off-target writing samples. This left me temporarily blind to the confident but understated and often casual pointers to reading better. In each lecture I listened through my demand, “Tell me how to write better.” So I had probably heard it a dozen times before I noticed the first half of this admonition: “To write better, read better.”

Reading and writing feel radically different to me. The phrase initially sounded like a quote from the Sufi mystic Rumi, a pithy irony more at home on the wall of Persian café than a truth I would cling to forevermore. I have since seen this observation so often in writing about writing, that it would seem trite if not for the fundamental importance warranting repetition. For many accomplished writers, reading is credited as both the fuel for continuing their solitary march and the ladder we climb toward improvement.

“Read better” seems plain enough. But in struggling to understand what it actually means, I realized our lecturers and visiting writers were using it with a few different meanings.

Some meant “read better writing”—spend time with better crafted prose, poetry, essays, and memoirs. Others meant something like “be a better reader”—which felt like having a running coach tell me to “run faster.” Others were encouraging us to “work harder” at our reading, and mercifully pointing the way. Today, I hear the phrase as a chord, three notes stacked to elicit harmonics none could sound alone.

1 - The exhortation to read better writing serves as the bass note, the foundation of the chord, and is perhaps the most obvious. Thankfully, they provided reading lists pointing me to exceptional work as well as personalized recommendations of specific authors and titles.

There may be people who can write better than anything they’ve ever read, but I’m not one of them. Time spent with well-crafted work expands my understanding of what is possible to accomplish by stringing words together.

I was quite surprised to learn it’s not essential to affirm, or even fully understand, what a writer is saying to learn from their technique. A few of the many works that overpowered me included Shakespeare’s King Lear, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and W. G. Sebald’s walkabout in Rings of Saturn. My understanding of these remains insufficient to properly evaluate their perspectives. Nonetheless, each contributed to my understanding of what writing can do. (My sincere thanks to Cameron, Scott, and Robert for helping me crack these open.)

2 - The highest note of this chord was encouragement to be a better reader. This stoked our aspirations with a magic trick performed repeatedly in the flagship lectures on Art & Faith. Each expository talk served as a variation of the same type of performance. Like a magician inviting an audience member to inspect a hat, rope, or sword, we received a reading assignment in advance. I would read the selected essays, poems, or books and notice all that I could. On the first day of the term, I took my seat in the classroom and watched a seemingly ordinary person take the stage with nothing up their sleeves. They would smile, open the book, and make it levitate. Then spin. Then turn into a phoenix and fly laps around the room.

With each new term I read with more analytic zeal, trying to see everything before they showed me. Yet every time, the miracle happened. In their hands, any given page could surrender a rabbit, become an umbrella that summoned a thunderstorm, or make me disappear. At least for a while.

These lectures revealed the expansive headroom above me; a cavernous space in which to grow. They pointed out levers and opened panels I hadn’t even seen to show us how the piece was arranged, why it worked, and how carefully crafted each element was. In this way, the path to a master’s degree steadily deepened my sense of how far I was from actual mastery.

3 - The middle note of this chord is my personal favorite. It’s the blue collar note emphasizing how we can work harder to become better readers. The labor is performed by investing time to read more attentively, think further, and reflect formally on a given piece. This is how they taught us to fish, to feed ourselves, to unpack what we found compelling in any writing. Here, we were given a tool to find the craft techniques we most needed to develop next. They called it “writing annotations.”

In the MFA glossary, an annotation is the short exploration of some aspect of craft made by analyzing a sample of remarkable writing. After one lecture, Alissa Wilkinson, described them this way: in an annotation, we’re not asking what a work is about, but rather, how the work is about that.

Like so many elegant tools, the annotation leverages a simple principle. This one serves to auto-personalize learning. There are an endless number of questions to explore in any page from a T. S. Eliot, Joan Didion, or Frederich Buechner. But the things that I, David, find intriguing are typically at the waterfront of my learning. If it grabs my interest, it is something I know enough to see, yet it remains new enough to be intriguing. Often, it is something I discovered for the first time while scrutinizing this very piece.

