In November of 2000, after the presidential election but before the results were handed down by the Supreme Court, John Daniel climbed into his pickup, drove to a cabin in the Red River Gorge, and quit civilization for a proscribed time. The strictures set up were severe: no two-way human communications, no radio, no music, no news, no clocks, and no calendars. The award-winning writer left his wife behind and moved into a cabin sure to be snowed-in just after his arrival, where he lived in complete isolation until spring, without even his cat as a companion.
He was intent on not hearing a human voice other than his own for the next six months. Thoreau's Journals were there, of course, for instruction and inspiration. In addition to the physical rigor of working in isolation, Daniel had assumed a hard spiritual task in deciding to live alone: to confront his now dead father. Rogue River Journal is the result, with writing as skilled as Jon Krakauer's—a remarkable memoir of both vivid present and past interwoven.
John Daniel, a former logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock climbing instructor, is the author of nine books of memoir, personal essays, and poetry. His new work, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature, published by Counterpoint in April 2009, is a collection of personal essays that explore various subjects in the human and more-than-human worlds, seeking to define his allegiances to his home places and region and the wholeness of life itself.
Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone, released in 2005, is an account of a four-and-a-half-month experiment in solitude in the backcountry of the Klamath Mountains in southwestern Oregon, and also a memoir of Daniel's father's life and career in the American labor movement and of his own growing up and coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Rogue River Journal was one of six books awarded a 2006 PNBA Book Award by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.
John Daniel has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, a James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University, and a Research and Writing Fellow at Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities. In fall semester 2005 he was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary's College of California, teaching the MFA workshop in literary nonfiction. In 2003-04, 2004-05, and spring 2006, he was the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in northern New York State. He is now conducting a yearlong memoir workshop through Fishtrap in northeast Oregon.
Two of Daniel's books, The Trail Home and Looking After: A Son's Memoir, have won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction from Literary Arts, a private non-profit that seeks to enrich the lives of Oregonians through language and literature. In 1998-99 he held a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also won the Andres Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction, the annual John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and a Pushcart Prize, among other honors.
Essays and articles by John Daniel have appeared in Audubon, Outside, Portland, Bloomsbury Review, North American Review, Southwest Review, and other journals and magazines, and in such anthologies as Nature Writing: The Tradition in English, the annual American Nature Writing series, and Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Southern Review, Sierra, The Pushcart Prize VIII, Poetry of the American West, and other journals and anthologies. His two collections are Common Ground and All Things Touched by Wind. He is poetry editor of Wilderness magazine, the annual publication of the Wilderness Society.
John Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, plus two cats, a dog, and usually a pack rat, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. His web address is www.johndaniel-author.net.
This review is from: Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone (Hardcover)
Poet and nonfiction writer John Daniel spent four and a half months living by himself in a cabin in the Rogue River canyon of southwestern Oregon. Though his original intent was to go there to write, he did some nature observation and terrain exploration as well. He chose to make his retreat during the winter of 2000-2001, beginning just after election day. We who were stuck back here in civilization can only envy his self-made cocoon of quiet, blissfully removed from the incessant media analysis of the Bush-Gore-Florida quandry. We can merely shake our heads, remembering.
Memory comes into play quite a bit here. After taking care of his immediate needs and taking in the natural world around him, Daniel spends much of his alone time considering the past. Or two pasts, really: his father's and his own. Something he sees or thinks about at the cabin will remind him of something else from the past, and he follows that tangent. He writes about his father and traces the man's work in the American labor movement as well as his struggle with alcoholism. At the same time, he reveals much about his own life and about growing up in a 1960s culture that was both anti-Vietnam and pro-drugs. "Rogue River Journal" is as much about Daniel's voyage of self-discovery as it is a temporary escape from society. By the end of his sojourn, it seems as if he has come to terms with all of it: his relationship with his father, his own varied and sometimes illegal activities of his younger days, his writing career, even the choice to enforce this self-imposed confinement. Daniel gets *very* personal, yet this is not a pure autobiography. It's funny, it's sad, it's thought-provoking, it's Life.
Daniel writes, "I thought I might find two books here -- one about the experience of solitude, the other the story of my coming of age and my father. From the start though, the two wanted to loop and weave together, and I saw no reason, and see none now, to discourage their union." (p. 301) The result honors both men. Obviously Franz Daniel passed the story-telling gene onto his son John. He has a knack for offering vivid descriptions and the tales to go with them, knowing just when to bring one segment to a temporary close so that we'll want to turn the page to discover what happened next. Baby Boomer readers will have no problem reminiscing on their own, inspired by Daniel's candid ruminations. This book is more contemplative than most "Walden" wannabees.
John Daniel uncovers two truths for us: We need occasional solitude in order to understand who we are as individuals. And we also need distance from the past in order to comprehend its contribution to our personalities and lives. Thanks for the reminders, John!
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This review is from: Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone (Hardcover)
The book has four themes: journal and musings while in the Oregon wilderness, auto biography, and father's biography. It's tough to write an interesting journal - face it, most lives aren't that interesting. Daniel has led an interesting life, but not that interesting. I enjoyed spending time with him in the wilderness, became bored with his reflections on his self-absorbed youth, and had to go for my own solitary walk to escape his musings on current politics - sorry, not interested in ruminations on Bill Clinton and Monica, the decriminalization of drugs, and the merits of Bush and Gore.
The sections on his father and the labor movement were fascinating and hope that Daniel can work through the emotional issues enough to write a full, more dispassionalte biography.
There are plenty of great nuggets to mine here, for example his experience as a choker in Washington forest, and having many fathers, that make the book worth reading. But often I could almost hear Franz Daniel saying, that's enough John, now get out and DO something.
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I loved this book - in a can't put it down but don't want to finish it way. This book is really 3 stories - woven together wonderfully. Not only does he capture the magic of the Rogue River canyon perfectly, he uses his time there to tell a compelling story about his father and his own coming-of-age, and he leaves the reader with a serious dose of self-reflection. I will read this book again.
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