Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take Your Work to the Movies
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
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Sometimes when I’m done with a scene or a section in a story or chapter or essay, I like to test it by thinking about how it would look as a movie. One way to help envision this is to write the script. No, really. Turn a section of your story or chapter or essay into a movie script. Nothing fancy: just take the scene or section (something short—you don’t need to kill yourself) and imagine what the first image in its movie would be, what the first words would be and who would say them, where the action would be, how the drama would fall. If you’ve been working too much in the mode of the writer sitting at her desk and talking, you’ll find that all you’ve really got is voiceover. If you’ve been sitting and thinking, ruminating in writing, you won’t even have that. Continue reading →
Big Reed Forest Reserve
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Ktaadn from the Abol Bridge--still 2 hours north to go!
Thanks to my friend Drew Barton, the forest ecologist immortalized in my my book Temple Stream, I got to go on a trip this past weekend to the Big Reed Forest Reserve, which protects the largest remnant of old-growth forest in New England (and likely well beyond). Our guides and hosts were Nancy Sferra and Dan Grenier, who are, respectively, the Director of Science and Stewardship and the Maine Preserves Manager for the Maine chapter of the Nature Conservancy. When I hear the words old growth my mind tends to conjure up enormous trees and pinecones the size of Volkwagens, but this isn’t the Pacific Northwest, it’s Maine, tough territory for forests and people alike. Instead what we found in the reserve were more than 4500 acres of undisturbed habitats, Continue reading →
The Author Photo
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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October, 2004: unbeatable
Dave and I are practically supermodels, all the camera time we log. But leggy beauty aside, for me it’s still a painful exercise trying to get the right author photo. I knew it was coming–it’s a standard request when you have a new book in the pipeline, but Algonquin’s letter threw me into a panic, a perfectly workaday letter from the very kind publicity assistant down there in North Carolina, one Sarah Rose Nordgren. “Your author photo,” Sarah wrote (and I know she’s never said this before–this missive was for me alone), “along with a copy of the attached photo contract, should be sent to me no later than August 3rd, 2011. It’s important that we receive your photo by that date so that we can use it for all promotional materials, including our catalog and advance reader’s copies of your book. Your photo should be in color. We prefer a high-resolution digital file (it must be 300 dpi, 5×7 inches or bigger, and approximately 10 megabytes), but you can send a hard copy instead. Dress for your photo can be casual, but we prefer that you Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Kill Your Internet, or, Writing in the Time of Harrison Bergeron
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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This was going to be a short essay about distraction. It was—excuse me, what was I saying? Wait I lost my train of thought….let me take this call first…and answer this e-mail….
Harrison Bergeron
As I was saying, distraction, and the thousands of possible objects we call distractions, are an enemy of the writing life, or at least, an enemy of the effort of consistent concentration required for the creation of longer projects. To write a book of prose most of us need blocks of time where we focus on nothing but that book. These blocks of time, it seems to me, are not so different in duration than the four or five set matches going on right now at the U.S. Open. And they also require a similar focus and intensity. You don’t see Nadal checking his e-mail during changeovers. He has, as the expression goes, one thing on his mind.
It is 3:46 A.M. as I type this sentence. There are disadvantages to working at this time of day, the most obvious is that I will be tired and cranky later on, especially when I teach my two o’clock class. But there are advantages, too, the chief one being that for the next two hours no one is going to call me or interrupt me in any other way. I know that my early rising time makes me an extreme case, but we all face the same challenge of finding that block, that chunk, that slice of time when we, like Nadal, can have one thing on our minds.
It’s always been hard to find these blocks and, let’s be honest, it’s getting harder. “Death by a thousand cuts,” was how a colleague of mine described the academic life, but it’s not just the academic life, it’s every life. Leave your computer for a day or two, and despite that automatic out-of-the-office reply, you will come back to find 400 messages in your inbox. E-mails and phone calls sting and swarm like insects. And it isn’t just writing that these distractions interrupt, but anything else that requires a decent block of time—going for a hike, say, reading a book, having a conversation, eating a meal.
Profusion
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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ready for the 4-H sale
The garden’s a grocery store, this time of year. One of my great pleasures is to make meals that involve nothing but a trip down the hill, 100 feet or so and into the wild zone. I’m a chaos gardener—flowers and weeds and veggies and herbs and compost pile and big rocks and lots of sticks and a tall ribbon pole all coexisting with the million insects and a toad or two, plenty rodents, plenty slugs, a couple of snails and at least three snakes.
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Elysia is the garden girl, and if it’s not too hot she’ll spend hours with me, digging, planting, mulching, weeding, and at last harvesting.
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Hurricane Irene knocked the popcorn over, but we’ve propped it back up and it should recover—the ears are well in place, and well along. The Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Workshop
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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The Haystack stair to the ocean...
