 I can't remember when I didn't know how to read. I knew how to read well before I went into the first grade. My mother had read to me, it turns out, as she would sit quietly because of her asthma. And my grandmother would read to me. I had a couple of teenage uncles. Everybody would apparently read to me. So I came out of that with great love of words. I believe I would have been a writer no matter where I was born, whether it was the West or Montana or whatever. I believe if I'd been born in downtown Dogpatch, I'd still be a writer. Good evening and welcome to the Friends of the Library Fall Event. This is called Living with It, Ivan Doig's Medical Journey. My name is Kenning Arlich and I'm the Dean of the Library. In 2015, Carol Doig decided to donate the collection of her late husband to the Montana State University Library. Ivan and Carol had put considerable thought into his legacy and wanted his collection to be as available to as many people as possible. As part of my proposal to Carol, I promised that we would digitize the collection in its entirety and make it available to the world via the internet. My staff thought I was crazy, but they pulled off my promise in less than one year. There is nothing like visiting the collection in person, and we welcome you to do so. But the URL in your program, IvanDoig.Montana.edu, will get you there from your desktop. What you will see tonight is the value of a living archive. The Ivan Doig archive is rare on many levels. Rare because the entire thing is available in both analog and digital forms. Rare because the writer himself was so meticulous about keeping records of his work and his life. Rare because the archive shows that writing is a craft that must be worked daily in Ivan's case, and that the writing was honed to perfection before the books were published. And the archive is rare because it intentionally includes documentation of Ivan Doig's medical journey. All of us face mortality, and many of us will face disease that shortens our lives. But not many of us are willing to talk about, let alone document, our last days. Carol insisted from the start that Ivan's medical journey be part of the archive so that people would understand what he was dealing with as he wrote his final four books. She wanted us to know what drove him, why he continued to work. We had some trepidation about this topic for a public event, but through our research and in talking to Carol and Ivan's friends, we came to understand that this is not a story about death. It is a story of perseverance and living one's best life. Tonight, our panel, our fine panel, will explore Ivan's journey in a discussion moderated by Dr. Bob Riedel, professor of history at Montana State University and co-director of the Ivan Doig Center. But a few additional points before we get started. First, many thanks to Jan Zouha and Vintaguerra and Lissa Fields for organizing this event. They spent countless hours on it. And thank you to Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society students who contributed their time and voices to record some of the quotes you will hear from Ivan's diary. The students are Logan Gunderson, Colin Hammock, Sheridan Johnson, Rachel Joule, and Ben Roder. Second, while this is a free event, it did cost money to produce. If you like what we and our partners, Mountain Journal and the Ivan Doig Center are doing, please consider a donation. Our development officers from the foundation, Gila Bader and Shannon Schumacher, would be happy to speak with you. Finally, this is a multimedia event that will include images, sound, and video. But our phones are not part of that event. So please take a moment to silence them. And thank you. And now please welcome Bob Riedel and our panel. So thanks very much. This is also a sound check, I think. So I'm going to look to the back and can you hear me okay? Yes, yes, yes. Wonderful, okay, good deal. So thanks so much, Kenning. It's an honor for me to be here. It's a great pleasure to be with all of you this evening. And what I want to do initially is to say a few words of introduction by way of presenting our panelists to you, and then we're going to move into the conversational phase. So just a few words beginning with Carol Doig sitting to my left. There's a very brief biography in your program, and I don't want to just rehearse things, by way of introduction to Carol, some words of thanks for your contributions to the archive and making Ivan's papers available. And also thank you for making some of your own papers available to me, the correspondence, your work at Shoreline College. It's really just really, really marvelous. One of the things I think you might not know about Ivan and Carol is that they co-authored a book. It's called News, A Consumer's Guide. It came out, I believe, in the 1970s. My sneaking suspicion is that this merits everyone's attention. Again, for reasons maybe we can leave unsaid or maybe not. But it is really important for you to know that Carol and Ivan formed a remarkable, loving partnership. Their very good friend, David Laskin, is sitting next to her. He is the author of Children's Blizzard, a prize-winning book about the awful blizzard that hit the upper plains in 1888. But if you have a sort of wonder what that might have been like think yesterday. Think 1888 and imagine how bad it was. And it was probably worse than that. To my far right, my colleague, Professor Brett Walker, MSU Regents Professor of History and a Guggenheim fellow. He is renowned in so many quarters for his work on Japan and environmental history. And he is also the author of a quite extraordinary book called A Family History of Illness, Memory is Medicine, where he talks about his own experience with a quite serious disease. Dr. Rob Patrick sitting next to him, a physician at the Lewis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He too is a recent author of a piece about Ivan Doig called A Doctor Plums the Depths of Ivan Doig's Illness, just published in the Mountain Journal. And speaking of the Mountain Journal, immediately to my right is the founding editor of that journal, Todd Wilkinson. He's had a distinguished career as a journalist. He's written The Last Stand, Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet. And he too has written an article about Ivan Doig's coping with the end of life issues that confronted him. So as for the structure of this evening, it's really pretty straightforward. We are going to have a conversation guided by some questions. But I'd like to kick things off here by just saying a couple of things about the archive. So I'm a historian and I spent much of my life in the archives and I spend a lot of my time trying to get people to understand why the archives are so not just important, but absolutely delightful. One of my favorite historians who's written about the archives is Arlette Farge. She's a distinguished historian of French history and she wrote one of my favorite books on the title The Allure of the Archives. How about that? Then to give you a sense of how she's structured, she works with judicial records, really dry, dusty records from the French courts and police records. And it's the