Cocktail Hour
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: Finding Time to Write
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 14 comments
Two missives this week, one from WriterMom, the other from Jean Witlow in Corvallis, Oregon, with very close to the same question. WriterMom: “I teach four sections of composition at two different colleges, and have three kids, 6-8-12. My husband is deceased. I write an infrequent column for the local paper. But that’s it for writing. I want to know how to get my book written when I have no time and never will.” She goes on to describe the book (almost a pitch—first advice: don’t do that—you come off like an infomercial or a flight attendant). And it sounds good, a memoir of her husband and the risk taking that finally killed him. Next, with as little punctuation as possible, Jean Witlow says, “Here I am finally with my MFA and my book basically written it was my thesis but needs some work and I’m going Continue reading →
Our Mutual Brain Damage (Special Guest Star: Clyde Edgerton)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
I was on our creative writing hallway yesterday chatting with my colleague Clyde Edgerton. We both like to talk, and we’re not terrible listeners either (able to mimic the appropriate facial expressions: all the head bobs, nods, and laughs that indicate interest) and sometimes a brief stop by his door can last upwards of half an hour. We also share a similar rambling not-entirely logical style of talking and, as it happened, this time we may have hit upon the roots of that mutual style. As it turns out, we both have brain damage.
I’m serious. At different points of our life we both had our oxygen supplies cut off (could this have something to do with our career choices?). Anyway, I’ll let Clyde tell his story first:
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: Rejection as Biofuel, or, Showing the Bastards
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 17 comments
Why do we choose to do this writing thing? Let’s start there.
I had a critical father, a man who, as I described recently in a post called Kid of the Year, would reply when I got a 98 on a test with: “What happened to the other two points?” I developed a self-deprecating sense of humor in large part as a defense against his sarcastic attacks. I hated nothing more than criticism and rejection.
So of course I dedicated myself to a career that would guarantee a lifetime of criticism and rejection.
Leaving Dr. Freud aside, I think it was a great decision. It has toughened me up enough so that I can occasionally laugh outright—ha!—at rejection. Occasionally. Of course it still stings, but I know that that sting is part of my writing life, my overall writing ecosystem. I was at a writing conference a few years ago when a young writer said he didn’t want to go to a particular party because it would be full of people from a journal that had rejected him. An older, well-respected writer overheard this and said: “If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone at the whole conference.” Continue reading →
Facebook Etiquette? Or: Bill and Dave’s is Starting a Fan Page (Hit “Like”!)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 17 comments
Dave and his Bridesmaids: Perfect Manners
I came to Facebook as a visitor to a foreign planet, an American visitor, with little sensitivity to the mores of the natives. It was a planet I had disparaged at length in boozy diatribes and probably in print. Imagine my surprise when someone told me they’d friended me and liked seeing my picture after all these years. Next time we spoke she was mad at me, leaving her unfriended! Which I didn’t know what meant! It turned out some mysterious person had started what’s called a fan page, something I still don’t understand. And not only that, but had started speaking for me, posting status dealies. I use the word dealies to show my age, because my age is a large factor in Continue reading →
Sure, Nature, But Not Too Much Nature, Please: On Snakes, Toads, Birds and Poets
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
It was a wild weekend here. The tides have been strangely high all week, flooding through our fence, and I paddled the kayak from our yard to Masonboro Island, where the yucca are blooming with yellow-white leaves that look strangely edible.
On Saturday morning I went for a walk with my wife Nina and daughter Hadley in Carolina Beach State Park. Last year, around this time of year, I would walk there every day and more than once saw big fat copperheads lying across the trail. Our yellow lab would jog obliviously over them, and I would tip-toe carefully around. But now we had Hadley, who had just turned eight, with us, and all spring she had been pretending to be a dog when we hiked these tails, which meant running far ahead of us, out of sight (though we could hear her barking.) I hadn’t wanted to tell Hadley that she shared her favorite trails with giant snakes, but now it was that time of year when they would be sunning on the paths again and there was no getting around it. Continue reading →
Caution: End of the World
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Best place to be for End of Days!
Harold Camping, who says he has crunched the numbers in the Bible, has revealed May 21 to be the date of the rapture. That’s coming right up, so I wanted to write a post to say goodbye to my believing acquaintances. Goodbye!
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In related news:
Living out towards Temple, as I do, I cross Middle Bridge over the Sandy River to downtown, just about daily, often multiple times daily. And I always look up at the huge letter sign high on Joel Bridges’s house (which is also headquarters of his Thoughtbridge Ministry), that controversial community bulletin board, free speech in eight-inch letters: lately a paean and exhortation to organic gardening; occasionally a paid ad from a political candidate or a reminder to register to vote; the odd quotation from the likes of Abraham Heschel (the Rabbi and Selma freedom marcher); a heartwarming WELCOME Continue reading →
The Self-Promotion Blues, or, Me and Jessica Lange
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
There was a fine essay the other week in the back of the New York Times Book Review, a piece called “Building the Brand” by Tony Perrottet. The beginning of the piece was particularly good, where Perrottet writes about the uneasiness that most of us feel about self-promotion: “In this era when most writers are expected to do everything but run the printing presses, self-promotion is so accepted that we hardly give it a second thought. And yet, whenever I have a new book come out, I have to shake the unpleasant sensation that there is something unseemly about my own clamor for attention.”
Unseemly. That’s it exactly. As I head into my summer of promoting two books, anxious that they will sell 30 and 34 copies respectively, I feel both the near-desperate desire to get attention for them and a deep-seated ambivalence about that desire. Continue reading →
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: this week, The Secret of Getting Published (and your letters answered)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 17 comments
Would you take advice from this man?
I get emails often with a few vague words of praise for my work and then the big question: I’m writing this article, this story, this poem, this essay, this screenplay, this book, and I’d like to know how to go about getting an agent. Agent, usually, because the correspondent has already done some investigating and has heard that you need one. I have sympathy, because I’ve been through it myself, the feeling that there’s some secret to getting published and that no one’s telling what it is. Well, that’s all changed. Because I now know the secret to getting published, and I’m ready to spill it. The same secret works for getting an agent: Continue reading →
Whose Woods These Are: A Public Letter to Our New Chancellor
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
Dear Chancellor-Elect Miller,
We have not met yet, but I look forward to shaking your hand. You have arrived at a fascinating place, a place that is growing fast in ways it is not always sure of. Like you, I had no plans to move to Wilmington, North Carolina, until fate decided that that was where I would move. This is my eighth year here and not long ago I almost left and moved my family West. The decision to stay marked a change in my relationship with this town and school: being thrown randomly into a place I had never heard of before was one thing, but deciding to stay, to commit, and to raise my daughter here was another. For many reasons I have felt confirmed in my decision to stay, including the passion of my students and the friendship of my colleagues on the creative writing hallway. But I also reaped an unexpected reward in the years since my decision: I discovered our woods. It was a little more than a year ago that I started taking Continue reading →
Bill and Dave’s Kochtail Hour
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
comments: 13 comments
Taxpayers, just like you and me.
Like most of my fellow Americans, I recently got a piece of mail from my state congressional representative, a survey he claims will help him determine what his priorities should be since he is, after all, representing me. It’s a push-poll, of course, with origins in a national “conservative” vision, several local twists added to add authenticity, the most toxic proposals attributed to the weakest local links, these dumb local reps desperate for favor. I put conservative in quotes because the vision is anything but—it’s a radical corporatist agenda, the one that operatives Continue reading →
