Cocktail Hour
Why I’m Going to the Gulf
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
With writers washing up like tarballs on the Gulf coast (thank you for the image, Ken), why do they need yet another one?
I’m not sure, but next week I will climb in my car and drive from my home in North Carolina down to the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it yet, but I am determined to join the mass migration of journalists southward. Yes, I understand the hypocrisy of traveling a thousand miles in a vehicle powered by a refined version of the same substance that is pouring out into the Gulf waters, and yes I, like the rest of us, am a big fat hypocrite. But I need to see the oil. My plan is to follow the same path that the great naturalist John Muir did as a young man, a trip that he later described in his classic book, A Thousand Mile Trip to the Gulf. Like Muir, I will not just look at the water once I get there, but get out on it, trading in my car for a kayak. And, like Muir, my goal will be to see the ecosystem of the Gulf as a complicated whole, that is, to try to see it, even in its current desperate state, as a naturalist would.
The House That We Built: A Nursery Rhyme For the Gulf
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 30 comments
This is the oil that spills from the pipe and gushes into the Gulf.
This is the marsh that breathes with the sea, and protects the land,
That now fills with oil
That spills from the pipe
And gushes into the Gulf.
My Week at Nature (Writing) Camp (New, Improved Edition)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Scott Russell Sanders is a beautiful man.
Janisse Ray is a beautiful woman.
I am somewhat less beautiful.
I just got back from a week of teaching alongside Scott and Janisse in northern Vermont at the Wildbranch Writing Workshops, sponsored by Orion Magazine. For anyone who doesn’t know Scott (who looks a little like James Taylor {and my friend Ger}), he sings songs of the land and his book Staying Put is a foundation of contemporary writing about place. We had Continue reading →
Bill’s last known post from Kachemak Bay (Happy Solstice!)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
We may just have another Timothy Treadwell situation on our hands. While I (Dave) hold down the blogging homefront, Bill has charged out into the wild, stalking grizzlies in his neck brace.
This is Bill’s last known post:
I’m at the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference in Homer, Alaska, where Dave has been, too, a couple of years ago, and remembered fondly… I don’t know how to upload a photo from the hotel computer, so will have to lean on words… It’s beautiful here. Sunset was long last night at about 11:00, and the light lingered till 1:00. Sunrise was just a few hours later, glorious… Homer, Alaska. This morning, a boat trip across the bay to a rock called Gull Island, home to some 20,000 nesting Continue reading →
The Rise of the Machines: Notes on the Literary Apocalypse
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
We have reached the end of something. That is clear enough for anyone to see. Every month another magazine bites the dust while editors live in fear, waiting for the next purge, and agents read from Kindles, hoping they can sell one more vampire book before it all comes tumbling down. Everyone left in publishing is 26. The books that do still sell do so through Wall-Mart and Amazon, for about as much as a bunch of bananas, and why buy books anyway since every word ever written by humankind is at this very moment being downloaded by Google? Meanwhile thousands of young people, still dreaming the old dream of “becoming a writer,” flock to monasteries called graduate programs. Some of these young monks, especially those in Iowa, actually have a shot at publishing books, since, as a rule, 26 year old editors are fond of 26 year old writers, but many grow discouraged by the scarred landscape and turn their energies toward blogging or, worse, real jobs. Meanwhile everyone involved holds onto the hope that the web will somehow change everything, though no one is quite sure exactly how it will do that. Continue reading →
Stopping Titan
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Well, Titans were mythical gods who were overthrown by the younger Olympian gods.
But Titan is a cement company that wants to come in from the outside (Greece!) and poison the children, my daughter included, of the town of Wilmington, North Carolina. How are they going to do that? By producing a million or so tons of cement which produces deadly mercury which will float into the air. Continue reading →
On the Banks of the River Ose
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Alexander Kerensky, really.
For me, it’s all about storytelling. That’s the first value. After that, language. A great sentence trumps all kinds of more prosaic concerns, like who’s a composite character and what’s a fabrication, about what rule applies and who might be offended. Still, fiction and nonfiction aren’t the same. I never have the faintest question which category a given idea fits into as I start the day’s work. Definitions: Fiction, I make up the stories. Nonfiction, I don’t. Fiction, I might use corners of my life to help create verisimilitude. I’ve worked in a restaurant, so I can invent a kitchen. I’ve had sex, and so can Continue reading →
PROPOSING (“Will you…”)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
I sent out my first feelers for my new book, Learning to Surf, yesterday. I thought it might be fun to share the often frustrating, but always exciting/nerve wracking process of trying to sell a book with you, my few intimate friends. It is a time defined by anxiety and uncertainty. The goal is to enter into a good marriage with a publisher and, if you don’t mind me pushing the metaphor, to eventually procreate successfully. And like most marriages, it usually starts with a proposal.
Unlike the last go-round where I spent a couple of years getting my book proposal together (see my Walking the Edge proposal below) this time I just wrote the book and sent a short synopsis, more description than proposal really. As usual, and as with any proposal/synopsis, parts of the description are bullshit. But most of it isn’t. I really believe in this new book but then again what kind of idiot would spend four years of their life on something that they didn’t believe in? Continue reading →
Acceptable Lies and the Ghost of James Frey, (or, Against the Lit of Fact III)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
I am new to the blogging world and so as a newcomer (note to all writers: avoid the word “newbie” at all costs), I am bound to make mistakes. I was having a beer with a former student and friend the other day when he informed me that my e-lingo was slightly messed up, that I had in fact referred to the “blog” I wrote a few days before, while what I had meant was the “post.” My apologies. It won’t happen again.
Anyway, one thing I am learning about blogs, that is posts, is that they should be relatively short. Which makes sense. Whenever I write long pieces these days, I do so apologetically, assuming, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson (or was it Churchill? Or both?) that the piece will defend itself against being read by its very length. Working on that assumption, I figure no one will actually read the full essay, “Against a Literature Fact,” which I posted the other day. So I’m going to excerpt a little bit of it here, as it seems relevant to the conversation Bill and I (and some of you) are having. To do so I’ll have to bring up the name James Frey, but after this I promise never to do so again. Continue reading →
The Fact of Literature (Part Two: Bill’s Take)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
In last summer’s number of the Paris Review there’s a great interview with Gay Talese. I thought I was going to hate it—he’s one of these nonfiction-is-the-facts guys—but I didn’t hate it, at least not after a page or two. He’s so personable, which of course is the mode of the Paris Review interviews, these carefully groomed and really lovely dialogues. He’s so smart. He’s so surprising, everything about him. I already knew a lot, like that his father was a tailor. But I didn’t know or had forgotten that his father wasn’t very successful, though talented, and that his mother was successful, but a dressmaker. And I didn’t know that he dresses up in an impeccable suit to go downstairs in his Manhattan town house to his windowless writing Continue reading →