kind of thing that would put a lot of people to sleep. She delights in those records because they tell the story of ordinary people and their encounters with all kinds of travails during Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France. She says the archives can be very talkative and I think that's a good way to think about archives and you'll get a real sense of that this evening. I hope archives do speak and you have to not just read them, you have to listen to them. And then she concludes her book with these words and I'll quote them to you. The Allure of the Archives entails a roaming voyage through the words of others and a search for language that can rescue their relevance. It may also be a voyage through the words of today with the perhaps somewhat unreasonable conviction that we write history not just to tell it, but to anchor a departed past to our words and bring an exchange among the living. And it's those last words, centering on the exchange among the living that I think sets the stage for tonight's conversation. I hope it's going to be a wide-ranging conversation with our panelists. We're going to move through a variety of topics. I'm listening on occasion to some of the quite moving journal entries from Ivan's Medical Journals read by MSU students. We're going to conclude the evening with a short video followed by some Q&A from you folks. Then we'll adjourn for a reception afterwards. And what I'd like to do to start things is ask Lisa if she could play for us one of the entries from the Ivan Doig journals. And you'll hear me read out entry numbers, and these are for Lisa's purposes so she knows which ones to queue up. So this is entry 13. The date is April 13th, 2013. 2013. I don't want the diary to turn into a medical journal, but I'm not sure how much else I can manage as things are. I work on the manuscript from pretty soon after breakfast, done by 4.45 in my case. I see Carol has aptly described my nights as chaotic in her diary. My body routing me out, usually by three, through the morning, and then usually two to three hours in the afternoon. A heftier writing stint than I'd put up with if I wasn't saddled with thal, rev, dex, side effects. Thank goodness for the work, the mental occupation, so I don't just wisen into an illness victim. But there's not much energy left after that much writing, so quite a lot of our doing goes unrecorded. So in case you missed the opening to that, it begins Ivan's writing this. I don't want the diary to turn into a medical journal, but I'm not sure how much else I can manage as things are. So with that in your minds, I'd like to turn to Carol and just ask you to perhaps say a few words about the journal, about the decision that Ivan made to keep that journal, and then also move towards finding out why you decided that this should be such an important part of the archive. Let me ask, am I coming through all right back there? Okay, fine, thank you. Well, this was going to be a journey, but then life is, isn't it? And so from the time that Ivan was diagnosed with actually a precursor to multiple myeloma, which was not harmful in itself, but he had looked into this in great detail, as you can imagine, researcher that he was, and decided that he was likely to, it was likely to develop into multiple myeloma. And we talked about it and decided that we would go forward and live our lives as much as normal as we could. And of course we didn't know what was going to happen or in what time frame. But again, isn't that rather like life for most of us? I mean, which of us has a date on the wall that we know is going to come up for us? So in a sense, this was perhaps a life within a life. And he went forward and as it happened, he had eight years and three months. That's what it came out to be. And in that time he wrote four books and someone among us had said it wasn't at five and that depends on where you put 11th man. The thing about the book process is that it is so slow in the production. And so I'll give it that if you want. He wrote four or five books in those eight years and three months. And put me back on track for the lesson. What was the decision about keeping the journal? People who are ill don't always keep journals. He had kept a journal. And part of going forward in life was to keep keeping a journal. And I think that was simply part of him. It was part of his day, most days. And of course as time went on and he got sicker, then he would write something like, I don't want this just to become a medical record. But it was quite like him to simply report. I was not as good a journal keeper as he was. But he went about doing what he had always done as long as he possibly could. And I think that's the essence of his last years. Great, thank you. Let me turn to Rob because I think it's really important to hear from somebody who can talk specifically about multiple myeloma. And so Rob, this is an area you know a lot about. Are we on? Or I could have just spoken into it. Hi, I'm Rob Patrick. I'm a physician as you heard from Cleveland, Ohio. I got to give two disclaimers before I talk about this. One is I do work for the federal government. I'm a VA doctor. I'm not here on VA's time. I'm here on my own personal time. So if you don't like what I have to say, please don't call your congressman and complain. If you do like what I have to say, please call your congressman and ask for a raise. And the second thing is that death and dying is something that I deal with every day in my career and I have for 20 years. That's something I'm very comfortable with. I've been on somewhat of a personal crusade in the last five years to get doctors to have better conversations with their patients about this topic. That's unique to me. I understand that that's not everybody's... not a lot of people are thinking about that every day like I am. If this dredges up something for you, that's fine. You know, please feel free to ask questions of me. I understand there's refreshments afterwards and I'm going to be thirsty, so if you want some free medical advice, I'll be here. So those are my disclaimers. Has anybody ever had myeloma or has myeloma or any of the plasma cell discrages? Okay. So myeloma is a disease of the bone marrow and it's from a family of diseases called the plasma cell discrages. Plasma cells... How many people have gotten their flu shots this year? All right. The rest of you do it tomorrow. I just got mine two weeks ago and my plasma cells are on high alert right now making antibodies against that immunization that I got. That's what plasma cells do. They make antibodies against anything foreign that comes into your body. And they're great. They're great thank God because we'd all be dead of infectious disease in short order if we didn't have them. The problem with these discrasias... and Ivan had two different types of discrasias. One was this MGUS that Carol refers to. And MGUS stands for monoclonal gamopathy of uncertain significance. And what that means is... monoclonal means one plasma cell starts to divide in an uncontrolled way and you get... what's called a clonal proliferation. So it forms clones of itself. It just replicates and clones itself. And the