Snagging my attention provided an entry point for the annotation, but most of the learning occurred while writing. I would often start with one claim, then find my understanding incorrect or incomplete or oblivious to something much more interesting. This process revealed how much I was learning by writing out my analysis, teaching me more than gained from mental reflection alone.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, was in the pair of books first assigned. The day it arrived, I ripped open the shipping envelope and stood, turning pages above the packaging crumbs, slowly shaking my head. I could not understand what game he was playing or why. I began my annotation with an argument this was non-sensical, providing a litany of the ways in which he was breaking every rule of writing. Where is his thesis? His support? Why is he not defining terms? Where does he establish his own credibility? Does he expect anyone to understand him? I intended it as condemnation but it better served as confession. This was a list of all the ways Four Quartets was unlike anything I had read before. And it was in the process of making my case that my certainty faltered as I noticed a few bits I could make some sense of. These suggested potential reasons for his less-than-direct approach. A single bulb lit, marking the first step of my long-delayed journey into poetic expression.

A dozen annotations later, examining Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I set out to explain how cooly detached her authorial voice was. But as I gathered evidence, I noticed her narrator was also highly engaged. My annotation became an exploration of how she was doing both simultaneously. Another light came on.

One last example: a year later, reading Frederick Beuchner, I decided to reflect on how he made familiar things strange to help us see them better. But as I selected quotes to demonstrate this, I realized he wasn’t making them strange so much as making them intensely specific. He was obviously drawing on his own personal experience, but choosing moments that every reader is likely to have had. Is this making the familiar strange, or is it reviving a cliché by downshifting into sense perception so we can discover it once again? More lights had come on.

In each annotation the insight I gained was precisely what I was ready for. It lay adjacent to what I knew, offering a single additional step, in one direction or another, to enlarge my map of literary terrain.

Compared to new creative work, annotations are casual. More of a sketch than an attempt at art. More analysis than expression. They could be (almost) as casual as an email to my mentor about a book I read. But I quickly learned that there were real rewards for whatever time I invested in digging, testing my understanding, and rewriting to more accurately describe how the piece was working.

This chord is now as much a part of my practice as tempo, pace, and long runs are when training for a marathon. I hunt for better work to read, interrogate the mechanics, and, when it’s truly remarkable, invest time in writing out my understanding of how the author is accomplishing this miraculous thing called “good writing.” Working together, these strategies accomplish considerably more than one would in isolation.

To say more would be to fly even further into abstraction or metaphor, so instead, I’ll offer an example. Just a couple pages from me, appreciating a couple pages from one of the most distinctive, and delightful voices I encountered in the program: Brian Doyle.

Photo by Jonathan Singer on Unsplash

This remarkable and much-needed book addresses how believers can respond when our faith hits turbulence. Coming from theologians, you might expect a book on what to believe or why to believe. But the authors take on the more surprising question of how to believe. Or to phrase it as a question I have asked more than once, with sincere urgency, “What can I do when my faith stops making sense?”

Like many, I grew up in a cozy faith fort, furnished with Bible stories and memory verses. As life became more challenging, I needed new strategies for navigating disappointments and grappling with God. The church can be maddeningly unhelpful at integrating theology with the rest of life. New questions arose in my mind, which apparently no one could answer, and the whole thing started feeling mighty thin.

Slow Theology (Brazos, 2025) is the book I needed. My twenties could have been quite different if I had encountered a professor like Nijay Gupta or A.J. Swoboda. (pronounced: swa-BOAT-ah)

In the years since returning to faith, I’ve learned how common it is for a crisis like this to precede what I understand as “second-growth faith.” These challenges signal the beginning of a new deeper phase in which we labor more actively with the Spirit to work the gospel into the fabric of our lives.

For example, consider the sixth chapter “Let Pain Be The Altar” (which, btw, seems an excellent name for a metal album.) Here they offer a particularly helpful section on lament, pointing out four ways the Psalms invite us to respond to painful experience: 1 Be honest and transparent with God.
2 Name God’s character.
3 Invite God to act.
4 Affirm God’s faithfulness and commit to hope.

These four exhortations permeate the entire text. The authors are upfront about the struggles we face in reconciling theology, scripture, and life. They affirm God’s character as both knowable in practical ways and yet, beyond what we can know fully. They convey an implicit trust that God will be present and active as we wrestle with our quandaries and will ultimately bless us. It is rare to see a work so accepting of questions which also maintains an unwavering commitment to hope in God’s faithfulness.

The authors say, in one way after another, to embrace the journey, think deeply, and ponder the mysteries we encounter. Disappointment and suffering come to us all. The way forward is to keep thinking, remain in community, and trust that God will continue cultivating us. The title Slow Theology is presumably taken from this long-simmering experience.

