Pat J Daly, Author
Sitting Bull Run
"Perhaps the best running novel I've ever read."
A cross-country championship dream collides with a painful truth in 1970’s Long Island…
“Daly doesn’t dress things up. He lets the story breathe in its own rawness, its own weird charm. The characters aren’t perfect, and they don’t try to be. They screw up. They say the wrong things. They carry guilt like a second backpack. But they feel real. Dennis, especially, is a character I felt for deeply—a quiet resilience runs through him. And Coach Jack? A wild, profane, occasionally brilliant force of nature. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hug him or slap him.”
My Story
As recreational running picked up steam in recent decades, it was inevitable that those with literary ambitions who take to the roads would explore the logical relationship between writing and running. And so the “runner-writer” tag emerged. Among the more famous exemplars is novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who has discussed the similarities between running and writing, mainly those of solitude, discipline, and endurance. In addition, Oates has explored the rhythm of running as generating literary ideas: “The body is always the first instrument of language: we move, and then we begin to speak. We run, and then we begin to think.” Another famous runner-writer, Haruki Murakami, takes it a step further when he describes running as “a form of meditation” that leads to fictional creativity.
Pat J Daly
Author
Book Excerpts
Through the front screen window, he stared across the field to the wall of summer trees that blocked all of the parish cemetery except for scattered headstones that, flickering like birthday candles from the moon’s light, broke through on its crest.
Good God, he muttered as he stepped back to his bed and collapsed on it. If we had just left well enough alone after the picnic. Had we just stayed home!
He tossed a good long while, the night’s images crashing one into the other.
Come, sleep, come, he pled with the night.
The coach barreled through fans right up to the rope. In time to see his top kid come down the straightaway.
“C’mon, Adam Feltman,” he screamed, “you got this, dammit! Just bring it home!”
Jack Hogan knew the fan tumult drowned out his words. Still, he continued to shout encouragement.
Soon, too soon, however, he noticed Adam’s legs growing rubbery. The boy jostled for balance. Pain stretched wide on his face.
“Pat J Daly mastered the magical aura of cross country running.“
Pat J Daly
A cross-country championship dream collides with a painful truth in 1970’s Long Island…