problem is that these cells crowd out everything in your bone marrow and they produce so much of this protein that it gums up all your other organs and causes all kinds of problems. So what he had at first is this... something that was causing a lot of protein in his blood but they weren't sure where it was going, followed it for years, eventually it transformed into myeloma. And again, one of the things that's unique about this as a form of cancer is that most... all cancer... the vast majority of cancers are divided into stages. One, two, three, four. Four is the worst. It's metastatic. It means there's no cure for it. Most of the time when you get diagnosed with a stage four cancer, it's not too long between the diagnosis and your ultimate demise. In myeloma, it can often be years, many years. I've seen patients survive decades or a decade, I should say, with myeloma. So as Kenning quoted this, I like this quote because it describes, I think, myeloma perfectly. And it's a description of settlers on the Great Plains in the 1800s. And they said, well, the great thing about being a settler out here is you can see trouble coming from a long way off. The bad thing is there's nowhere to hide when it gets here. And that, I think, describes myeloma very well. You know it's coming, but it's inevitable. And not many cancer patients are in that position. Not many people have that long to think about their end. And so having said that, I would like to reiterate what was said before, that as I read these journals and I talk to Carol and I think about Ivan Doig, this is a happy story for me. I know that sounds perverse, but we can get into it more. This is a sore story of a guy who was successful in his dying. And I've seen a lot of people not succeed at that and do it poorly. And that's not to say that he was happy to leave this earth. He wasn't, and certainly wasn't happy to leave his wife. But we can talk later about my own sort of personal epiphany about understanding how he thought about his disease and his death at the end of his life. Super. Thanks so much. Let's do, Lisa, could we hear a couple of other journal entries? And could we hear readings from entries 3 and 14, please? May 14, 2007. A note on how I look these days, appraisal no doubt sharpened and darkened by the eminence of tomorrow's verdict. With my beard thinned down to a sufficient mustache and a translucent goatee, to myself I look markedly older, bat-eared, mightily bald-domed, and thinner. In the past year, the cords of my neck have begun to stand out and with the proportion of my beard gone, I now look like I'm inhabiting my shirt, rather than wearing it in the old known fit. October 22, 2013. This morning I am a dex machine, struggling to get past grogginess from the 1030 sleeping pill that buys me some sleep after taking the 10 little green mini-pills then. Along with the cloudiness in my head, I have the item by item sorting, fixation, whatever the hell it is, and now, at a little after 6.30 a.m., have done the Revlimid reordering and the monthly phone drill, along with some upstairs chores. Again, I'm a medicated facsimile of myself, or what I could be, undrugged, and that's the way it is. And that's the way it is. So, Brett, I'd like to turn to you and just ask you to say a couple of things about your encounter with Ivan Doig, because reading your own quite moving book about your own illness, all of a sudden there's Ivan Doig. How does Doig appear in the story? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so about 10 years ago I was diagnosed with a different sort of plasma cell disorder, and my BNT cells don't produce gamma globulin, so essentially I have the incapacity to produce antibodies, and I began to think in a similar way about my own experience with disease and mortality, and was very strongly drawn to Ivan Doig's writing for a lot of reasons. I mean, one, as somebody who was born in Montana, he was raised on essentially the eastern side of the Bridgers and had a lot of experience in places I knew He was a very compelling figure to me. We had a family farm in Cut Bank for a while, and in this house of sky there's a scene where he's on a cattle drive under an electric storm up in that northern part of the state that has always really stuck with me, so he was somebody that described things in a way that really appealed to me, and I think personally one of the things that attracted to me to not only his books but also to these journal entries, in the journal entries he refers to them as hinge days, and I, as a sailor, I call them waypoints, or moments in our life where we're faced with a very difficult and important decision that shapes the rest of our life from that point forward, and I think Ivan Doig had a very strong sense of when those decisions were made and what the implications of those decisions might be, and I think there's something about being diagnosed with a serious illness that causes you to reflect on the decisions that you've made that have had a strong bearing on the course your life has taken, and I was very moved by him. As far as I'm concerned, Ivan Doig writes about that in a way that few others can. I would, Vladimir Nabokov does, and possibly Richard White is right as somebody that does, but Ivan Doig is almost magical in his ability to go back in time, revisit those decisions, and it's something that I do in the book as well. Great, thank you. What I'd like to do now is involve some of the other panelists in responding to some questions about the writing process linked to Ivan's disease, and just about creativity in general as we think about mortality. Entries 5 and 7, could we get those? December 30th, 2007. We are going through this season in an oddly thrilling household glow, the writing of 11th Man burning in me like a filament. I woke at 2.30 this morning, two of the book's final sentences clear in my head. I put in a big day of manuscript work yesterday, Saturday, and the couple of complex scenes yet to be done have brimming me with that feeling I have only had a few other times with books, that if I could just work for the next hundred hours straight, the book would be done. It's never that basic, or I don't have the Iron Constitution to do it that way, but even as I contradictorily pace and push myself just enough, these are monumental days. July 21st, 2009. I don't know that I can continue the determined writing pace that produced the 11th Man and work song in the past, what, three years? With the stem cell transplant and thalidomide prednisone thrown in, but that is still the direction I should go. So, we're talking about someone who knows he's dying, and we're talking about his response to that through not only recording his thoughts about that process, but also through recording his thoughts about what it takes to remain alive and contest a certain kind of faith that awaits us all. And I'm just very curious to hear from my fellow writers up here about Ivan's creative process during this time of just extraordinary distress and how that process actually worked. I mean, I frankly can't imagine generating, we're counting now, four or five books, not articles, not essays. We're talking books. I