Cocktail Hour
Mr. Hopeless
categories: Cocktail Hour
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While I don’t mind rumbling a bit in my writing, I am not a fan of personal attacks. What follows, I would insist, is not one, but rather an attack on a writer’s ideas, ideas that I have over the years found to be not just wrongheaded, but pernicious. The writer Derrick Jensen presents the world in primary colors, oversimplified, and seems to have had little contact with or knowledge of his fellow human beings, or at least human beings as I know them.
A few years ago I was supposed to be on an academic panel with Jensen, and a couple of weeks before the panel I sent out a friendly e-mail to the other panelists, suggesting we bounce some ideas off each other. Here is part of the actual e-mail I got in response from him:
The Incremental Method
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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David showing me some technique
I have these secret projects. Maybe you do, too. One lately has absorbed me on my daily walks through the woods here. About a half-mile in on one of my circuits there’s a stretch of deep mud you can’t quite skirt–a spring rises there when the weather is wet. So a few years ago I started placing stones in the mud. There are plenty of stones around, just not many flat ones, and most way too heavy. But over time, at the rate of a stone or two a month, I’ve managed a pathway. Continue reading →
My Father’s Voice
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Note Nametag
This piece was recently published in WM On-Line, the lit magazine for Wabash College. I thought I’d link to it for Fathers’ Day.
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Bad Advice Wednesday: Tough Guys Keep Journals (And You Should Too)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Every year I bring in a big pile of black journals into my classes and plop them on the desk and go on and on about how important they are to my writing life.
And every year my students nod politely and say “uh-huh” but you can tell what they really want to do is roll their eyes and get this bit about diaries over with so we can move on to more important writing stuff, like how do you get an agent. Journals, admittedly, aren’t sexy. They conjure up thoughts of “Dear Diary” and tears over lost high school boyfriends or girlfriends, and they require that least fashionable of writing tools—a pen.
Incubator
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My friend Drew called the other day to say that something, probably a fox, had gotten to his chickens and he had only one left alive. I love that moment when you know a request is coming but you don’t know what it’s going to be. Did he want a couple of chickens? Nothing lonelier than a chicken without its flock. He said, “I wonder if you would take her.” Her name was Buffy after her color. Drew brought her over the next day. Elysia announced that the hen was a Buff Orpington, same breed as the late Maggie, our winter casualty. We put Drew’s hen in the dog yard, which is now the back yard of the chicken coop. And nothing particular happened. There was some pecking-order business–our various breeds trotting over to chase Buffy or nip at her, the rooster ducking and sweeping flirtatiously. But no mob scene, nothing dangerous. We thought Buffy would probably spend a few nights outside or on the floor of the chicken coop, might get beat up pretty bad, but that it would all work out in the end, a replacement bird for Maggie.
I Love You: Three Thoughts on Love
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am writing this from the Doe Branch Ink Writing Retreat in the mountains of N.C. I’m stunned by how beautiful it is here. Yesterday my daughter and I took two beach chairs and spent a good hour hanging out on a rock ledge in the middle of a creek.
Which leads to today’s topic, which is love.
1. I once said “I love you” to a convenience store cashier outside of Vail, Colorado. I didn’t love her, in fact, barely knew her, and I wasn’t having an illicit affair. I had just bought some snacks, granola bar or Twinkies and an ice tea I’m pretty sure, for my summer road trip into Utah. We were going through the usual rote dance of convenience store politeness–“Thanks so much,” “Have a nice day”–and had gotten to the part where I usually say a friendly “See ya” or a final “thanks” as I walk away, when something else slipped out instead. “I love you,” I said as I pushed the door open, and then, realizing my mistake, fled.
It’s Thank Your Editor Day at Bill and Dave’s!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I realize I’ve gone missing. It’s because I’ve been working feverishly on The High Side, my new novel. And moments ago, I finished. Finished for the tenth or eleventh time, four years and counting, but finished. The edits came back a month or so ago, and after several smart and wonderful but very intense conversations with my editor, Kathy Pories at Algonquin, I got to work.
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The thing about working with an editor on late drafts of a work in progress is that with each draft you fully believe you’ve finally done it, finally delivered the perfect manuscript. So when your editor says she loves it, you rejoice. You blush and stammer. And when the other shoe drops, the “but” sentence, you tend to resist. You’re a writer, after all, and you know what you’re doing. Kathy’s letter is very careful and thorough, and after these words: “I loved reading this; I love your sense of joy and fullness and ability to create rich Continue reading →
Cover Me
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The other day I got the cover for my new book, The Tarball Chronicles. Here it is–over there. I hope you like it. I do. I’m actually very pleased. I think those of you who followed last summer’s posts from the Gulf will agree that it gets across some of the sheer strangeness of the experience, of the tragic aspect of the BP spill but the black humor, too. At least I think it does. If you don’t agree, please don’t write me about it. I’m too fragile at the moment. Somewhat close to cracking up in fact…..
There is this anxious time in the life of a writer (um, when isn’t an anxious time?), when you are done with a book but before it comes out. You await the Day of Judgment, fearing, not so much being consigned to hell–hell at least is active and participatory–as nothingness. Here is Ed Abbey, for instance, describing his book, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and the quiet reaction he imagined: “Another drop down the well of oblivion.” (Of course, Abbey’s worries proved wrong and any writer would like to have their book attain the level of non-oblivion that Monkey Wrench did.)
Another Night at the Opera
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Mario Lanza as Pinkerton
[update, 6/5: got a note the other day from an opera singer named David Weaver, as follows: “Hello Bill, A friend, Kate Fox, sent me your piece about “Another Night at the Opera.” As it happens, I have done a number of roles with Opera Columbus. I was not in the 2000 Madame Butterfly you referenced – but I do know that the Pinkerton in that production was tenor David Corman. You were close about David being from Nebraska – he is actually from Kansas. He is now teaching music and leading the choral program at Odessa College in Odessa, Texas.”]
In the spring of 2000 a grad student in one of my workshops at Ohio State asked if she could bring her cousin to class–he was to visit Columbus soon. (I can’t for the life of me call up her name, and would like the help of any of you who were in that class.)[Update: it was Ellen Seusy, and credit goes to Jim Fox, whose face makes me remember quite a few others in the room]. I was like, well, I’m not sure. Because in the workshop we’d developed a level of trust and frankness that wasn’t like other classes. Maybe we should ask the group. And she said, “He’s a tenor. He’s going to be here to sing Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly for Opera Columbus.” I knew about the production, all right, already had my tickets, not great ones because the house was Continue reading →
The Poster Biz Part II: Attack on Reagan’s Head
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After our poster of the Trickle Down Theory flopped (see my earlier blog) my friend Dave and I continued undeterred. We next created something called “Ronald Reagan: A Physical Examination.” This was a drawing I’d made of Reagan naked except for his presidential seal boxer shorts and a dozen arrows slanting in from the sides (like the one pointing at his groin that said “gender gap” or the one pointing at his pompadour that said “nuclear warhead.”) It was intentionally dumbed down in hopes of sales, tamer than our first effort, but I still wanted to make the drawing great. Though I had been a political cartoonist for three years, and already had a set caricature of the President that I drew, I vowed that I would start over and create the perfect Reagan, and so avenge the failure of our first poster.
I worked on the poster in an attic study of a room on Cape Cod, looking out at the steely blue ocean and the last of the gold leaves peeling off a post oak. I listened over and over to a tape of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos and drank black coffee, and drew Reagan after Reagan. It was early Continue reading →
