Jack Driscoll

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

~Raymond Carver, Late Fragment

Around four o'clock in the morning of June 25th this year, just as the first waking birds began their dawn chorus, at an hour when, in years past, he would have been just coming in from fishing all night for steelhead in northern Michigan's Platte River, or just heading out in his Boston Whaler to troll for lake trout in East Bay or for big brown trout and Coho salmon out of Frankfort harbor, John Francis Driscoll-known to everyone as Jack, but also known within a closer circle of acquaintances as Jackie Boy, Mr. Famous, Leon Hammerhead, Himself, and half a dozen equally respectful sobriquets-died peacefully in the comforting company of his twin brother Toby and sister-in-law Debbie, his nephew Jay, and his beloved and loving daughter Cate at his home in Mystic, Connecticut. The cause was cancer (pancreatic). He was 78 years old.

According to Henry James, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost." That would be Jack. He possessed exacting powers of attention, and the talent to translate his observations-of people (both real and imagined), of the natural world, of the tidal fluctuations of the human heart-into poems and stories of uncanny precision and persuasive power. "Make believe" had, in Jack's practice, a doubly imperative function-the 'make believe' of invented stories, and the 'Make believe!' of the writer's obligation to his audience. In four volumes of poetry, four novels, and four short story collections, including the award-winning Wanting Only to Be Heard and, most recently, Twenty Stories: New and Selected, Jack established a reputation as one of the premier writers of his generation, his distinctively compassionate voice earning him the praise of such luminaries as William Stafford, Mark Strand, Stephen Dunn, Jim Harrison, Charles Baxter, Stuart Dybek, Antonya Nelson, Pete Fromm, Barry Lopez-the list is long.

Jack was a gifted storyteller off the page as well, his congenital Irish delight in talking for the sheer fun of it always on the ready. Moreover, he loved interacting with all kinds of people, almost Whitmanesque in his ability to talk easily with people who do the hard work of the world, as well as with those who labor at more intellectual endeavors. In conversation he was witty as well as wise, as given to goofy confabulations as to more somber reflections. He often told stories to those closest to him about his early days in Holyoke, Massachusetts, rehearsing his memories of a childhood that included a stint on the Nick's Nest Pee-wee baseball team, a job as an ice cream truck driver, and the especially memorable occasion when he and his twin brother took from their father's collection of memorabilia a baseball signed by Babe Ruth and pounded it to dust one summer afternoon, hitting fungoes to one another in a vacant lot. And then there was that time, right after high school, he drove a Harley-Davidson, or in another version of the saga, as Jack sometimes told it, hitchhiked with a stray cat on his shoulder out to San Francisco at the height of the hippie migration to Haight-Ashbury, took one look at the scene and turned right around and hitchhiked (or it may be motorcycled) home. Jack was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story, and to hear him repeat these tales over the years was to be witness to virtuosities of gratuitous invention, the tale growing taller and somehow truer with each re-telling.

But despite his acclaim as a writer, Jack always took greater pride and satisfaction from his life as a teacher, first at Interlochen Arts Academy, where he was a founder of the Creative Writing Program, which he guided from 1975 until his retirement in 2008, and subsequently in the low-residency MFA Program in Writing at Pacific University in Oregon. Jack always understood that teaching, properly practiced, is a pastoral vocation: a calling to shepherd young hearts and minds through the bewilderments of this world toward that intimate and nurturing clarity of thought and feeling that would sustain them throughout their adult lives. Of this pursuit he was not only an acknowledged but a revered master-as is evidenced by the surge of condolences received from former students expressing their affection and gratitude for the teacher who was one of the most significant, if not the most significant influences on their lives, helping them to fashion for themselves a coherent vision of a world they could inhabit with confidence and compassion.

Jack lost his beloved wife Lois in 2021 and that loss left him for a time disoriented, her presence having been so vital to his happiness for more than 45 years. Fortunately-one might say miraculously-only a few years earlier, Jack was contacted by a daughter from a previous relationship, and who had been placed up for adoption as a baby. They became instantly devoted to each other, and Jack took great joy in being a father and grandfather to his daughter's, Cate's, children.

Jack knew stuff. And what he knew allowed him access to the hidden stories of his characters, secrets hidden even from themselves, which he disclosed for us, revealing more vividly than they could themselves the worlds in which they lived, the very world in which we live as well. The very world in which he lived, lived the life he chose, with honor, a wondrous clarity, and a heart that never stopped giving.

Jack is survived by his daughter, Cate (Robert) Hotchkiss; two grandchildren, John and Amelia Hotchkiss; twin brother Toby (Debbie) Driscoll; three sisters, Gail Deliso, Maura Driscoll Ditmar, and Bean Driscoll; and many nieces, nephews, and friends. He was preceded in death by the love of his life, Lois Larsen Driscoll.

A celebration of life will be held at a later date.

This obituary was lovingly written by Jack's best, longtime friends, Mike Delp and Nick Bozanic.