mean, these are Ivan Doig scale books. I mean, he's writing constantly, and I find that to be that kind of outpouring to be absolutely extraordinary. So, I'm trying to understand, I guess, a little bit as I was just thinking about this evening, to try to get some help from you folks here about the drive. I mean, this is not somebody who hangs it up and says, well, it's over. This is somebody who on a daily basis is working away at getting thoughts down, and writing isn't just, you just don't move from one word to the next, right? I mean, you write, you revise, you reorganize, you're trying to think where you're going, and it's a remarkable journey. So, David, why don't we start with you, and then we'll just open this to everybody. Great. Well, thank you. I find it humbling to talk about this, to kind of put myself on the same podium with Ivan in terms of the creative process. So, I'm not really sure I can speak to that directly, but I think I'm going to actually backtrack and answer a different question, as politicians always do, but I think it will circle back to this, and it really relates to the archives. I think Ivan's archives, in my experience, and I've spent some time poking around archives and for research in various books, I think Ivan's archives, to me, are a unique window into the life of the mind of a great writer. And, you know, I think it's pretty rare in this day and age that somebody committed to paper or computer as much about his inner life and experiences as Ivan did. So, I went poking around the archives and reading the journals and the note cards. You kind of feel like you're with Dickens or Trollop. You know, I remember, you know, reading, okay, so Dickens wrote these vast novels and he also had a vast correspondence and he wrote articles and he went to America and lectured and wrote about that and how the heck did he have the time? I feel that way with Ivan too, and knowing him, living up the street from him, and there I was sitting at my computer poking away and writing my few words, and Ivan had this immense output of published and unpublished work. So, I think the archives, you know, if you haven't spent time with them do and if you have a favorite Ivan diagonal or memoir, read the journals that were written during the time that he composed that book and you will be immensely rewarded just by seeing Ivan's mind at play. So, getting back to the question, you know, to me I think it's an incredible act of courage that Ivan faced up to all of this. He didn't, there was no shirking. You know, the card, you know, that I think is to me the most moving, invariably fatal, which multiple myeloma is, damn, but then so is life. Ivan knew that and he wrote about it. He faced up to it. He was fascinated by his treatments. He talked about them to me openly and with a lot of detail and concentration, he was a very private man. Even though we were good friends, there was a lot of stuff that Ivan never talked about and I would never dare ask him about, but this aspect of his life he did want to talk about and did want to open up about. So, I felt that it was part and parcel of the creative process that you mentioned that he needed to write about it. He needed to write in order to live. And if he were still with us, which we all wish like hell he were, he would be writing about everything all the time. That's, you know, he thought, he used to have this expression thinking through your fingers and that's how Ivan lived his life. And so, you know, when you think about when he got that diagnosis, he could have gone in a number of directions and I think withdrawal is probably one avenue that seems like a natural one to take. But Ivan didn't withdraw and it's just amazing to have the privilege to see and, you know, we're hearing snippets from the journals now to kind of peer over his shoulder as he did that. So, yeah, as for the creative process, you know, it's easy to talk about in somebody else. It's hard in yourself, so I think I'll just leave it there. Carol, would you like to... Well, what Ivan did after the diagnosis was to write faster. He once said, and he might have, something he might have said to you, David, that if given the chance he could write until he was 150, he never ran out of ideas. So, his idea of a limited future was write as fast as he could without letting up at all in the craft of it. And, yes, I think he did have to write. I mean, that is the thing that he most of all wanted to do. He never found it easy, particularly the first drafting. He always said he was a more natural editor than a writer. But whatever, he simply stayed at work. He never gave up. And, you know, even as in the latter stages of his life, he never gave up. And that is why I think David wound up at the doig house, helping Ivan with the last few edits of Last Bus. What was that? A day before he died? Two days before he died? And our great friend, the wonderful poet Linda Beards, said of that, that's on a film that's in the archive. That's exactly what I would have expected of Ivan. And so did I. Thank you. Let's turn to you, because in some ways, I think what brought us all together here was an idea you had to make this medical journey and the journey through Ivan's creative work, a part of the discussion. So what moves you? What do you take from these journals? What insights into the writing process do you derive from these? So what was really interesting was being able to get together in your living room and talk about the old days in Chicago. I, too, came from Chicago. And one of the things you all need to know about Carol is that she started as a journalist in Chicago the same as Ivan did. And we talked about getting into the zone, how writers get into the zone, how hard it is to get into the zone, but when you get disrupted from it, it's almost this agonizing thing. And so when I think about Ivan, there's the disease element, but there's also the element that there's fundamental struggle and suffering that writers go through anyway. And I think one of the nightmares for all of us is that we die suddenly and then our stuff is left for our survivors to pick through. And what really fascinated me about Ivan's archives is that he was very meticulous. In fact, he saved lots of things that would be seemingly innocuous and yet they're tied together, the love letters to you in the morning, the notes about writing, the observations about things that were going on. And so what I think is beautiful about the archives and gives them a value added is that in some ways he was anticipating someone in the future coming into this in the same way that you two would set off on research trips and discover characters and listen to be able to hear the vernacular that they spoke. And so he leaves all of these crumbs of clues to go through that can reward one ultimately to come in and write the Ivan-Doig biography. If it's there to be written for someone who wants to do it or at least there's material to do it. So for me what was just fascinating was this golden opportunity with archives, living archives to be able to come in and it's truly a gift. We talk about libraries becoming archaic. Well these archives of Ivan-Doig is it was by design