I first met Cliff Doerksen in January 2003, when he came to the Reader as an assistant editor and took up residence in the office next to mine. Before too long I realized what wicked laughs were to be had inside that office, with the door firmly sealed and no one on the premises safe from his razor-sharp judgments (except me, I think). Later on, after Cliff had quit the paper and begun writing freelance capsule reviews for the movie section, I got a chance to edit him and realized what a splendid talent he was. Readers already know his work was brilliant, insightful, and gut-laugh funny, but they may not understand, as an editor would, his formidable control of his craft. His sentences were so elegantly structured that he could swan dive off them into the most arcane vocabulary or the funkiest, most vivid turns of phrase. Reading Cliff—who died on Friday at age 47—I never knew exactly where he was going to take me; every paragraph was like a college road trip, bound for adventure and possibly big trouble.
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Cliff made his first appearance in the Reader as a letter writer, responding to a March 2001 story about the traffic woes of bicycle messengers. Reading his letter now, it reminds me of those old westerns in which a mysterious gunslinger wanders into the local saloon and instantly makes a fearsome reputation for himself: “The funny thing about this article is that prior to reading it, I was inclined to partially exonerate scary bike messengers as individuals, apportioning at least some of the blame for their behavior to the rules of the rat race,” he wrote. “Now, however, I have learned that their aggressive riding practices are less a matter of economics, more the reflection of a grotesque subculture of narcissism and self-delusion.”
But for all his literary bloodlust, Cliff will be remembered by those who knew him personally as an adoring and delighted father. One of the bigger surprises of his publishing tenure at the Reader was a brief series of offbeat parenting pieces (“Remote Fatherhood,” “How to Be an iPod Dad,” “Further on How to Be a Remote Father”) that described his struggle to keep six-year-old Gladys, the apple of his eye, focused on movies and music that wouldn’t drive him around the bend. Why suffer through an endless loop of Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, he reasoned, when the child is just as captivated by 2001: A Space Odyssey? “Before I take this any further,” Cliff hastened to add, “I want to make clear that I’m not indulging myself in any Neal Pollack-style Alternadad bullshit here, nor crowing about how unbelievably brilliant my progeny is (although she is, of course, unbelievably brilliant). I’m talking about issues of stark survival, from a viewpoint of narrowest self-interest.” Thank you, Mister Rogers.
