Gifted: A Novel

" A remarkable story." -The New York Times Book Review Henry Fielder, solitary and unmoored in his thirties, runs into an old lover and finds himself ready to tell the story he has harbored for two decades. He is fifteen, in rural western Oregon, enduring a year of sorrows. His mother has died, his father is physically abusive, and his extraordinary spiritual affinity for the wild lives of his native country seems to desert him. An older couple, retiring to the area from California, offer solace and expanded cultural horizons but set him further at odds with his millworker father. The abuse escalates, and ultimately a natural disaster catalyzes a crisis in which father and son betray each other and Henry sets out on a trek through the backcountry of the Oregon Coast Range, seeking to understand what has happened and to forge a new sense of self. A Huck Finn of the modern age, Henry is portrayed with a directness and clarity that pulls readers through the environmental dynamics of the Pacific Northwest. In stark yet beautiful prose that highlights his long tenure as a nature writer, Daniel creates an odyssey that explores the spiritual dimensions and deeply entangled pains and pleasures of belonging to the human domain and the natural world of which it is part. Set in the mid-1990s, when environmentalists and timber communities warred over the future of the last Northwestern old-growth forests, Gifted is the story of a young man with a metaphysical imagination-naive yet wise, gifted yet ordinary-who comes of age under harsh circumstances, negotiating the wildness of his home country, of his human relationships, and of the emerging complexities of his own being.

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.

Review :
[Advanced Praise for Gifted: A Novel] "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 [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 "As beautifully wrought as it is truthful, Rogue River Journal is a Walden for our time." --Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards Committee "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 wining 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. There 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