to have these things you can go in and get a real sense of who he was. And frankly I think it's as interesting as the characters that he developed in his books because he becomes a character in his own story. So if you have thoughts. You know I suppose he thought it would be fine if somebody would write a biography of him some day although I'm not absolutely sure of that. But I think what he wanted his archive to do was to teach anyone who wanted to learn to write. To do it or someone who already knew how to write to do it better. And it's all there. One of the things about the manuscripts for example that he left the manuscripts of his novels are various numbers of them but I think they go up to maybe five on one of his books. And you can actually see you can't really do that anymore in this electronic age because things are edited on the screen. And the old ones go away. Well Ivan had all this on paper. And so you can trace through you can see what he did you can see how he edited his work and then beyond that in its final stage you can see what his editor Becky did. And so there's all kinds of textbook there for anyone who wants to access it. And I find that pretty striking. And given that we're in the electronic age where things just disappear into the universe I don't know how much more of this if any we're going to get from writers in the future. Can I just jump in for a second and pick up on something Carol said. You know I was talking about how much Ivan wrote and how prolific his journals and cards and so on were. But Carol said Ivan didn't come easy when he was writing those novels or memoirs and I remember him telling me once I'm a bleeder when I write it comes out drop by drop. And it's true and you know you see the difference between the journals which didn't come out drop by drop he would just sit there and you know kind of think out loud but then when the time came to compose for publication there was this constant wrestling match and I think anybody who's written anything knows all about that match. But what's striking one of the things that was striking to me about Ivan was that he never he neither complained about it nor puffed it up. It wasn't like oh I work so damn hard you know every sentence is polished to a fairly well or you know it's just so difficult to write. He didn't complain he didn't brag it was he was the consummate professional but it didn't come easy and as a friend and as you know somebody who kind of looked up to Ivan in every way it was an amazing example of how to be a professional and Ivan loved that word and whenever he used it you know he or she is a real professional there was no higher praise and so I think reading you know I keep coming back to this reading delving into the archives and then seeing those drips coming out one by one and the beautiful novels that those created it's just this is nothing like it. Thanks very much. Rob let me turn to you with a question because my guess is as a physician you don't have many novelists that you get to work with in terms of expressing ideas about what they're thinking about confronting mortality. But you also have some insights into how people as they approach the end of their life come to terms with the sense that being creative matters so much and I'm wondering if that is part of the world that you see in working with patients if this idea of this kind of drive to complete this drive to get things done seems to be more common than not or if Ivan is really unusual in the degree to which he pushes that creative spark. He's definitely unusual so just picking up on something that David said that when he got this diagnosis he could have he could have taken many paths and one of them is withdrawal and another one is self-pity and I can tell you that's a dark road that goes nowhere and he didn't do that and so as a doc another just as a preface to what I'm about to say I'm the only non-writer up here but I will throw down with anybody in this room as a doig superfan I have made a pilgrimage to White Sulphur Springs, Montana when I was 25 and it's a long way from Cleveland, Ohio to White Sulphur Springs so I'm not a casual fan and so when I sat down with the archive I got to look at this house of sky is an iconic book for me it's probably one of my top five of all time and I got to sit down with the actual last draft of his book and he was marking it this is right before it's going to the publisher still in that iconic first paragraph that first page he's still making corrections after the fourth or fifth draft and every one of them made it better as a reader I can tell you that and that was the first thing that he ever wrote and I felt very privileged to actually as a reader get to physically see that and in this dusty old file in his medical file I found a spiral bound notebook at the very end of it and I flipped through it and it was the notebook that he kept in the last stages of his life I also got to read the last thing that he ever wrote so as a reader I got to read the first thing and the last thing that he ever wrote so in answer to your question I'm just giving you that background I'm not a casual fan I was insanely curious about how he handled you know the end of his life knowing that he had a long time to think about it and it wasn't I didn't get to read the journals until much later on they weren't part of the archive so I was just going through his papers and he has these incredibly funny quips Kenny told me I couldn't swear but I'm going to quote Ivan he says multiple myeloma is like the waiting room of hell furnished with side effects and as a doc I cannot think of a better description of that disease that is perfect so when we went out to see Carol and another thing I think as a super fan you think that I think as an on-writer that all writers of Ivan's stature are these geniuses and this work just flows from their pen and you know after they've gotten done killing an elk and like you know sleeping with beautiful women all day and I had this romantic notion in my head and when you look at the archives you realize he wasn't that guy he was a nerd like me you know who kept note cards and shuffled them into other papers so I dispelled myself of that notion but I was really hoping that when we went out to see Carol I was going to you know get this big epiphany she was going to tell me okay what was this big epiphany that he had at the end of his life and I was pretty disappointed Carol's very charming and well-spoken and I pushed her pretty hard and she you know I said walked out of there and said where's my GD epiphany you know and it wasn't until a few days later of just thinking about our conversation that the epiphany was that there wasn't an epiphany because he didn't need an epiphany because he got up after he knew he was going to die he got up every day and he did the same thing he had always done he got up early he was like a blue-collar worker I mean he packed his lunch took it to the mill and he did his work and the reason there was no epiphany is because he was already living his best life and it didn't get any better for Ivan Doig and so that was a real revelation to me as a superfan and as a doc and it was