Cocktail Hour
Investigation
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
comments: 7 comments
Talus House at Bandolier National Monument
“Investigation” appeared in The Iron Horse Literary Review 12.6/13.1, “The Fiction Issue,” which appeared this past spring. The fiction issue is a great number with some terrific writers, highly recommended, and comes with a taxonomy. That is, the editors have divided their offerings into sub-categories: the short story, flash fiction, one-sentence stories (Michael Martone has a great example here), the long story, and the novel, excerpted. “Investigation,” at 8300 words, fell into their long-story category, but folks, it’s still a short story! As are all the others except the novel excerpts. I was awfully happy to be in such wonderful company. Lee Martin, who succeeded me at Ohio State and is now the MFA program director there (but more importantly a wonderful writer of both fiction and nonfiction), emailed last summer and asked if I had a story to submit. As it happened, I’d just finished the one I’m posting here. The idea for “Investigation” came from a place I love, simple as that. I wanted to set a story there, and this is what emerged. At first it was just a kind of strange love story, but in subsequent drafts the politics turned up, and welcome. Continue reading →
Elvis Costello at the State
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 12 comments
Months ago Juliet bought tickets for Elvis Costello at the recently renovated State Theater down in Portland (our Portland, the one in Maine), and last night was the show. We drove a couple of hours behind logging trucks, got a fine dinner (I added a gin and tonic and club soda or two to the mix), and then to the State. It’s a pretty relaxed place, and we walked around a while looking at the renovation. It’s a pretty clever approach, if a lot of cement, and clearly done on a slim budget, but the theater was preserved and now offers a steady stream of concerts. It seats about 15oo people, nice. Very nice, actually, since the place shut down in 2006, slated for demolition, rescued by saints, just reopened last fall. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take Down your 10,000 Hours
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
Most of the talks I gave over the last month were Environmental with a capital E. But one was more specifically about writing, given to some young writing students, and in it I gave an overview of the first decade of my own writing career (“career” being a word I wouldn’t have used, even loosely, back then). That chapter of my writing life could be aptly titled Banging My Head Against the Wall. I wrote two novels, the first better than the second, that were big, clunky, and ultimately unpublished. When I finished each novel, I sent them along to 5 or 6 big New York publishers and they sent back the obligatory form letter rejections. One editor wrote a personal letter, that included the phrase “You are a writer of considerable talent,” a phrase that I clung to like a lifeline through my (roaring) 20s. I revised the book along the lines of her criticisms and sent it back to her, only to get a form letter in return. Continue reading →
A Sad Ending, or at Least Compost
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Well, our experiment with incubating hen’s eggs has ended at the compost pile. Four weeks and you know it’s been too long, though Elysia stayed patient and true. Our confidence was bolstered around the two-week mark, when we candled the eggs and saw all the positive signs we were supposed to in at least half the eggs. But in the last week we had several mishaps. First, the light bulb in our makeshift styrofoam-cooler incubator burned out. Next time around, I’ll install a car alarm to go off when this happens, but we didn’t know how long the eggs had gone dark. They weren’t freezing cold, as Continue reading →
Wuthering
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 5 comments
So I spent some time in the last month on Cape Cod and I also spent some time re-reading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. These two facts conspired to get me thinking about a novel I’ve been trying to write for the last 26 years, a novel that is a family melodrama set on the bluff on a fictional neck on Cape Cod. I’d love to start it right now, to take the advice I’ve been giving you, dear readers, on Bad Advice Wednesdays, and plunge right in. But in this case it is other writing that is getting in the way of writing, and the likelihood is that my novel will have to slumber again, at least until December when school ends for the term……
In the meantime I’ve been immersed in Bronte’s miserable, beautiful book. It really is horrible in a way, specifically the way that Heathcliff, regarded as a grand romantic character by those who have not actually opened the pages, sets about systematically destroying the two families who have wronged him. Despite his sadism, I’ve always been a sucker for a good primal character, and he certainly is that. He is described by his lover Cathy herself as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation….a fierce pitiless wolfish Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday (Thursday Edition): Take a Break
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: Comments Off on Bad Advice Wednesday (Thursday Edition): Take a Break
MacDowell Colony Cabin
I’m in New Hampshire as I write, enjoying the annual Roorbach family gathering at the lake. Five or six hundred of us, including container loads of Elysia’s cousins, have climbed Mt. Cardigan, eaten large amounts of everything, swum, fished, sailed, sung, rope-swung, toasted marshmallows, thrown horseshoes, and etc. And I, I haven’t written a word. I am taking a break.
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But that’s just one of the kinds of break I’m talking about here. Another is the opposite—the writing break. In which you carve out a week and take yourself somewhere (preferably boring, preferably alone), and perform an ambitious task: finish that book, start that play, learn Russian. Continue reading →
The Spock Twins: The Death of the Death of Environmentalism
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
In my new book, My Green Manifesto, I take on another book, Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are two lifelong environmental-advocates best known for creating an attention-grabbing paper called The Death of Environmentalism. That paper, which sparked lively debate on websites and editorial pages, advocated breaking environmentalism out of its granola ghetto and tackling global warming head on, which, according to the authors and contrary to most conservatives, could actually create jobs and ultimately help the economy. I picked up the book because I thought it might fit my present surly enviro mood, and I’d heard that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like me, have grown tired of both musty mysticism and hysterical apocalypisim, favoring a more practical, hard-headed brand of environmentalism.
Health Insurance and the Independent Writer
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
comments: 10 comments
Cobra
When my wonderful five years at Holy Cross were up I was able to take advantage of COBRA health coverage. The acronym stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, but it’s appropriately threatening, deadly snake, right. All the act states is that employers’ insurance plans must continue to cover employees terminating for any reason for eighteen months after termination. This protects many people, but for an example, think of someone battling cancer: can’t work anymore, gets to keep insurance. For a while. If she can pay. My own COBRA amount was about $2200 a Continue reading →
Royal Visitor
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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As the best writers in the world, Dave and I wanted to be sure visitors to Bill and Dave’s could easily find and comment on our work. So our web designer, Randy Skidmore of Subpar Design, has set up the Bill and Dave’s “Our Best American Essays” page, formally static, so that we can post work old and new, and readers can respond. I’m going to launch the new capabilities today with “Royal Visitor,” which I’ve read at a a number of public events and which appeared in Louisville Review #62. I also posted it on my old Down East blog. It’s my answer to the FAQ about the writing of memoir: what if there’s material from your life you really can’t use? The answer in this case is one word: metaphor. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Write in THE FUTURE
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Everyone can imagine a time in the future when circumstances will be better, more ideal, for tackling that big book, that perfect poem, that masterpiece. Right now you are too stressed, too busy, involved in a family squabble, and money’s tight. But in that imagined future life is stress-free, everyone gets along, your bank account’s flush, and of course you have plenty of spare time. No wonder you want to write the book then. If you did it now, with all this other stuff going on, you couldn’t do justice to the work of genius that is in embryo in your brain. If you did it now it would come in fits and starts; you would make mistakes; it wouldn’t be pure. Continue reading →
