Cocktail Hour
On the Road (and Writing the Book)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here are some photos from the road trip that became my new book. Some are repeats that I published here during from the summer of 2012, but some are new. This is the first of two posts of pics.
First stop on way west: the home of Wendell and Tanya Berry in Kentucky.
The next day in Lexington with Erik Reece and Ed McClanahan. Ed was not just a Stegner fellow and a Merry Prankster, but was WS’s officemate.
Getting Outside Saturday: Traveling Giants
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Photo Haiku
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A friend spotted this scene on a recent trip to Honduras…
Outside Magazine Weighs in on All the Wild That Remains
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This hit the newsstands this week. And the book is starting to ship! Let me know who is the first to get it.
North Carolina’s New State Song
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Book in hand
categories: Cocktail Hour
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When the thing finally arrives. Always a nice moment.
As coincidence would have it, I just happened to be working on a memoir about Ultimate Frsibee that ends with my first book arriving. Here is the passage about receiving that first book:
The package arrived in the mail in March of 1997, the year I stopped playing Ultimate.
It came in a simple UPS box and even though I knew what was inside the box I didn’t think it would affect me like it did. This was no big deal after all. Being on the cover of the New York Times, winning some big prize, having your face on the cover of a magazine. Those were the Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Closer All the Time,” by Jim Nichols
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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JIm Nichols
Any discussion of candidates for the title ‘Fiction Laureate of Maine’ will quickly conjure names of the usual subjects: Stephen King, Elizabeth Strout, Carolyn Chute and Rick Russo spring to mind and all of them have carved out a unique niche in the Maine literary landscape. Bur for my money, when it comes to capturing the ethos of the people and culture of the Pine Tree State, perhaps no one does it better than Jim Nichols.
A Hidden Life
categories: Cocktail Hour
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[Editors’ note: Today we repost a guest column from March 1, 2013, by Lisa Bonchek Adams. We didn’t know Lisa Bonchek Adams personally, except we knew her well, both as a contributor to Bill and Dave’s and as an inspiring presence on Facebook and Twitter, not easy to be cynical about social media at a time like this: Lisa passed away the other day after an incredibly bold and brave battle with the various stages of breast cancer. She was 45 years old. Her blog chronicling her experience is a testament to her intelligence, clarity, and fighting spirit, and well worth looking at now, along with her Twitter feed, both of which will remain accessible. Now, her two-year-old post–see her website for more.]
The first blog I ever followed was written by Leroy Sievers, an NPR commentator and journalist. Leroy wrote about his experience with colon cancer which ultimately killed him in 2008. For the two years before his death he wrote about his daily experience with the disease. When he was too ill to write or in the hospital, his wife, Laurie, would fill in with a brief update. She knew readers would worry. She knew that with stage IV cancer, an absence might signal Leroy’s death. Continue reading →
Table For Two: An Interview with Jim Nichols
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Debora: Jim it’s lovely to have you with us at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. Congratulations on your new novel Closer All the Time, published by Islandport Press, available now—and at last, for established Jim Nichols fans! I’m a newcomer, Jim, and wish to say that I love this book for the tenderness in the writing and the expressiveness of the characters. It’s clear that there is a lot of experience and wisdom behind these pages.
Jim: Hi Debora, it’s a pleasure to discuss CATT with you and to be part of Bill & Dave’s…one of my very favorite literary sites. And thanks for the kind words, I’m really happy you enjoyed the book. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Why Not Say What Happened?
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Robert Lowell
One of the most-asked questions at writer’s conferences and here on the Bill and Dave’s Bad Advice hotline is about the dangers of hurting or offending or simply alerting people who will appear in a memoir or even, disguised, in fiction. Here’s a particularly cogent version of the question, which we’ll keep anonymous by request: “I’m planning a memoir of my growing up partly in Nigeria, partly in London, mostly in the Chicago area. I’m terribly worried about offending my mother, who is sensitive about some of the material in the book (my father ended up in prison, and rightly so). Also, I’m worried about my children reading this material, as they are Continue reading →
The House at the End of the World
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Take a good look at this photo—snapped last December by the marine biologist John Dindo on the west end of Dauphin Island, Alabama—and you can see almost everything that’s wrong about building homes along the coastline in this climate-changed, hurricane-prone, post-Sandy world. You can even make a game of it, if you want—sort of like one of those spot-the-error puzzles that you find on the children’s placemat menus at Red Robin. It’s easy to play along: Just print out the image and draw a big red circle around all the things that make no sense whatsoever.
Here’s what I circled:
It’s obvious that this oversized house was built on an untenable spot. It’s practically asking to be flooded by the next major storm or taken out by the next hurricane. But what I’m really interested in is the owner’s second mistake—the one that ended up compounding the first one. In an Continue reading →