only later after the journals came out that there's actually a quote from him exactly to that effect but it took me a while to get there Great thanks and so Brett you write about your own illness and you're diagnosed with this extraordinary serious disease and I think many people when they get that kind of diagnosis undergo the treatment there's a sense that things are really coming apart and yet the book you wrote is really about things coming together and your book is really quite an extraordinary story about history and memory so when does that coming together part happen? Well that's very kind of you to say that I'm not sure that I felt like it ever came together but I appreciate that I mean my project started very simply I was dying in an emergency room and I had a bunch of emergency room doctors looking over my bed saying do you have a family history of illness and I remember thinking to myself I could lecture you now for hours on state building in the 17th century throughout Asia and I couldn't tell them the first thing about my own family and so I thought you know I'll get back to you on that and so after I actually got out of the hospital I undertook a four year odyssey to better understand the medical story of my own family but to deconstruct my own body in a medical way to better understand how it was that my bone marrow and my cells and my immune system function and frankly it scared the shit out of me and I mean that quite simply I can't hardly read my own book anymore and even having this conversation right now scares me and so when I first when Jan first sent out those quotes what struck me was not the acceleration of the writing but the sort of candidness that he could approach the medical deconstruction of his own body in his pharmacological state and the discussions of the real me versus the pharmacological me and it takes a lot of courage to look into your own health that closely and to engage it and I was just struck by the degree to which he had the courage to do it and to talk about it openly in those journals I just couldn't believe it so the first thing I thought was I know from personal experience that a deep investigation into your own body can be terrifying in fact what I always think is I can't believe everybody's just not dropping dead of this stuff because the body is so complicated right? you know that's the first thing you think and so just the boldness that he could do this the second thing is and I just hope you'll indulge me for a second on that I am by training I teach Asia and so I am kind of Buddhist inclined towards these kind of things and when I started reading these quotes from Ivan's diary a quote came to mind from a 14th century monk and I think it's incredibly aproposal I'll just read it's very brief so this is by a monk by the name of Kenco who is a very wise man and he wrote this he said in all things it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting does the love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other's arms the man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled whales empty vows who spends long autumn nights alone who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house such a man truly knows what love means and that would be the second thing I'd say if we could excuse Kenco for his 14th century impulse to use a masculine pronoun what these entries revealed to me was the appreciation for the people in your life and the expressions of love for you Carol are remarkable I mean the one thing that having an experience with death or near death does is it sharpens your appreciation for the people you love and you care for and when I looked at one of the very first ones he says I told Carol through a lot of emotional choking up one of the countless things I despise about all of this but we are going to have to get used to that I don't feel I have great unachieved things I have to get to or places I must see I simply want to have as much more time with her as we can manage that really struck out as a very sincere statement yeah so can I add to that real quick so that's the quote I was actually talking about when I said I read it in the journal it sort of confirmed what Carol had said the other thing I'd say about the journals is so Kenan gave me two warnings don't swear and don't refer to Ivan you didn't get the warning? he said don't refer to Ivan as a dude but I'm going to say the dude is funny I mean you read those I was reading those journal articles and I was literally laughing out loud and I mean I thought buddy you're going to hell you're laughing at the words of a dying man but a lot of those entries are really funny and just his self-deprecating humor and his rye observations about his side effects and his sex life he's talking about being on philitimide and getting asked more about his sex life than he was since the Air Force it's just really again it's a story it's a happy story it's a joyful story I think the story about friendship is so important I'd like to turn to that briefly but just in terms of his language the way he talks about illness at one point he describes himself as a human pillbox it's incredible the way the words capture the reality of what he's trying to come to terms with but friends matter a great deal to Ivan and to you too Carol and what I'd like to do is just listen to a couple of additional readings could we get entry 2 please listen February 15th, 2007 David questioned me about the physical side of the treatment I'm going through then asked about the psychological aspect I said something about there really being no choice in girding and doing it not nearly quick headed enough to lay out the better answer that occurred to me first thing this morning that I don't have any why me in this I've always figured life coldly asks any of us why the hell not you and therefore it becomes a matter of doing the medical chores and seeing what happens so there's a a social aspect to this disease and Ivan drew and Carol both of you drew on friends I mean you didn't keep them away and I think that's an important part of the story is that they were very much a part of your lives as this disease progressed so is that something you could say maybe a couple of words about well he wouldn't have wanted his friends not to know what the medical situation was and so we at some point how early was that I think it was a couple of years in I don't think you told us right away I could check back in the journals but yeah I think it was a couple years but anyway at some reasonably early point we came to the conclusion that no we weren't going to make our social life into medical reports but Ivan particularly I think in the case of David and his wife Kate and a few other in the what I would say would be the tightest circle of our friends he would be happy to report at the start of a social occasion and then that was that then on to other things nobody be moaning I think David it was more like a report is that fair to say somebody mentioned how Ivan did not change his habits his professional habits he still went to work every day but he didn't change as a friend either and now that I'm thinking about this it never occurred to me how