Starfish Work: An Interview with
David James Duncan

I have been sustained by great loves, but I’d be dodging the hard truth if I didn’t also admit that right up to this moment I have been, and am, being shattered by them.
 

Introduction

Just 26 letters in the alphabet. In this language anyway. And none of them outlandishly different from any of the others. Haikus. Manifestos. Suicide Notes. Treasure Maps. Constitutions. Divorce Papers. The Bible. Postcards. And now, Sun House (Little, Brown & Co., 2023), David James Duncan’s long-anticipated novel, an epic tale heaving with heart and humor.

Guided by Buddhist monks, Indian poets, Irish bards, and “Dumpster Catholic” mystics, it wanders through Portland alleys, Seattle classrooms, Rocky Mountains, and Montana ranchlands. Along the way, Duncan’s meticulous arrangement of those 26 squiggly lines carry the spark and heat and intimacy of in-the-flesh, on-the-ground, campfire-infused, whiskey-enhanced experience. It’s a mystery how a story pinned so thoroughly to the flat page swells and floats, wafts and winds, sifts and settles into huge and unseen dimensions.

Duncan is the author of 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 collection of “churchless sermons,” God Laughs & Plays. His work has won three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, a Lannan Fellowship, the Western States Book Award, inclusion in multiple Best American anthologies, an honorary doctorate from University of Portland, and the American Library Association’s 2004 Award for the Perseveration of Intellectual Freedom (with co-author Wendell Berry), among other honors.

Writer William deBuys describes Sun House as “one of the greatest imaginative achievements I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading.” Sixteen years in the making, Sun House is a cathedral, a high-domed room of stories the reader enters and never fully leaves. Duncan attributes the vaulted architecture to writers before him. He introduces the book’s bibliography as “an honest, though not exhaustive, list of books that have helped me, many of my friends, and the dramatis personae of Sun House find and maintain our ways.” The list includes works both obscure (The Bijak of Kabir) and well known (Gary Snyder’s Axe Handles). Duncan’s life-long study, digestion, and synthesis of these texts into an edible story is a profound gift to readers who hunger for the insights of ancient texts but lack the appetite to read them on our own.

For years Duncan has stayed true to his craft as, across the country, children get shot and greed-blind politicians get elected, poverty spreads and forests burn, waters warm and salmon vanish. Sun House rises from and through that loss and violence. It is a loooooong pray-full note, a sustained tone vibrating with heartbreak, humor, and healing. It is a story like no other and echoes far beyond the book’s covers. In the clear reflection at the book’s end a vision shimmers. We’re all there. Stomping and flapping and wagging, ten-toed, tree-rooted and webbed footed, striving and caring and crying and loving and singing, pulling from a place broke but overflowing.

The great poet Rumi wrote:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Sun House is that field.

I’m not on the hunt for specific sensations. I’m just paying attention when, once in an eternity-flavored while, presences turn me inside-out.

Interview

Hank Lentfer: There’s a lot of heartbreak in Sun House. A lot of humor too. Whenever I closed the book, I found myself riding through the highs and lows of my own life. I felt such a welcome and needed solidarity with the characters. They became companions in the darkest parts of my life.

David James Duncan: The relationship between grief and joy is a mysterious chemistry. I can’t say I fully understand it but I know they dance together. I’ve given a lot of talks and readings over the years. I’ve seen countless times that if you go to grief, turn on a dime to humor, turn on another dime back to grief, the audience opens.

Hank Lentfer: Sun House opens with the inexplicable death of a young girl and the heart-breaking isolation of her father. The book ends with tears on the joyous faces of a community gathered around yet another death. The poet Ross Gay said, “Joy has nothing to do with ease. Joy has everything to do with the fact that we’re all going to die.” Can you speak to the possibility of encountering joy on edge of death?

David James Duncan: I’ve seen joy on the verge of death several times, and friends of mine have, too. On the last morning of his life my grandfather was struck by some kind of joy. He looked radiant, and was desperate to tell me what he’d seen or felt. But my grandfather wore dentures and didn’t have them in the room—and somehow it didn’t matter. I couldn’t understand a word he said. But oh, could I feel his joy.

One more. My mother, a lifelong Christian, fell madly in love with the Dalai Lama two-thirds of the way through her life. She remained a Christian, but His Holiness the Dalai Lama had a way of feeding her yearning. So it was not a “conversion,” it was simply what my Christian mother had come to feel was truth when, three weeks into hospice with four days to go, she whispered to me in slow-motion, “I . . .  believe . . . the Tibetans . . .  have it right.”

