Wonder Is a Lovely Place to Be: 365 Days of Wit, Wisdom, and Irrepressible Imagination

Wonder Is a Lovely Place to Be gathers 365 essays, poems, and sketches from Brian Doyle, revealing his keen eye for grace and an imagination shaped by his Catholic faith. Drawing from both beloved and previously unpublished works, this collection invites readers to notice holiness woven through ordinary, everyday moments.

With a keen eye for detail--the slap of flip-flops on pavement, a kindergartener released to the playground with arms flung open and untied shoes, a no-look pass in a neighborhood pickup basketball game--Doyle shapes small moments into stories and aims them straight at the human heart. His writing is a summons to live with wide eyes and open hearts in a fragile world: "Do not tire, do not despair, . . . be relentless, be merry, . . . be alert, be attentive--for there is holiness all around us like an ocean." In Doyle's vision, holiness lives in pain as much as it does in joy, and "no moment is mundane, every moment is a miracle, every moment is a meal."

Doyle wrote everywhere--on envelopes, inside book jackets, on the backs of menus--driven by the conviction that we are "here so briefly" and called, each day, to "see clear" and "bring [our] best selves to bear." Some of these fragments became essays published around the world; many others remained scattered across his desk like driftwood from a life immersed in language. Now his wife, Mary Miller Doyle, gathers his writing--including never-before-seen stories, poems, sketches, and even cartoons--into a daily collection that invites readers into his sacred imagination on all year long.

A born story catcher, Brian Doyle was a master of the brief essay, the tight poem, and the achingly beautiful anecdote. Though the magazine editor, novelist, and author of One Long River of Song and A Book of Uncommon Prayer died of brain cancer at sixty, readers continue to return to his work for the way it reveals the joyful, wild mystery of holiness humming through all things.

Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was a best-selling and award-winning author who served as editor of Portland Magazine from 1991 to 2017.

Doyle wrote many books of fiction, essays, and poems, including A Book of Uncommon Prayer, which was named one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2014 by Spirituality & Practice and received an honorable mention in the spiritual softcover books category from the Catholic Press Association. Doyle's novels include Mink River, The Plover, Chicago, and The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World. His book Martin Martenwon the 2016 Leslie Bradshaw Award for Young Adult Literature and the 2017 John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing.

Doyle was honored with several book awards from the Catholic Press Association, the Christopher Award, three Pushcart Prizes, the University of Notre Dame's Rev. Robert F. Griffin Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award. However, his most important award and blessing was being a dad.

Doyle's work appeared in a number of publications, including Orion, The American Scholar, The Sun, The New York Times, Harper's, Commonweal, America, U.S. Catholic, The Christian Century, National Catholic Reporter, First Things, and Give Us This Day. His essays have been reprinted in several anthologies.

Mary Miller Doyle worked for nearly a decade as a teaching artist with Children's Healing Art Project (CHAP), a nonprofit organization that remains close to her heart and celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2026. She can now be found painting in her Portland studio. Mary and her husband, Brian, shared thirty exuberant years of marriage and were blessed with three children.