The Oregon Extension

David James Duncan

“Several Decembers ago I was invited, in my capacity as a novelist and freelance writing teacher, to a little Christian college extension built out of a converted logging camp in tiny Lincoln, Oregon.  I’m not too big on Christianizing efforts, generally speaking, but if there is anything on earth I like seeing converted it’s logging camps…”

So begins “Wonder; Yogi; Gladly,” an essay written by David James Duncan after his first visit to The Oregon Extension in the 1990s.  You can find the rest of this essay in Duncan’s most recent collection of nonfiction, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right (2006).  And you can find Duncan himself at The O.E. this fall (2009), spending a few days with us at Lincoln.

We’ve loved Duncan’s books here at the O.E. for a long time.  His bestselling novels, The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992), have held spots among our core books nearly ever year for over a decade, and this year The Brothers K will once again be our summer reading.  Duncan’s essay-and-story collection, River Teeth (1996), and his memoir, My Story as Told by Water (2001), generally circulate as favorites among student cabins as well.

So what’s the big deal about this writer?  What is it about his baseball and fly-fishing narratives that gets us so excited?  That’s hard to say.  If you invite an O.E. alum out to coffee and pitch him or her that question, you’re bound to get an earful.  It could be the deep spiritual issues that Duncan explores with humor and honesty in his stories.  It could be the mess and beauty of the families that people his books.  It could be the unique variety of mysticism that shows up in his pages, wearing waders and casting a fly rod and singing a gut-wrenched love song to wild salmon and to Montana’s Blackfoot River.  It could be all of the above.  Or something else altogether, something impossible to pinpoint and impossible to forget.

David Duncan is currently hard at work finishing his new novel.  We’re grateful for his willingness to carve out some time to come and chat with us at Lincoln.  We welcome him heartily, and we welcome you, incoming students.  We look forward to the conversation.

OE Group Photo, Fall 1997

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