Hank Lentfer: I had a hand under a dear friend’s head when he died. His last breath lifted me from loss to joy. I didn’t see it coming. It reminds me of Glady’s words in Sun House when, around a high-mountain campfire, she tells young Grady, “A lot of Lumi myths and legends have become fragmented, and a lot have been lost altogether. But if people keep exposing themselves to the land where the legends take place and the creatures who live there, lost parts sometimes appear out of nowhere and can be grafted onto remembered parts. The best myths and legends grow toward wholeness the way a starfish can regrow its central ring-disk and five whole tentacles out of a single surviving limb.” I wonder if the move from grief to joy is also the move from forgetfulness to remembering? Perhaps, in the face of loss we remember the spirit threads more enduring than breath?

David James Duncan: Your question is so beautifully said and so true that I have nothing to add to it, Hank. Starfish work in the face of massive loss is the crucial work of our time, and nothing I’m aware of is more vital to this work than spirit threads more enduring than breath. Mother Earth has recovered her biodiversity after five great extinctions that we know of, and will recover from the sixth. All of this is the gift of the Being Lao Tzu called “the eternal Mother of All; the Mysterious Female; She who was before heaven and earth came to be.” And how I love wise Lao Tzu for humbly adding, “I do not know Her name.”

Hank Lentfer: I love your buddy Jim Harrison’s advice to finish life disguised as a creek. Becoming what you love is a worthy goal. You love salmon and every gleaming, flowing swirl of their watery world. During the years crafting Sun House, you’ve been saying goodbye to the salmon in the great rivers of the West. You’ve described Sun House as your most optimistic piece of writing. How did optimism flourish in the face of such loss?

David James Duncan: By going deeper, higher, lower, more carefully, more repeatedly (as in liturgy or mantra), more patiently, more passionately, and three times longer than I’ve ever attempted to go in a piece of writing before. The extreme effort bore strange and sometimes difficult fruit. For example, a holy fool named Jervis who tells his brother about a miraculous female God he calls Ocean:

“Here’s the hard thing, Teej. Whoever life harms, she heals. But almost never in ways we get to see. You need Ocean’s own eye to see her work the healing. So to mention her insane mercy sounds like a lie to a human mind. Her mercy can’t sound true to a mind because it’s inaccessible to the mind. We grasp her mercy when we feel her. When I’m gone into feeling her, she is the mercy, triumphant inside the havoc. When I’m gone into feeling her, creation and destruction are two necessary powers, she’s inside both, and she has no preference between them. When I’m gone into feeling her, I too lose all preference. Her insane mercy weaves all of it. Not just parts, like my old me preferred. Not just goodness, like most humans prefer. Not just life, as most prefer. Her mercy weaves the wrecked and the wreckers, the truth-tellers and the liars, the life-takers and life-givers. Because she is, there’s this endlessly destructible yet indestructible whole.”

We live in a ravaged country and world in which a lot of people greet what they don’t understand not with patience, but knee-jerk anger, which accounts for the 1-star reviews Sun House is receiving. But this is a risk I knew I was taking because I believe humanity’s survival may depend upon ancient spiritual texts, stories of everlasting wisdom, language that sometimes leads to ecstasy, humor, and good will even in dire circumstances, and a merciless depth very hard to perceive in which an infinite mercy is hiding.

Hank Lentfer: The holy fool Jervis endures physical violence that almost kills him. He returns from death’s door with the ability to sense Ocean’s currents. The other characters in Sun House each, in their own way, suffer trauma of the heart and spirit. They all navigate, with the help of various traditions, to a place of healing where invisible spirit threads shimmer on the edge of sight. Is it fair to say the spiritual journeys of Sun House’s characters would not have reached such heights without the trauma of deep wounds?

David James Duncan: My answer is yes, and I would add that those characters would not have reached such heights without the traumas of my own deepest wounds. I have been sustained by great loves, but I’d be dodging the hard truth if I didn’t also admit that right up to this moment I have been, and am, being shattered by them. 

But there’s a reason I was attracted to Julian of Norwich when I was in her home city in England at age 17. Who better to console me than this woman who wrote, “Christ said not, Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased; but he said, Thou shalt not be overcome. And all manner of wounded and vanished things shall be well.”

Hank Lentfer: Community is central to healing in Sun House. Escaping the confines of the ego is made easier in the company of people doing the same. Risa says it best: “How simple the reason the company of these people feels so right. They don’t ever let go of their threads.”