extraordinary that was that there was no bid for sympathy nor was there pride nor was there kind of chip on the shoulder like you know what I'm going through you'll never understand he was himself he didn't expect special treatment at all it was just but nor did he shirk from the truth so yeah it's funny it never occurred to me till now how extraordinary that was that he was himself you know fully and didn't milk it I mean God I think if I had something like this I would milk it for everything I was worth I would you know whatever I didn't do that well you know I have a hunch that some of this might have been from journalism training I'd like to hear what Todd might have to say about that but you tell it like it is you tell it true to the best of your ability I think everybody in this room will know that he did not write melodramatically and the beauty the profound beauty is the fact that he didn't write in those flourishes but the profundity of day-to-day encounters with everyday people and I don't think he ever betrayed himself in that in the way that and David maybe you can jump in because you were there as well but that being true to oneself is something that comes through one thing I wanted to just add there's an assumption when you have a famous writer like Ivan Doig that things might have come easy and you spoke about the struggle even before he got sick with some of his famous books that got rejected by publishers and I think people would be stunned to hear about that that going back to journalism and he was actually a freelance writer and you went through that at Medill as well and the fact that he was prepared through the rigors of being a writer in some ways to deal I'm just presuming here to deal with hardship in a way in the way that he wrote about that but if you could speak a little bit and share with folks here about getting some of those books for which he was most famous getting them into print the fact that they weren't a sure deal well it was particularly this House of Skye because here's this 37 year old guy who he would have been at the time writing about his family one of my best friends said who's Ivan that anybody would want to write this would want to read this you know but what Ivan did was he mapped out maybe in journalistic fashion that he he asked one of our best friends if she would mind being his agent because he didn't have an agent he hadn't had a book published so what was this guy doing well he took one of the grittiest of our friends and what she would do which she would send out four to six letters to that many publishers at a time with a sample of the manuscript for this House of Skye and began getting answers none of them saying yes but all of them sort of baffled admiration for what they were looking at but they didn't think it would be a commercial success it's just celebrated its 40th anniversary and it's still selling so much for that idea right but he simply said and he went to the old publication publisher's guide that we used at the time and he would pick out from these mainstream publishing houses associate editors that is not the editor in chief who is going to be too busy with desk work to get to pay too much attention but somebody down the line just a little bit who might be interested and it was the 13th publisher that came from an editor named Carol Hill at Harcourt in New York and she said she liked the book she's going to take it to her advisory council she'd get back to him and I think it was 10 days she did and they offered him a contract wouldn't make you rich but it was a mainstream publisher and they offered him a contract and that's the book that was nominated for the national book award so he plotted it and he stuck with it and did it in a very workman like way thank you we'll move this towards conclusion I'd like to just go around and ask the panelists for their thoughts take away lessons from these journals I mean what are we supposed to learn from this archive Brian I'm going to start with you just because you're looking at me so quizzically sort of why me I would only say that it's a good idea to keep a journal right? I mean I think maybe you would take it for granted that someone of Ivan Doig's caliber would be writing all the time and practicing and thinking but I think the art of keeping a journal has sort of fallen out of fashion a little bit but I think it's a great way to collect your thoughts to think through things in a way and one of the nice things about these entries is you're invited into that process so it just reminded me of the power of daily writing and daily thinking and I'm just not sure many of us are doing that anymore and also just to echo what Kenning said at the beginning whether you know or should know that all of this is available to you and how do I keep a journal what does a journal look like you can get into this archive online thanks to the heroic works of Professor Zuhan or colleagues and special collections I mean it's really just incredible what is there for you too, for all of us to learn from about so many facets of Ivan Doig's life I think my answer is going to be a little different than everybody else's I mean for me this guy was a dream patient I mean it's so hard as a doc to get people to articulate what they're so much of what I do in trying to diagnose disease and treat disease and figure out what's the best course of action depends on what patients tell me you know that's still the fundamental even with all the high tech stuff the MRIs, the CTs, this, that still sitting down and talking to people and saying how do you feel if you would not believe how difficult it is to extract just some of that basic information from patients and I'll tell you a body story about that afterwards but Ivan gives these incredible descriptions of what it's like to be on prednisone and what it's like to have side effects of these medications and how it's what neuropathy feels like and for me as a doc that was just priceless I mean because I I never to sort of hear that from like your literary hero and see that as a benefit to your profession that was probably one of the most striking things for me I think what struck me is something we mentioned at dinner which is the collaboration that went on with you and your husband and he was you were his best set of eyes you were there to read his manuscripts and it really offers insight into that dance that the two of you did and one of the things that that you said that he mentions about some of those triumphs of a great writing day and the fact that these guys would at the end of the day go in and have a cocktail or something standing with the sound out your window in the Olympic mountains is that you know he spent all this time in isolation writing and grinding it out and that the two of you at the end of the day could celebrate these these victories that you had even as he got sick it was really touching great thanks Todd David what about your thoughts there yeah well once again I'm not going to answer the question but whatever I was once chatting with Ivan about giving a talk and I was giving a talk at a high school in the Midwest and there was time for the Q&A and I said Ivan I got