Darrin Doyle
Darrin Doyle was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He has worked as a paperboy, a janitor, a mover, a telemarketer, a door-to-door salesman, a Kinko's Copy Consultant, a porn store clerk, a pizza delivery guy, a prep cook, a magazine store clerk, a technical writer, a freelance newspaper writer, an English teacher in Japan, and finally, a professor and an author.
Darrin has a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do and wishes he had stuck with it a little longer to get the danged black belt.
Darrin hoards and plays lots of musical instruments: guitar, piano, drums, mandolin, banjo, bass, ukelele, and a diatonic 4-string stick dulcimer.
He lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan and teaches at Central Michigan University.
He knows what skeletons do.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
Absolutely! If I ever stop feeling imposter syndrome, I should probably quit, because feeling like an outsider, like you have to prove yourself, is an excellent motivator. Whenever I read books by authors that I admire, I feel like I come up short: Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, Revolutionary Road and Easter Parade by Richard Yates, pretty much anything by Tony Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Bernard Malamud— I could go on and on. I read passages and get stabbed with overwhelming admiration and panic, positive that I can never measure up to such greatness. Then I remind myself that there’s no objective standard for greatness, no absolute measure for belonging. And most importantly, this isn’t a competition. My art has value; my art serves a purpose. We live in such a competition culture that it’s sometimes tough to remember that in this game there are only winners; we can all participate in the creation of our narratives. Leave the comparisons to sports.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
I love this question. Like many people, I feel a pressure to finish every book I start, maybe because I must have picked it for a reason, so it must be something wrong with me if I don't complete it. But with age and time comes a different viewpoint. As you said, not all books are for all readers, and time is precious. So if I don't find myself invested in the story by page 50 or so, I'm OK with bailing on it. It's still painful, and I'm still weirdly hesitant to do it, because I want to give all books a chance—after all, these were written by somebody, and I'm a writer, and I would like people to stick with my books as well. However, if people are stopping my books after 50 pages, I'm OK with that. I'd rather they don't torture themselves! And you can't please everyone all the time. Nor should you try.
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
I'll start this with a disclaimer that I love big cities. I lived in Osaka, and I've been to Tokyo and other cities in Japan. I've been to New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Toronto, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Auckland, and more. However, if I had to choose, I would be most at home out in the woods, with pine trees and hills and rivers and wildlife, not a single person to be seen. Both cities and rural destinations can fill the soul, but nothing resets me or brings me joy quite like spending time in nature. I love to take long hikes, to sit under the stars with a campfire; I find stillness that way.
Is there another profession you would like to try?
Piggybacking off that last answer, I’d love to be a Park Ranger, preferably at a large National Park like Glacier, Yellowstone, or Yosemite. To be able to have these beautiful locations as my “office,” so to speak, would be amazing. Plus, I would love to be involved with educating the public on the value of these natural spaces.
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?
I would create a museum of horror movie makeup. I’ve been a huge fan of horror movies since I was a kid, and I subscribed to (and still subscribe to) Fangoria magazine, which focuses on not only the movies but the makeup involved. I don’t care so much about memorabilia – I don’t want Freddy Krueger’s glove of knives or Jason’s hockey mask – but give me the severed hand from Evil Dead 2, the mechanical Regan with the spinning head from The Exorcist, the spider/head creature from John Carpenter’s The Thing, the exploded stomach from Alien. My museum wouldn’t be for the squeamish!
