John Daniel.Gifted.jpg

John Daniel, who lives in Oregon's Coast Range west of Eugene, set his debut novel there during the timber controversies of the 1990s.

(Author photo: Alexandra Shyshkina; book cover, Counterpoint Press)

Henry Fielder doesn't just enjoy the woods outside Eugene. He thrives in them; sometimes he feels a mystical connection to the animals living in them. It's his gift, his mother says.

Then he loses his beloved mother, and to some extent his grieving father, too. He finds solace with an older couple who've moved in nearby, but his millworker father denigrates them as California hippies. It's the 1990s, and the battles over Oregon's old-growth forests in timber communities like the Fielders' are still raging. Henry is at a crossroads: Does he stay true to the way of life he's always known, or strike out on his own path? His choice has devastating consequences.

Henry's story is the heart of Oregon writer John Daniel's debut novel, "Gifted" (Counterpoint Press, 384 pages, $26). It's very much a story about a boy and the land he considers holy; Daniel says, "I would ask readers to approach it as if entering a wilderness area. My narrator will be their guide."

Daniel will read from the book at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 24, at Broadway Books, 1714 N.E. Broadway. He talked recently to The Oregonian/OregonLive about "Gifted"; here are excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What inspired this novel?

A: The first glimpse came way back in 2006. I just scribbled a few notes about wanting to write a novel about this place, this country where I live, the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene. I knew it would involve a teenager.

Q: Are you a native of the Coast Range?

A: Not a native at all, but place is always important to me in my work. It always influences, sometime shapes my work both in poetry and nonfiction and now in fiction.

We were here for part of the timber wars. The primary idea wasn't to write about the timber wars, but I've always felt the rural angle on that, the millworker's side, really hadn't been necessarily heard very well by green environmentalists and cities and suburbs. I wanted to get that issue into the book with some of its complexity.

Q: I was struck by how detailed your descriptions of those workers' lives are.

A: I haven't been a millworker myself. I did set choker for Weyerhaeuser (the Northwest forest products company) after I dropped out of Reed (College), in 1969 and '70. That was up in Washington state, but it's the same culture. That's where I got to know, a little, some of the men who worked in the woods and came to appreciate that they had different ideas about land use than Sierra Clubbers but they were actually more placed in the land, closer to the land, than just about any of us city and suburban "green" guys.

I went and toured a mill down here in Noti and another one up in Monroe, just to get a sense for the work and what it felt like to be in those places. I think I already had a sense of the recreational values, the hunting and fishing - I do a little bit of both.

Q: Why did you go with an unreliable narrator?

A: I wanted him to be flawed, and one of his flaws is he doesn't always tell the truth. I wanted that to show, and I wanted the reader, too, to have some room maybe not to believe all the things he tells you that happened. I also wanted him owning up to the reader as a step in his own maturation out of the very hard, hard stuff that happened to him.

Q: What do you hope people take away from reading your novel?

A: A flavor of the times and a sense of a kid dealing with some really awful stuff that shouldn't happen to any kid but did.

I realized somewhere along the way that I was also writing about a lot of improbable things: a biker running over a bobcat, the unlikeliness of a father turning on his son the way George Fielder did, right up through, as Henry likes to ponder, it's kind of improbable that we're here at all, it's kind of improbable that anything is, and that life somehow came out of a rock-and-water planet and consciousness somehow emerged. I wanted all that to be in there, at least flavors of it.