Ivan Doig - 1939
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Hot Springs County High in Wyoming
I. Biography
Ivan Doig was born in White Sulpher Springs, Montana, in 1939. He grew up along the Rocky Mountain front where much of his writing takes place. His first book, the highly acclaimed memoir, This House of Sky
, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Son of ranch hand, Charlie Doig, and ranch cook Berncta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on his sixth birthday), Ivan made up his
mind in his junior year of high school to become a writer. He worked as an editorial writer in Decatur, Illinois, and as an assistant editor for the Rotarian magazine in Kranston. Then,
starved as they were for mountains and ocean, Carol (his wife) and he left the Chicago area in 1966 and came to Seattle, with the notion that he would get a Ph.D. in History. He still
lives in Seattle with his wife, who teaches literature of the American West.
II. Professional Life
Doig is a graduate of Northwestern University where he received bachelor's and master's
degrees in journalism. He also has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. In 1989 the Western Literature Association honored him with its Distinguished Achievement Award for his body of work.
He continued to freelance write magazine articles during graduation school and he also began writing poetry, which he had never even thought of attempting before. His eight or
nine published poems showed him that he lacked a poet's final skill, the one Yeats called "closing a poem with the click of a wellmade box." But still wanting to work at stretching
the craft of writing toward the areas where writing mysteriously starts to be art, he began working on what Norman MacLean has called the "poetry under the prose -- a lyrical
language," what he called a "poetry of the vernacular in how characters speak on the page."
One last word about the setting of his work, the West. I don't believe that he thinks of
himself as a "Western" writer. To him, language was the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose is the ultimate region.
III. Literary Works
Fiction:
Ride With Me, Mariah Montana (1968)
Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1969)
English Creek (1972)
The Sea Runners (1974 )
Nonfiction:
Heart Earth: A Memoir (1983)
Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America (1987)
This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (1989)
This essay was submitted by a student of Kevin Brooke, a teacher at Hot Springs County High in Thermopolis, Wyoming.