Cocktail Hour
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Innocents and Others,” by Dana Spiotta
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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The tumultuous ’60s and their aftermath were occasion for a seismic cultural shift, a ‘subversion of the dominant paradigm,’ in the parlance of the times. Few novels have come close to capturing the mercurial complexity and staying power of this period. Roth’s American Pastoral nibbled at the edges, while Susan Choi’s American Woman offered a fascinating glimpse of the radical left… and then there was Eat the Document, a haunting National Book Award nominee by Dana Spiotta, a tale of two radical survivors of the chaos of those times whose lives intersect again, years later, after they have re-assimilated into mainstream culture… as though that were possible. Continue reading →
Table for Two: Debora Black talks with Steve Almond about Football, Hate Mail, Life, and Art
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Debora: Steve you’re everywhere—The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The New York Times Magazine’s Riff, The Rumpus online magazine, and you host the Dear Sugar podcasts with Cheryl Strayed. You are into journalism, fiction, life advice, and politics. You are Football, candy, rock and roll, hate letters, open letters, writing strategies, and book reviews. What is your mission as a writer, what impulses drive your work?
Steve: Oh, I’m like the rest of you suckers. I have this persistent dream that I’ll build a bridge of love to the rest of the species. For the most part, I chase my obsessions down. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Believe What You Think
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Actual photograph of Jesus dancing with the Disney kids
A great place for a personal essay to start is with a long-cherished belief. Like that vitamin C helps colds, or that Jesus wasn’t married, or that the ocean is too vast to harm, or that such-and-such a writer is great or horrible, or that such-and-such type of music is boring, or that such-and-such city sucks. And on and on. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Ancient Minstrel,” by Jim Harrison
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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During a lifetime of obsessive reading, there are certain authors whose new work merits an immediate trip to the bookstore for a hardcover copy… Jim Harrison is on that short list and now graces us with a new collection, The Ancient Minstrel. The trilogy of novellas is deeply, richly satisfying in a manner that only Harrison can conjure.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Avoid Literary Postpartum Depression
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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So for weeks, months, maybe years you have been pushing toward the end of the book you are writing. It has been your main goal, your driving purpose. Not a few times each day you fantasize about being done. What could be better? It sounds like heaven.
And this morning, miracle of miracle, you have finally finished. You’re done! Maybe you will drink some champagne and tell some people and try to make an occasion of it. But maybe you also feel, instead of elation, a kind of depression setting in. Immediately. What the hell is this?
What is the root of this strange depression? It is emptiness. It turns out that all this time, even when you were griping about it and dreaming of the end, this book was keeping you full. And while you thought there was nothing you wanted more than to be done with the book, without it your life feels empty. The book has filled up your days, even if you only work on a it for a couple of hours in the morning. And even if you don’t know you are, you are Continue reading →
Paperback Writer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The Paperback is due out in the world on March 14 (Birthday eve). Got some readings coming up in Boston (March 8: Emerald Conservancy with Dan Driscoll/March10: Waltham Land Trust with Dan also), Tucson (March 12: Tucson Festival of Books), California (April 1:Book Passage in Corte Madera /April3: Henry Miller Library in Big Sur).
Please Give to the Jason Bradford Memorial Fund!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Please give to the Jason Bradford Memorial Fund, which will help his family with final expenses [only two more days!]
Click HERE to go to the donation site.
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Poet and teacher Jason Alexander Bradford, age 28, of Center Point, IA passed away on Tuesday, January 19, 2016, at New Hanover Regional Medical Center after a lifelong battle with Muscular Dystrophy. Continue reading →
Anxious Bode Loves Paris (Despite Anxious Times)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Sunday Sermon
comments: 1 comment
Thierry Kauffmann, aka Anxious Bode
Bonjour! It’s me, Anxious Bode. I’m having French roast at my favorite
cafe, in the Paris airport. I’m on my way to New York. That’s the
truth. Many writers write to access a reality deeper than reality
itself. That’s my street address, reality deeper than reality. I write
to reach the surface of things. Pardon my levity, but the joy of
actually flying is hard to resist. But for you, readers of my Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Many years ago, as I was dipping my toes into the teaching profession, I wrote the following: “Between the campus where I attended graduate school classes and the school where I was student teaching was a large city park. I would sometimes mention my walks through the park to my students (who were all brown or black), describing the welcome sight of the spring’s first crocuses or the sense of wonder that came while watching birds gather material for their nests. One day James, one of my students, interrupted me: ‘Why do you keep talking about that park? Don’t you know that park’s not for us? We’re not welcome there. That’s a park for white people.‘ “ Excerpted from Becoming (Other)Wise, “Notes From a New Teacher.” Continue reading →