Seasoned Christians can readily agree with this approach but may have forgotten the panic of first encountering such challenges. Swoboda and Gupta are both college faculty, well-positioned for conversations with believers at this inflection point. The text appears to be collected from many informal conversations with students. These aren’t lectures, but compassionate responses to sincere questions. Typical of the sensitivity shown throughout the text, they ask:

“What can we do to develop a faith that not only is resilient through difficulty but actually grows as it faces challenges? What if, by God’s grace, every new question we asked was not a problem? What if it was just a way for our faith to become deeper?” (9)

The gentleness and promise in this phrasing epitomize this book’s affect; it feels like it was baked in conversations during office hours, then sliced into topics and served here, still warm from that compassionate oven.

The quote above is clearly building on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thinking about anti-fragile systems, a connection made explicit in the text. This is one among dozens of wide-ranging references the authors use to illustrate aspects of believing, including the tragic invention of chemotherapy, an experience Swoboda had with a UFO (later identified), and five lessons from an obscure 3100-mile footrace. The breadth of references can feel chaotic, but together they effectively convey that knowing about faith is, in many ways, like knowing about anything else.

Scripture remains present throughout, as we should expect from two theologians. Yet they don’t assume readers share their Bible knowledge. At times, they will introduce a well-known passage, such as the parable of the soils, with no presumption that the reader has heard it before. Other times, they’ll go deep into biblical B-sides to pull out a verse like Isaiah 45:7 “I…create evil” (KJV). Such passages can be weaponized out of context, and I appreciate their willingness to address them directly.

The chapter names, including “Take Your Time,” “Embrace the Theological Journey,” and “Think Slowly,” are indicative of the perspectives the authors encourage. These are helpful ways to respond when some life event or line of thinking reveals a shortcoming in your current theology. The text offers encouragement to articulate the question, revise your understanding, and strengthen your faith.

Each chapter addresses its theme through four to seven short essays. For example, chapter four, “Ponder the Mysteries” includes ways of responding to a newfound theological puzzle. The authors note that our questions sometimes work like cliff-hangers, urging us to keep reading. Other times our questions highlight the incomprehensibility of God or an element of the ‘now and not-yet’ nature of the kingdom.

“This tension—that Christ is disclosed and yet not yet fully understood—is at the heart of what we mean by theological mystery.” (96)

The chapter concludes with a brief essay on “Practicing the Mystery of God” which encourages us to hold our current understanding with humility, remain open to the Spirit, and trust Christ.

Our work of faith in Christ should always be written in ink. It is our theology that should be done in pencil. (90)

Throughout the book, Gupta and Swoboda hold space for what we don’t know without sliding into agnosticism or adopting an apophatic stance of, “if you understand it, it’s not God.” Yet they readily admit there are questions we can’t answer. It helps that they remind us that many things we now know required a genuine struggle before finding peace in our current understanding. Successfully walking this line of epistemic humility is one of the most distinctive accomplishments of the text.

…

David Lindrum is still trying to figure everything out. Since 1994, he’s worked in college textbooks so he can keep posing questions to professors. He’s been in Bible Study Fellowship since 2002, so he can ask questions about scripture weekly. In 2025 he received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from SPU, where he is best known for ceaselessly asking, “What is creative nonfiction?” He lives, with his long-suffering and saintly wife Mary Jane, in Asheville, NC.

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Class of 2025

Last month I crossed a small stage at Seattle Pacific University to shake hands with Scott Cairns, receive a hood from Mischa Willet, and officially graduate with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. It is now time to (slightly) broaden the circle of friends I’m leaning on to help me continue to grow as a writer.

Excellent book recommendations were among the most treasured gifts from my time in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University (now hosted by Whitworth University.)

It took a while to understand how to engage with a book primarily for the writing rather than the content. But spending hours with well-wrought words made it easier to shift my focus from what a work is what about to how it is about that.

I primarily read creative nonfiction, a category which is notoriously difficult to define. But I’ve learned those who love creative nonfiction relish work that is remarkably well written, an author relating events through personal experience, and using careful examination of something specific to effectively explore a universal aspect of the human experience. Three traits that are uncommonly common in the list that follows.

Why so much reading in a program on writing? I slowly learned and came to deeply appreciate a cue often repeated in lectures, conversations, and books about writing:

If you want to write more, read more.
If you want to write better, read better.

