Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday: Decision Time, MFA
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 21 comments
My Alma Mater, Graduate, at least
I remember waking in the middle of the night, mid-April 1986, wondering where my life was going to go. I’d applied to five MFA programs all around the country, no great logic in my choices (which were strongly geographical, but one) and swung between total confidence and total despair. I was 33 and the idea was to change my life. The letters came in one-by-one. Okay, Montana! I’m in. I’m going. That would be wonderful. I knew Montana well. Or, holy shit, Arizona, which came next. Okay, definitely Arizona, though it was Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Guest Contributor Joshua Bodwell
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
This Won't Hurt A Bit
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This piece by MWPA director and all-around good guy Joshua Bodwell appeared originally in Maine Ahead, and speaks directly to business leaders, nice idea: Hire a writer! And of course Bill is available for any type of surgery. Bring your own hospital gown. Bill has a Leatherman and a hack saw. Dave is in charge of anesthesia. Rates are competitive with the best garages.
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Please, Hire a Writer
My pal Bill Roorbach is an exceptional storyteller. He is descriptive yet concise on the page, and perfectly meandering when he shares a story over a beer. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Circuit
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 23 comments
An Early Circuit
Part of the writing day for me is a circuit. This has been true no matter where I’ve lived, and I’ve lived a lot of places since I started writing seriously. The country circuit is the one I’m on now–every morning out on skis at this time of year, or walking in the summer, or maybe riding a bike, sometimes swimming. The idea is a similar or the same route each day, preferably a loop (no backtracking), one that takes me through my thoughts as surely as through the woods or through the streets of whatever given city. The first twenty minutes are often a tumult of spare Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beginnings
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
Today’s guest post is by Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory (Stories). He’s at work on The Sexual Lives of Missionaries (a novel). And he’s an all-around good guy. Like Bill, he works all night.
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Beginnings
I. Bad Advice
At Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, when someone offers “bad advice,” the advice that follows is usually pretty good advice. The phrase “bad advice” is armor, because you know how it goes. First, you offer good and useful advice, and then somebody gives you the one example of why the greatest story anyone has ever read would be a terrible story if the writer followed your good and useful advice. And then somebody else puts on a black beret and lights a cigarette and talks about how all true art is boundary-breaking, and all true artists would never accede to the tyranny of conformity. Then the open mic night begins, and somebody starts beating the bongos, and somebody else yells abstractions into a microphone and uses the word “poetry” a lot. Three friends in the front row say, “This performance really flows,” and the four drunk guys at the bar watch the basketball game, which is, let’s face it, the better of the two shows. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Thisness of a That
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 16 comments
My mind at work
Metaphor is the elemental condition of language. English teachers forever have been saying, “A simile is a comparison using like or as, and a metaphor is a comparison not using like or as.” That’s simple and plain, but it’s not quite right. I’ll buy the old definition for a simile, but a metaphor—wow!—a metaphor is something enormously greater than allowed for by Mr. Bottomlifter back in ninth grade. First of all, a simile is just a kind of metaphor. A symbol is a Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday, Superbowl Edition: VINCE WILFORK, C’EST MOI
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 11 comments
Monica Wood is today’s special guest star. She is the author of Any Bitter Thing, Ernie’s Ark, My Only Story, Secret Language, the Pocket Muse series for writers, and the forthcoming When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine.
VINCE WILFORK, C’EST MOI
Football, like all sport, teems with metaphor, boasting a long, tedious tradition of Teaching Young Men About Life. Agony, ecstasy, teamwork, character-building, yadda-yippity-yadda. But for those of us who are a) already built, characterwise; b) old enough to have absorbed our allotted portion of agony, thank you; or c) female, football is all about the glam and glitter of the offense.
Behold the snap, the hike, the bullet pass flying straight to the steely midsection of a wide receiver! Behold the gorgeous spirals! The gazelle-like runs! The circus catches in the end zone! No wonder these guys get all the glory, all the press, all the endorsements, all the girls. The quarterback and his posse: bestsellers of the Astroturf. For them the crowd chortles, it caws, it spills its beer, it waves many misspelled signs. What’s not to love?
Henry Miller’s Commandments
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 20 comments
A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932. It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing. And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject. [here’s a great interview with him in The Paris Review] Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Memory Game
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 17 comments
Bill and friends, August, 1972#
One of the many curious things about the act of writing is the way it can give access to the unconscious mind. And in the hidden parts of consciousness lie not only hobgoblins and neurotic glimmers, but lots of regular stuff, the everyday stuff of memory. The invisible face of your grade school bully is in there, somewhere, and the exact smell of the flowers on vines in your grandma’s Continue reading →
Read Local!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
I was sitting here musing the other night, and mulling (my friend Peter Campion told me on the same night that mulling refers to the medieval practice of heating an iron rod or poker white-hot and plunging it into your alcoholic beverage—instant boil, and instant vaporization of the alcohol, and so an efficient delivery of your musing fluid), that is, I was sitting here somewhat mildly fluthered (Irish for shitfaced, which I realize is a kind of absolute—I mean, what could “mildly shitfaced” actually mean?), anyway, sitting here pondering among and amid my bookshelves, and I thought, Think how far these books had to come to get here! Published all over the world, printed even moreso, Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday (Creative Nonfiction: What Kind of Roast Chicken IS This, Anyway?)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
Eat This Image!
Andrea Zeeman, a very sweet and gentle friend of mine was, back in the day, a food stylist. Not a chef, not a cook, not a sandwich maker. What she did was prepare food to be photographed—whole menus for food magazines, sample dishes for cookbooks, convincing chef’s creations for Hollywood. She was brilliant at her work and made a good living because she was indispensable. And the reason the likes of Gourmet Magazine couldn’t live without her was that even the most beautiful, most appetizing dishes photographed as they were, fresh out of the oven, no matter how renowned the chef, looked . . . plain. And sometimes ugly. Or even sickening. Roasted chickens—plump and Continue reading →