the weirdest question from one of these kids it was Mr. Laskin what's your favorite war and I was like hard to choose they're all so wonderful in their own way and I said well what about you Ivan what was one of your favorite or oddest questions and he said well I was also at a school and a kid said to me Ivan who was your first love or Mr. Doug who was your first love and he said the answer is I married her and for somebody who didn't open up a lot that was important so here she is oh thank you David well I would like to say that what Ivan and I had was a partnership we both got to do what we wanted to do he wrote and I taught and yes we did get together at the end of the day and enjoy the view out the window so but it was like that so I don't feel that I gave up anything for his writing career I think we added to each other as we went along and it worked out very well for half a century so I cannot I cannot say more than that that's wonderful Kenny I'm now going to have to turn to you or to Lisa for the final and the final video you could spend two minutes on Google type in multiple myeloma and one of the things that comes out very quickly is invariably fatal there's no cure Ivan knew that Ivan was not fooled and would not ever not face the truth but didn't talk about that and interestingly when I was at the archives and looking through the series of 3x5 cards and on one of the cards it said invariably fatal he knew that he had a death sentence it strikes me that when Ivan died he had nothing to regret except that his life was too short Ivan was he lived by his principles and that's a great beacon and we'll do this twice first I'd like to ask you to join me in thanking our wonderful panelists and next we'll take some questions from you and then we'll thank our panelists again and thank all of you but and you have the okay so I think probably it's kind of hard for us to see down here but if you are not timid and raise your hands please hi Bob I'm right in front of you so this is a question for Todd and we're talking about Ivan doing journals and archives and you run an organization now called Mountain Journal do you feel like some of this work that you're doing now is similar to what Ivan did on his own life but you're doing it for an ecosystem and you're doing it so other people have access into things that are important that aren't always discussed I think that what Mountain Journal is about is it's about looking at the west through the lens of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and I think what Ivan did extraordinarily well is looking at place-based journalism through the eyes of people who actually live there because all of the stories of landscape or stories of people and how we relate to them so thanks for the question the one thing I will say about Mountain Journal is I think that these two stories Rob's story which was really remarkable with the physician is what we try to do is tell place-based stories and that Ivan Doig has an influence the development of Mountain Journal would be a lie he certainly has and so I don't know if that answers your question but I would love to hear what Carol thinks about Ivan as someone who I don't think he called himself an environmentalist but he sure cared about the landscape and the future if you don't mind I would love to hear your thoughts well yes he certainly did and we also got out in the Pacific Northwest a lot we also hiked in the Bob Marshall we did a lot of things right out there in the landscape but Ivan was not going to preach he was going to tell it through his stories through his people and yet I have a feeling that people reading his books really do get it and that's part of why readers are drawn to his work he had a reverence for the land I mean even the hard part of it and the hard life of the people living it but he thought they were worthy people he loved the land and I hesitate to think what he would be thinking or saying if you were here today maybe we just all have to keep at it as long as any of us can and see what we can straighten up so again any other questions Mary we're going to go to the back first I guess this is directed at Carol so in his first major work this House of Sky it was an extended disquisition on death and dying but it was his father and emphysema it was a different death but I wonder I mean it was written with such a maturity and he was obviously affected by it did this in turn affect his own approach to death and dying I'm sorry I didn't quite get your last couple of sentences there how did this affect Ivan's own approach to death and dying having witnessed it so closely with his father yeah well he never particularly said anything about that relationship but undoubtedly his dad's travels over a long period of time with emphysema affected Ivan and I think matured him and perhaps in a way got him ready to handle a situation like his own you know I've never quite thought about it that way thank you so much for that question and Mary Murphy I'm going to ask a similar question in that Ivan grew up with people whose bodies were worked really hard and who knew that kind of physicality of work very much and then thinking about his grandmother his mother's early death and his father that's what I wonder too if that was a way of him learning how to deal with this and that he learned to deal with his life through language and writing and that would be the same approach he would take to his own death well I think you folks are writing the story yeah I mean he didn't sit around telling me about he didn't sit around telling me about that but as much as can be found would be found I think in the journals and in that file the medical journal file he called it in the archives and I would say if you're interested in any of that go do some reading in those you know you could start as I believe we did in getting this program going and that Jan so well did was to take excerpts from his journal beginning about the time that he was diagnosed with the MGUS specified significance that Rob is talking about there and read through some maybe even kind of skip through between then and his death in 2015 and see what you think I think as we all do there was an awful lot of it in his family of illness of hard life that sort of thing as grandmother plus her heart she lived to 80 through all the travails through all the hard work Ivan's only question when grandma came to visit was how to keep her busy so so I think all of that pertains but he never did he never wrote a book beyond this house of sky that gave a kind of global answer to it but I think you're all on the track that I find very telling so there is more time for questions during a reception so I think what we might do is in the direction of the foyer for a reception before we do so I would like to thank Kenning Arlich I'd like to thank his staff I'd like to thank the marvelous librarians who have made this evening and this archive possible my fellow associate director of the Ivan Doig Center Mary Murphy and the director of that center Susan Colleen for all of their contributions to this I'd like to thank the panelists and above all this evening I'd like to thank Carol Doig thank you