So read we did. Over two years, we each wrote sixty reaction papers on books, essays, and poems reflecting on the author’s voice, craft, and choices. Each student’s list of books was unique, depending on the mentor, student goals, style, and topics of interest. The sixty I chose are listed below. Each of these taught me something. Together they dramatically broadened my understanding of what writing can do in skilled hands.

Short List

My mentors David McGlynn and Robert Clark put together a list of CNF essentials for this program. From that list, I grappled with these:

• James Agee / Knoxville: Summer of 1915

• Wendell Berry / What Are People For?

• Joan Didion / Slouching Towards Bethlehem

• George Dyer / Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

• Patricia Hampl / Blue Arabesque

• Michel de Montaigne / Essays

• Marilynne Robinson / When I Was a Child I Read Books

• Richard Rodriguez / Hunger of Memory

• Mary Ruefle / Madness, Rack, and Honey

• W. G. Sebald / The Rings of Saturn

• D. J. Waldie / Holyland: A Suburban Memoir

• David Shields / Reality Hunger

Long List

They also provided a longer list of exceptional books. Although at this level, the distinction between first and second tier is like taking gold or silver at the Olympics.

• John Berger / Here is Where We Meet

• Frederick Buechner / Whistling in the Dark

• Patricia Hampl / Virgin Time

• Anne Lamott / Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

• Kathleen Norris / Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

• Walker Percy / Lost in the Cosmos

• David Foster Wallace / Consider the Lobster

• Christian Wiman / My Bright Abyss

• Lauren Winner / Still

Art & Faith

Art & Faith lectures formed the conceptual center of this program. Each lecturer chose substantive and challenging texts to explore. Mercifully, the 90-minute, daily lectures during our residencies cracked open these literary geodes, enabling me to glimpse the gifts these works have for those with the skill to see.

• Julian of Norwich / The Showings

• T. S. Eliot / The Four Quartets

• Emily Dickinson / 1461 from “Before The Door of God”

• Christina Rossetti / Time Flies: A Reading Diary

• William Shakespeare / King Lear

• Emily Dickinson / The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge / The Major Works

• Camille Dungy, ed. / Black Nature

• Rachel Carson / The Sea Trilogy

Spiritual Experience

Many of my choices were guided by my abiding interest in how others experience the spiritual. Several of the books above do this well, but I selected the following titles primarily to see how others have described theses internal experiences of perceiving and relating to the Spirit.

• St. Augustine / Confessions

• Christian Wiman / Zero at the Bone

• Stephen Pressfield / The War of Art

• Simone Weil / Waiting for God

• Brian Doyle / A Book of Uncommon Prayer

• Sallie Tisdale / Mere Belief

• Donald Miller / Blue Like Jazz

• Burrows & Sweeney / Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light

Craft

In addition to the craft books above, here are four more selected primarily to hear these authors reflect on the process and craft of writing.

• Anne Lamott / Bird By Bird

• Phillip Lopate / To Show and To Tell

• Vivian Gornick / The Situation and the Story

• George Saunders / A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Humor

Evidently, very few people write well and with humor, but these are three of the best.

• Harrison Scott Key / How to Stay Married

• David McGlynn / One Day You’ll Thank Me

• David Sedaris / Calypso

Fiction

One definition of Creative Nonfiction is “using the tools of fiction to write about true events.” To that end, Robert Clark consistently encouraged me to read more fiction, including these remarkable books: a novel, a short story, and a collection of stories.

• William Maxwell / So Long, See You Tomorrow

• Andres Dubus / A Father’s Story

• Denis Johnson / Jesus’ Son

One of a Kind

The remaining titles were each selected for a different reason. But this unclassified list includes some of the heaviest hitters.

• B. H. Fairchild / What He Said (a poem)

• Esau McCauley / Reading While Black

• Brian Doyle / One Long River of Song

• Frederick Buechner / The Alphabet of Grace

• Paul Kalanithi / When Breath Becomes Air

• Richard Rodriguez / Late Victorians from “The Art of the Personal Essay”

• Ross Gay / The Book of Delights

• Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message

• Tim Bascom / Chameleon Days

• C. S. Lewis / The Four Loves

• Henry David Thoreau / Cape Cod

It’s impossible to quantify the benefits of reading and reflecting on these works, but there is no question their impact was substantial. On my first day in Seattle, the task of reading sixty books in twenty-four months loomed as a foreboding wall to be scaled. On the last day, it was clear they’d been a huge gift. Our readings were not the wall, but the ladder we used to ascend. How could I not pass them on?