Review

Praise for Gifted: A Novel

"This alluring debut novel [is] primarily set in the hippie- and blue-collar-populated Oregon Coast Range during the timber wars of the mid-1990s...Daniel explores an ecology of natives and invasives―plant and animal―while rendering clear-cuts and second-growth forests with the same keen eye for beauty as he does towering old growths. ... [A] remarkable story." ―The New York Times Book Review

"Daniel captures Henry's feeling of isolation and loneliness with eloquent prose that draws readers into the mossy old-growth forests of the Northwest. His clean descriptions and comforting digressions about the landscape mirror Henry's own attempts to find solace in an unjust, confusing world. Daniel's impressive novel quietly builds, ending in a place where Henry can see the way past his experiences into a much more beautiful, logical future." ―Publishers Weekly

"Emotionally raw and evocative, Gifted is a rare book that manages to intertwine family drama, internal turmoil and landscapes of the world around it all. Set in Oregon’s Coast Range, the book is the first novel by Eugene poet and essayist John Daniel, whose lush writing has a way of haunting you long after the last page." ―The Oregonian, 1 of 21 Books We Loved in 2017

"Lyrical evocations of nature clash with shocking revelations of human nature in this coming-of-age story…. [A] stroll through the wilderness of adolescence and the Oregon woods." ―Kirkus Reviews

"With Gifted, John Daniel has given us a lyrical, soaring tale that is deeply affecting. It's full of love and pain and understanding and forgiveness . . . as is life, if we're as lucky as our hero-guide, Henry Fielder. Daniel has written a transformative novel I will never forget." ―Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain and A Sudden Light

"Part Catcher in the Rye, part Sometimes a Great Notion, John Daniel's novel vividly evokes the emotional tempest of youth, the cultures and subcultures of the Pacific Northwest, and the rainwashed, animal-rich forests of Oregon's Coast Range." ―Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"When Huck Finn lit out for the Territory, no doubt he found a mysterious, magical world much like that in John Daniel's modern coming-of-age tale. The glories, the violence, the stirring spirit that fashioned our nation continue, and are vividly chronicled in this bold and generous novel. Daniel has reseen and regifted us all with our deepest, most cherished American stories, expressed here with poetic precision, amplitude, grace." ―Tracy Daugherty, author of What Falls Away and The Boy Orator

"The gifts that relieve the guilt and losses suffered by John Daniel's teenage hero come from the living matrix we call nature―rivers and mountains, lion and coyote and bear, stars and storms and throngs of birds―and from human guides―foster parents, a wise elder, a backwoods sage, two lovers, and a sympathetic judge. All of these redemptive figures, human and greater-than-human, are vividly rendered by a writer whose feeling for language and landscape shines from every page." ―Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works and Dancing in Dreamtime

"Gifted tells of growing up in the semi-outback and sometimes dangerous Coast Range of Oregon. It grows and rings as it matures. John Daniel has been one of our finest for a long while. He is to be congratulated again." ―William Kittredge, author of A Hole in the Sky and The Willow Field

"I take John Daniel's Gifted as personally as my own Willamette Valley boyhood. Henry Fielder brought back 1,247 things I've lived. The joys and sorrows of full sensory immersion in an astoundingly beautiful, grievously wounded place. Being fed by both the beauty and the woundings. Coming of age, or trying to, in an industrial anti-culture that sees the adoration of trilliums, ancient trees, wild places, and early mystical experience as alienation." When Henry finally set down his pen I experienced a small miracle: the teen in me bowing, feeling completely understood and vindicated, half a century after the fact." ―David James Duncan, author of The River Why and The Brothers K

Praise for Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone

"Daniel's time alone is potent, a dilation on the amusements and scorchings of the simple life, and a distillation of the strange, human group that was his family." ―Kirkus Reviews

"Sustained by the natural world, Daniel grapples with the demons of midlife and finds wholeness in this funny, wry and searingly honest book." ―Los Angeles Times

"Rogue River Journal touches, more than a little, the fountains of glory in wild lands skirting the Rogue River. It touches another kind of glory also, and with equal elegance―the past, the relationship between a son and a father, as John Daniel recalls, with honesty, flamboyance, tenderness and true regard for his father's life, his own journey toward manhood. It is an extraordinary book."―Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning poet

Praise for The Far Corner

"The Far Corner makes such good company because the writing is patient with what it wants to discuss. It thinks, recognizes nuance and includes it rather than dismissing it. The result is a view (of rivers, logging, Wallace Stegner, nonfiction prose) that's layered rather than simplistic and accurate rather than glib. John Daniel's essays sound a voice that wants to tell the truth and that finds out―and makes clear―how complicated and mysterious an effort this can be." ―Lex Runciman, Professor of English, Linfield College

"Mr. Daniel's writing is at once precise and lyrical―equally compelling in passages that present ecological facts and in those that portray the elusive workings of memory, grief, or joy. From its opening description of the daily labor of the tree fallers that 'never seemed to advance very far against the front of the forest' but turned 'the standing woods into pick-up sticks,' the book astonishes the reader with its complex observations about time and place, the relentless industry of humans and the forces of nature…. While each essay stands alone brilliantly, the collection resembles one of its main metaphors: a river of heaven and earth, drawn from a multitude of living streams." ―Kyoko Mori, Professor of English, George Mason University

Praise for Of Earth: New and Selected Poems

"What is the poet's work? 'Listening to what lives outside our lives,' John Daniel answers. And on this book's pages, he offers the results of a remarkable attention. Daniel's poems are psalms born of stillness. They are praise-songs born of both awe and a steely insistence on clear, spare depiction of the 'mystery of the given world.' Vivid glimpses into his process of truth-seeking, his poems spring from a secular yet numinous reverence." ―Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate, author of The Voluptuary

"John Daniel's poems are indelible, essential, endearing―and exquisitely shaped. This rich and precious earth, so often trampled and forsaken, must be somehow touched and restored by such attentive consideration. We are much richer readers, who live with these generous poems and this great poet's spirit." ―Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer and Fuel

"When a young Ojibway went into the woods for an initiatory vision, singing 'Whenever I pause, / The noise of the village,' he was seeking a vein running between solitude and society. Thoreau sought the same vein, and it is the realm of John Daniel's Of Earth. These poems are nature poems, but we might as well call them social poems or, to use Yeats' word, companionable. If you want to share the joys of being alive on this perishing earth, this book is for you." ―Kenneth Fields, Stanford University, author of Classic Rough News

"John Daniel presents poems of testimony to the glories and mysteries of the natural world. In a steady voice filled with wonder and gratitude, he examines thunderstorms, the Milky Way, a screech owl's eyes, thimbleberries, a dying snake. Daniel's poems are honest, compassionate, genuinely wrought and generous in their gifts." ―Pattiann Rogers, author of Wayfare and The Grand Array

About the Author

John Daniel's books of prose, including Rogue River Journal and The Far Corner, have won three Oregon Book Awards for Literary Nonfiction, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and have been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts among other grants and awards. His essays and poems have appeared in Wilderness Magazine, Orion, Sierra, Terrain.org, The North American Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and other journals and anthologies. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, he has taught as a writer-in-residence at colleges and universities across the country. Earlier in life he was a logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock-climbing instructor. Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. Gifted is his first novel. johndaniel-author.net