Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Journey Years
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
Bill at the forge
Dave has talked in an earlier spasm of bad advice about the 10,000 hours an apprentice at anything must put in. Now, perhaps, it’s time to talk about the artist’s or writer’s journeyman years, or better, journeyperson years, or better yet, just Journey Years. These are the professional years after your apprenticeship has been served, the cruelly harder but perhaps much more rewarding years. A friend says that after apprenticeship (after, say, the MFA is done, or once the first book is out there, or whatever marks the transition for you in your particular set of circumstances), that after the apprenticeship comes something he Continue reading →
The Meaning of Lance
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
To lose a testicle is to lose a friend.
I wrote that sentence about twenty years ago, soon after moving out to Colorado in the wake of going through an operation and radiation for testicular cancer in Worcester, Ma. A book about my cancer experience poured out of me (and to be honest I haven’t stopped writing hard since.) Soon I also started biking, mostly up steep hills.
Not much later a more famous case of testicular cancer made the headlines. Lance Armstrong also did a little biking after he lost a ball. About ten years ago I wrote, but never published, the essay below about Lance…..it’s far too long for a post so you are excused from reading it if you are busy. Just skim! These days I am more cynical about Lance, and the possibility of his doping, than I was when I wrote the piece, but I still think there is something archetypal about his return from near death.
Table for Two: An Interview with Lea Graham
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
comments: 1 comment
Crushed in Galicia (photo Jen O'Leary)
Lea Graham is a traveler. Fluent in Spanish, and a poet to reckon with, she also speaks wine. Her first book of poems, Hough and Helix, has just been published by No Tell books, and it is a wonder, a confluence of image and story and meaning and mood. I first met Lea in Worcester, Massachusetts when we were both teaching there (she at Clark, I at Holy Cross), and we had meals together from time to time and good conversation. So this “Table for Two” isn’t entirely a fantasy, though we’ll make free with the location:
Lea, in answer to my query: “A beach in Cadiz (the oldest Western city, you know, because of the Phoenician trade route, I believe). We’ll eat tortitas de camarones (small thin crispy omlettes with tiny prawns), calamares en su tinta (squid in its ink), all kinds of shellfish including sea urchin, crab and lobster… Continue reading →
Classic Bill: “Into Woods”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
comments: 8 comments
Dave and Poppy, October 12, 2011
Gardening one day in the spring of 1992, first year in Maine, I looked at my dirty and freshly blistered hands, and thought of my days in construction. Idea for an essay. I wrote the words “my hands” on a seed packet and the packet went into the ideas folder. Another idea I’d had was to devote Saturday mornings not to the novel I was working on (eventually to be The Smallest Color) but to shorter work. I went into the ideas file–a bunch of paper scraps and napkins and coasters and pulled out that seed packet. The piece didn’t start out being about my father and Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Write Scenes!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 13 comments
Okay now, you’re saying, I thought the “bad” in bad advice was ironic, but after reading your title I’m thinking maybe what you’re pushing here really is bad bad advice. And I will admit that maybe today’s title overstates a bit, and that I was trying to catch your eye…..But, I mean it. Or partly mean it. What I really mean is “Don’t Write Scenes Exclusively.”
As someone who has read thousands of workshop pieces, both fiction and non-, and who has read over a hundred theses, I can say that there is a certain sameness to the work. Not that the writing and themes and events aren’t wonderfully varied and full of both possibility and dazzling writing. It’s just that almost 99.9% of that writing is in one mode and that mode is the minute by minute, often second by second, dramatic unfolding of events that we have come to call scene. Somewhere along the line the “Show, Don’t Tell” police got hold of America’s young writers and scared them straight. Straight out of summary, exposition, condensed thought, essayistic pace, and idea. Straight out of the notion that time in a book can be manipulated, pushed in and pulled out like an accordion, so that one important event might take ten pages and another a sentence. And straight away from the idea that variety is one of the deepest pleasure in any art, and that reading back to back blocks of same-sized scenes does not constitute variety. Continue reading →
Table for Two: An Interview with Patricia Henley
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
comments: 1 comment
Patricia Henley with Jack
Patricia Henley has hiked a long way to get where she is, and yet she’s someone who knows how to stay put. She’s taught at Purdue for 24 years, for one example, and she’s just kept writing, even when the weather got rough. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, three short story collections, two novels, a stage play, and numerous essays. Her first book of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star (Graywolf, 1986), was the winner of the Montana First Book Award. Her first novel, Hummingbird House (from the once brilliant house of literary discovery, MacMurray & Beck), was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999. She’s kept writing stories (Glimmer Train, Seattle Review), and recently her trail crossed that of the writer Victoria Barrett, also an editor (Freight Stories, Puerto del Sol, good lit mags in which Patricia has published), who had just started Engine Books, a new press dedicated to finding the best fiction and to getting it out in the world. And, in a triumph for the press and author alike, Engine Books has just published Patricia’s 4th collection of stories, Other Heartbreaks. By email, I asked Patricia where in the whole world she’d like to sit for our interview if we could actually be together. “Camping,” she said, or rather, “Camping,” she typed. So instead Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Just Write
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
This is no time to get ready!
My old grad student and now friend Connie writes from beautiful New Zealand to say, “Help! How do I get back to my book?” I know her book. She’s been working on it for some years, and it’s already really good, the story of how she ended up where she is (small jets are involved, and an ad in the newspaper, also running away cold from a certain husband and falling in with a kind of sky pirate, now dead.) And then someone I’ve never met, Roger K., writes to say, “I’m just about started on THE BOOK.” This is not the first email from Roger K. We’ve been back and forth for years. As a former roadie, he has access to Mick Jagger. Well, not actually Mick Jagger, but someone just as big whose name I shouldn’t say so as not to give away Roger’s proposed project. Notebook after notebook of interviews and confidences and inside dope to make your knees wobble, also permission to use it all! Written permission. Just about started! And from a friend, call her Ishmaela, the author of several good novels, Continue reading →
