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Blood song surges through writer's heart Ivan Doig lives in a writer's universe By BILL VARBLE Ivan Doig found himself at a potlatch party on an Alaska cruise ship that magnate Paul Allen had chartered for pals Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg and assorted Hollywood glitterati. Afloat with half the money in the known world, the professorial 59-year-old writer felt like he'd won a lottery he didn't know he'd entered. A rock band played. An American Indian man did a raven dance. A totem pole seemed to nod. Candace Bergen walked by. Doig, a white-bearded fellow, leaned against a bulkhead with his notebook -- "writing, writing." Of such stuff are writers made. The brief story was one of the stops on what Doig called "a tour through the making of books." The author of "This House of Sky" and "Dancing at the Rascal Fair" was speaking Thursday night at the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater in Medford as the fourth and final author in this year's New Chautauqua Lecture Series. The cruise ship potlatch story came up in the context of what Doig called "the blood song of the writer." In his scheme of the writing universe, that's the inner push that sometimes can take a writer into unexplored spaces. It's the third element of what Doig calls the three hearts of writing. Often cited as one of the foremost regional writers working today, Doig was born in Montana, grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front and has lived in the Seattle area for more than 30 years. His first book, "This House of Sky," (1978) was a finalist for a National Book Award. It put forth, as its subtitle promised, the landscape of a distinctly Western mind (you can't escape the weather or the geography). It was a memoir of being raised by his father and grandmother after the death of his mother when he was 6, and it elevated Doig quickly from the ranks of unknown free-lancers as it became an instant classic. His "Two Rivers" trilogy from the 1980s, "Dancing at the Rascal Fair," "English Creek" and "Ride With Me, Mariah Montana" further stamped him as a top regionalist. And that is him in "Winter Brothers," (1980) musing on the bonds between men across time and in a region. But Thursday he poked gentle fun at the "regional" tag. "All writing is regional," he said. "Tolstoy is regional." The first two hearts of writing, Doig said, are the dance of words and the sense of a home country. The first is about language, the second, a voice. Doig said he was inspired by his Scottish-American grandmother, a woman with a third-grade education, to develop an ear for what writer Norman Maclean called "the poetry under the prose." The language of his everyday characters often rises to a sort of poetry of common language, as does his own speech as he reads prepared remarks. He said literature began with people sitting around a cave telling stories and painting bison on the wall, and that today we are ``sitting together around humanity's cave." He said he's moved by "pathological diligence" to write 1,000 words a day when working on a book. What he's looking for is that blood song, and writing better than anybody has a right to. His new novel is due from Scribner this spring. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA