Lee Doyle's Blog

The first anniversary is hard, they say.

Compared to what? The first day, week? Decade?

It seems "they" are right.

Late May. Roses in full bloom. The season of calls from nice detectives with an unbearable task.

(What families must feel when the find a soldier at their front door.)

"Is this a joke?" I asked. Like a bad actor in a bad movie, or a nightmare. Time stopped, but in my head, rushed the refrain: No. Not this. Not Dad. I just spoke with him. He was just here. Just in Italy. Just.   

"I'm afraid I'm not joking, Ms. Doyle. I'm very sorry."

Afterwards, I lit candles. Picked some of those roses out there last spring from the Mr. Lincoln, Double Delight, the Gemini bush he bought me for a birthday. Made a beautiful table to lay my sorrow.

"Here's to more beauty in our lives. Love, Dad."  This, in an enclosure card for the flowers delivered the day he proclaimed Daughters Day—lilies or orchids–I don't exactly recall.

The roses, I remember.

I know it's coming this time, you see.  I'm ready. This morning, I picked two blood-red Mr. Lincoln blooms, a Double Delight. Three Geminis. They're in the cobalt blue vase on the little shelf in the kitchen, next to the candle and the photograph.

When the call comes, I'll talk to that detective with the kind voice, set him straight. Tell him You can't fool me this time.

Tell him the roses are blooming, and how much Mr. Thomas Doyle loves flowers in any size, shape and scent. That beauty makes sense to him. As for the rest of it, well.

How I'll keep picking flowers for Dad every May; and loving those roses right along with him, every damn day they bloom, and every day they don't.

This Wall Street Journal post says it all: "How to Write a Great Novel."

My only complaint about short fiction is that I don't have time to read more of it. That said, here's my current top ten list of short stories (listed in the order they came to me). I hope you'll post a comment about your faves.

1. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." By Flannery O'Connor

2. "Red Weather." By Lewis Buzbee (from the After the Gold Rush collection).

3. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." By Raymond Carver

4. "The Twenty-seventh Man." By Nathan Englander.

5. "Brokeback Mountain." ...

Marriage sucks sometimes. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.  At points during our more than 20 years together (fifteen of them married) it’s been so hard, we’re pretty sure it must be over. That like all those other couples, Tim and I are done. 

The sucky times always turn out to be necessary. They have ultimately invigorated our relationship and made us love each other more deeply and honestly. This is the gift of hanging in there–not through the struggle, but through the pain of not knowing where the marriage is going. We show up and say what’s true for each of us, no matter what. 

Before we got married the Episcopalian priest who counseled us said marriages sometimes die. This and not literal death, was the ’til death do us part, part. Father Bradley had been divorced and had remarried. He wanted us to understand that while we were entering into a lifetime committment, there were exceptions. 

Tim and I went through a rough patch around our anniversary this month.  The details aren’t really important. On the surface, the struggle was related to finances. But really we were both struggling with change. Change in ourselves and consequently, change in how we see each other as partners, lovers, parents, and human beings.

Would these changes be  the death of our marriage?  Or were they simply part of the two of us growing up, and learning to be better people and partners?

We’ve come out the other side. It doesn’t suck right now. Not by a long shot. We’re closer. Standing on our own two feet more than ever. 

We found out that how we love each  in this moment is what matters. How can we do our best to see each other in a new light? How do we look for the humor, and not to sweat the small stuff even when it feels like big stuff? We’re figuring this out, and our marriage is stronger for it.  

The other morning, I walked Tim out to his car. The air had that cozy crisp smell of autumn; the fallen leaves were swirling in the street.

“It’s fall, sweetie,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied, kissing me passionately. 

A few seconds later he came inside the house. He’d forgotten his keys. 

“Can we do that again?” he asked. 

I followed him outside again. The air still smelled wonderful, the leaves were still dancing. 

“It’s fall, sweetie.” 

“Yeah, it is.”

The kiss was twice as nice this time.

Marriage sucks sometimes. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.  At points during our more than 20 years together (fifteen of them married) it's been so hard, we're pretty sure it must be over. That like all those other couples, Tim and I are done. 

The sucky times always turn out to be necessary. They have ultimately invigorated our relationship and made us love each other more deeply and honestly. This is the gift of hanging in there–not through the struggle, but through the pain of not k...

Constance Hale, author of Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose calls voice "the je ne sais quoi in all strong writing." Other writers and critics refer to voice as the music behind the prose, the unique way a writer expresses herself–a fingerprint of language. Voice can be imitated but not duplicated; its rythymn and tone are unique to each writer.

Voice is often confused with style. But style is concrete–the way we structure our sentences, our word choice and use of...

My dear friend and writing colleague Elizabeth Banning died last week. She was a member of my writing group, and on the verge of publishing a fabulous historical fantasy novel about three matryed saints. Elizabeth had a two-year battle with cancer. During this time, she wrote profilically, had all of her stories published, completed one novel, and started another. She was also a brilliant editor who helped me and other writers sharpen their stories for submission to literary journals and...

1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

2. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

4. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullen

5. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

6. Middlemarch by George Eliot

7. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

8. Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

9. Victory by Joseph Conrad

10. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishigura

11. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

13. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet

14. Atonement by Ian...

I've been working on a couple of short stories. I'm in awe of how difficult, and liberating, it is to write a good one. Every gesture, scene, and piece of landscape and dialogue has to matter and work to move the reader towards a defining moment.

I've learned an interesting lesson with one of these stories, "Letting Go."  I took a chapter from the novel I'm working on and tried to make it a standalone story. The novel is in first-person present.  I may change that, but for now that's the...

Here are seven reasons why you should read “The Twenty-seventh Man,” which you can find in 1. A minor bureaucratic error leads an unpublished writer (the 27th) to find his readership seconds before his death.

3. Englander illustrates the obsessive passion of writers. The 27th man composes a story in his mind, which he completes and recounts to his colleagues only moments before their execution.

5. Englander is a pre-modernist (my term). He’s a good storyteller whose prose is ample, and characters deeply sympathetic.

7. Englander knows his history and he knows people. In “The Twenty-seventh Man,” he shows the transcendent power of art and humanity in the face of evil and extreme ignorance.