I disdained all organized writer things when I was young (in my twenties, that is), regarding them as extraneous and foolish and vain. I thought the only proper apprenticeship for a writer was to make pages on my own under the unwatching eyes of various writing gods, not Shakespeare—I thought he was a jerk for all the puns—but more like Scott Fitzgerald and Bukowski. I worked in construction and as a bartender and on a farm and played music and all of these things were the experiences I was collecting for my writing fund, real stuff, life stuff. Anything I did was writing, as I saw it. I was on the wet path, as the Buddhists call it, partying and playing and working the sentences when I saw fit and writing in fits and starts, getting better, sure, but in a terrible vacuum—aside from reading, reading. Study and devotion to a mentor seemed too much the dry path for me. And why bother, since everyone knows both paths—wet, dry—lead to enlightenment. Continue reading →
Topsail Island: A Photo Essay
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Orrin Pilkey and Me on Topsail by Coke Whitworth
After Irene passed through on Saturday I went out to Topsail Island. I blogged about it in a piece called “Believe The (Long-Term) Hype” for the Natural Resources Defense Council (and you can read that blog here. )
In the meantime I thought I’d post a couple of pictures from Saturday’s adventure. As I wrote in the piece, some of Topsail’s homes are so close to the water that they seem like they are being offered up to Poseidon, but Irene did relatively little harm. There was the usual street flooding, and the fairly feeble north-end berm had been eaten away some more, but we were not treated to the floating houses that have made this island such a dramatic player in earlier hurricane narratives. In fact, the main damage we witnessed was to gas stations, specifically to the metal awnings of gas stations. Before we even got to Continue reading →
Gold
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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There it is, the first fiery leaf at the edge of the forest, and only mid-August. And now that I’m looking, I spy several distinctly yellowing popple trees off in the distance, and a shade of purple taking over some of the grand ashes spotted through the canopy. The broken old box elders in the shedyard are all but bare. I tell myself these are stressed trees, not harbingers. But the field weeds are dying back, too, really only the golden rod in its glory, not even any monarch butterflies unfolding and drying their wings out of chrysalis: frost in Mexico three winters ago, and recovery uncertain. Continue reading →
The Perils of Irene: Will the Shack Survive?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The question on everyone’s mind this morning–the one that Jim Cantore has already asked in stentorian tones on the weather channel and that has Mr. Obama making a frowny face up on the Vineyard–is will the shack survive?
“We don’t really care about Gessner’s house,” said a local official who refused to be named. “We don’t even really care that much about his life. But that shack is an important local landmark. We will do everything we can to protect it.”
Some locals expressed anger toward the storm for seeming to make a beeline toward the famous writing shack. “It’s like it has a vendetta,” said a guy in a hat. Other locals, bitter folk, expressed resentment that so much media attention was being focused on an 8′ by 8′ plywood shed. “Human lives are at stake here,” one woman whined.
President Obama was said to be heard wondering if parts of My Green Manifesto were written in the shack. Secret Servicmen assured him it was not, but, coincidence or not, soon after The President issued a state of emergency for North Carolina. Meanwhile, despite Governor Bev Perdue’s order to evacuate the shack, Gessner has stayed put.
“Fuck Ya,”he said. I’m riding this one out. I’m going down with the ship.”
Sadly, despite other conscientious preparations, including sending his wife and daughter inland to his sister’s house in Chapel Hill, he somehow managed to neglect that most vital of hurricane supplies–beer. At his news conference this morning he admitted, to gasps from the crowd, that he only had three Ranger IPAs.
Still, at the moment, Gessner, remains highly caffeinated and relatively happy. In fact, he has decided to spend the morning writing and watching the wind build as birds shoot across the marsh.
“It’s peaceful,” Gessner said. “Except for Cantore yakking away outside my screen door.”
Bad Advice Wednesday: Break Your Book Out Into the World
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This post is about ambition. It’s a scary word, no doubt about it. It’s a word a lot of writers tip-toe around, though it’s always there, lurking nearby. As others have said, too much or too little can doom a writer; you need the right formula or at least the right balance. For some, grand ideas about the work, and the way the work will make its way into the world, can paralyze. This, I think, is particularly true of young writers, since it is hard to take those first tentative, stumbling steps while your mind is leaping ahead to future acrobatic feats.
But this is not a warning about ambition to young writers. It is instead a warning about not enough ambition to not-so-young writers. In fact, if this post were a ski run, and this post had an actual post, with a sign on that post, it would be marked, not with a blue circle but with a square, or maybe even with a black diamond. The type of ambition I’m talking about today is not about visions of glory, or maybe it is but a very specific sort of vision of glory, which is to say a vision of glory for your book, your project. Because there are times when we all play it too safe, when we get too comfortable within a particularly form, a genre and Continue reading →
