Dealing with Ivan Doig’s death this past month led to a re-examination of the mentors who provided roots, planting a tree in my own writing. Two others who clarified my own orientation, Seamus Heaney and Bill Rose, also departed in recent years. What commonality between these authors struck my writing soul? What were their lessons? All were either Scots and Irish, but I am not. So why their appeal?

I first met Ivan Doig in Billings, Montana, at a writers’ roundtable. He had just come out with a little memoir called This House of Sky, which deeply affected me. Over the years, he graciously gave readings and shared with my students and writers’ groups in Montana, and later in Washington State, where we both ended up after spending much of our lives in Montana. He showed the value of having a background in journalism, interviewing, and library research to create a fictional or non-fictional hard-knocks world where matters of the heart power their way into landscapes as hard, sparse and grand as his words. Ivan had an ear for the voices of his characters. That made both major and minor characters equally alive for the reader. I was always struck by his boxes of index cards where he kept recorded speech habits and expressions that might appear in a book. If you said something that captured your essence or captured local color, you could be part of a character in his books.

Seamus Heaney was no different, capturing the human voice wedded to the land, where hard, honest work and a sly sense of humor could keep you from being swallowed. Each word had to be earned. There was a sparseness here set against the human voice. I responded to his sensibility, and he responded to mine, so I felt totally comfortable in workshops I had with him in Dublin and Sligo.

Bill Rose really gave me the clue as to why he, Doig and Heaney form such a triumvirate for me. Bill was pipe major for the Caledonian Pipes and Drums of Billings, Montana. His career as an architect showed up in his art. Even in watercolor painting, he was a careful draftsman concerned with form to reveal feeling. We both enjoyed the confluence of painting, poetry and prose in capturing the essence of people living in the West. The Western landscape is certainly very architectural, immense yet sparse, awe-inspiring yet swallowing. His work captured that, even when portraying people in the city. The epiphany came for me when Bill said that the vast Western expanse enforced a certain feeling. It was one of walking a fine line between loneliness and solitude. Landscape molded its people, or at least selected the people who lived upon it. I saw this in all his works. Doig captured it in his prose. Heaney had his own Irish version in blunted, sparse words. It’s a feeling similar to the call of the sea, which these artists also considered, be it Heaney’s Beowulf and his Viking longboats, or Doig’s Sea-Runners.

Which leads me to me. As I grew up on the Mississippi in northern Illinois, for whatever reasons. the West exerted its pull on me. Just before graduating from high school, I became aware of feelers being extended to see if I would be interested in being nominated to attend one of the military academies. My taciturn grandfather, who had been at sea most of his life, wanted me to instead attend the Merchant Marine academy. He had taken me fishing as a boy, and we had survived a hair-raising incident in a storm on a Minnesota lake where our boat was in danger of being swamped. At the same time, I had to cut out fish hooks impaled in my own hand while a huge northern pike, also attached to the hooks, thrashed about, driving the hooks farther into my flesh. That story is for another time. Suffice it to say, later my grandfather said that he could tell I was an independent loner who could survive the solitude of the sea that many could not. He would back my following his life at sea. Of course, I did not do that and followed my own path. I went west to Colorado, then Montana, and then Washington, but found my seas and Big Sky with the towering waves of the Rockies and the vast inland sea of the High Plains. Rest in the peace that solitude of the heart grants, grandfather, Ivan, Sheamus, Bill.