David James Duncan:  When TJ enters a state of deep reverie, Risa describes him as the hole in a guitar. I often feel the same while writing. Beyond my wildest dreams, the flow states that result in the best things “I” write turn the pronoun “I” into a lie. Things arrive on the page that “I” don’t know how to do. A kind of music grows audible in which “I” get lost, and my fingers go on a kind of “walkabout” in which they’re able to write it down. I’m as amazed as any reader that this book exists. I know I was the conduit, but feel no sense of ownership. What I do feel is that this book would not exist were it not for 30 or so truly amazing close friends. That’s where I sense the spirit threads.

My literary brother of a lifetime, Brian Doyle, once expressed this beautifully in a “proem” he wrote to me:

Proem for a Dear Friend

I don’t tell you how much it matters to me that you are my friend. 

I’ll never tell you, bluntly and face to face. I can’t summon words 

That way. They only come to my fingers occasionally if I’m silent 

And just quit thinking. Our fingers are a lot smarter than we know. 

Like today when my fingers want to say something like: your gifts 

To me have been ears and humor. We speak some strange language 

That few other people speak. I don’t know why that’s so. It’s surely 

An accident. It’s not like we set out to find each other in the tumult 

Of this sweet wilderness. But we did somehow. You can put names 

On the finding if you want. The names all mean the same thing. An 

Old name is Providence, which is another way to say God, which is 

A way to say We Have No Idea How, But We Are Aware of Grace. 

There are more names for God than we’ll ever know, and one is you.
 

Hank Lentfer: Wow! Brian seeing the face of God in your friendship is such a tender and potent gift. And authentic gifts are never a one-way exchange, the lines between giver and receiver blur and disappear. Friendships within Sun House do the same thing. Risa and Lore recognizing the impulse to lean toward wholeness in the other person strengthened the impulse in themselves. The journey toward wholeness in the pages of Sun House gives strength and encouragement to readers to do the same.

And I love that Doyle, a devout Catholic, wrote, “There are more names for God than we’ll ever know…” This openness to the unknowable faces of God is at odds with the dogma of many churches. Can you speak to the importance of this openness in authentic seeking?

A theology can feel like a classical music recital, which is a lovely thing. But the best cosmological speculation is more like an improvised raga or jazz tune, and I love that about it.

David James Duncan: There’s a strong resemblance between the dogmas of many churches and the life insurance policies door-to-door salesmen used to try to sell people when I was a kid. Dogmas were originally meant to open us to wonder, not close it off.  For that very reason I find cosmological curiosity more truly theological than most theologies. Maybe some of this is a matter of style. A theology can feel like a classical music recital, which is a lovely thing. But the best cosmological speculation is more like an improvised raga or jazz tune, and I love that about it.

A jazz pianist or sitar player can, on any given occasion, pull trained instincts from their fingers and structures from their mind, interact with their keyboard or fretboard, and spontaneously produce a music utterly unique to time and place. For me, paying cosmological attention to the living world inspires improvisations much like those. Cosmological improvisation takes place in a moment-to-moment relationship between humans and the universe that envelops them. A living cosmology inhales what’s fresh and exhales what’s stale; cross-pollinates and migrates if needed; morphs if needed; reasons, intuits, and imagines as needed, more like wild nature itself.

And wild nature has a way of turning me inside-out. For most of my life I’ve occasionally stumbled into moments containing a palpable presence, or mesmerizing sort of hum, whether walking in cities or mountains, wading through traffic or trout streams. This inspires an alertness I wouldn’t call “seeking.” I’m not on the hunt for specific sensations. I’m just paying attention when, once in an eternity-flavored while, presences turn me inside-out. A spring aspen leaf might brush my face, and I’ll close my eyes and find myself feeling the tiny, self-contained universe that is a spring-green aspen cell dividing to make two of itself, thus growing. I’ll witness fruitful multiplication in a creek’s spring-awakened insects, a river-bottoms’ whitetail fawns, the newborn wood-ducks, kingfishers, killdeers along a riparian area, and wonder comes upon me as the densities, unions, and divisions grow palpable.

This is such a wonderful feeling that I’ve come to believe that, when the spheric shapes we call cells divide, creating more cells, plants, creatures by constantly sacrificing all that they were in order to be reconfigured and reborn forever and ever, it’s not time to quibble about whether these miracles comprise a theologically agreed upon God. It’s time to quit reason and cry: “My God! Thank You!”