Cocktail Hour
Table for Two: An Interview with Melissa Falcon Field
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
comments: 2 comments
Melissa Falcon Field and Noah
Debora: I’m so pleased to be among the first to announce your debut novel, What Burns Away. Kudos! How does it feel to know that bookstores all over the country are unboxing your book and making room for you on the Newly Released shelf?
Melissa: Well Debora, I have to say that it is wildly exciting. Publishing a novel has been a dream I have been chasing since my college days, back when I had a big spiral perm and wore stonewashed Daisy Duke cutoffs. Always, in those years, I carried an enormous bag full of books with me everywhere I went, furiously reading Stephen Crane, Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, Andre Dubus, Stuart Dybeck, Mary Karr, Annie Dillard, and so many more. I read literally everything I could get my hands on, studying plotlines, and working hard to develop my own with a ferocious appetite, I still read to inform my craft. But the debut, holding my own work in my hands, it feels like a big deal—a graduation of sorts, a kind of birth, and a sense of legitimacy after chasing the dream and working as hard as I have to understand how to write a novel, for some twenty years now. And, mostly, I am full of gratitude for all the great mentors and literary friendships that gave me doses of the necessary tough love along the way. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Create a Tour!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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My long-former student and great old friend Melissa Falcon Field had a book coming out, and mine had just been published, and so we put our heads together and thought–Let’s do some a reading together. Just that. And then we figured out where, adding one another to invitations already received, until we had several events lined up, then several more, from Maine to New York City, and back again. We named it after an element both of our books share: TAINTED LOVE. Continue reading →
When Doug Met Arnold
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
During my research on the Abbey-Stegner book, I became fascinated with an episode of the old TV show, “American Sportsman,” in which Doug Peacock spends a week in backcountry of Yellowstone looking for grizzly bears with Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is a younger more innocent Arnold, fresh off his early “Pumping Iron” fame, and one of the pleasures of the show is the odd couple factor. There is Peacock, who was the real Grizzly Man and retains that title in my book despite the Herzog documentary, in archetypal Wildman mode, spouting his radical enviro-philosophy—including some great lines about his goal “preserving an element of risk in wilderness” by keeping an animal around that can kill humans—and there is Arnold, kind of stiff and silly at first, but then getting more and more into it. The two only see tracks the first day but that night they stand in the smoke of the fire to disguise their “foul human scent,” after which Arnold says: “I hope the whole week is going to be as strange as the first night.” When they finally do see grizzlies, a sow and its yearling, Arnold’s whole face lights up with a goofy enthusiasm and he keeps muttering things like “This is fantastic.” In a way he perfectly embodies Peacock’s main point: that we feel more alive when the threat of death is near.
Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Whites,” by Harry Brandt, aka Richard Price
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
We live in a culture that is obsessed with specialization and categorization. Things that don’t fit easily into a preordained niche make us nervous. The result diminishes work that is unique and difficult to classify, but it also does a disservice to writing that becomes pigeonholed into a category that does not often receive the serious attention it deserves. Continue reading →
Come to Minnesota to Write This Summer
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Cold and miserable? Try thinking ahead to summer. Better yet think ahead to the week of summer solstice in beautiful northern Minnesota. Now add writing to the mix…..
Boy I should have gone into advertising and bagged this book-writing thing. Anyway, the above is my attempt to seduce you into signing up for my “Writing from Place” workshop at the Minnesota Northwoods Writing Conference starting this June 20th and running through Friday June 26th.
Here’s a description of my class:
All the Wild That Remains Trailer
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
Hi folks. Here’s the trailer for All the Wild That Remains:
I’ve pasted below some nice things some people are saying about the book. More at my home site: www.davidgessner.com
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Know Where You’re Going
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
So many people ask if I outline, if I know where I’m going when I start a story, a novel, an essay. The answer is an inefficient but satisfying: No. I’m not even E.L. Doctorow trusting that he’ll get where he’s going even though it’s night and his headlights only illuminate a small part of the way. Because that implies he knows where he’s going, that it’s only the way in question. I’m more like getting in the car blindfolded and seeing how far I can go before I crash. Usually, the crash is more interesting than whatever magnificence I’d planned. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Astonish Me,” by Maggie Shipstead
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Cartoon Bill Makes the Rounds
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
We are lucky enough to have a lot of great guest teachers who visit down here at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. This past month our grad students were treated to a class with the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil (who by the way found out just yesterday that she had landed a poem in the forthcoming Best American Poetry–congrats!). Anyway, we were having a little goodbye party for Aimee and who should show up? Bill! He was looking good too…..
My Amazon Revenge: Reviewing my Reviewer
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 24 comments
I am confident that a lot of people enjoyed reading my book, Return of the Osprey. That confidence is based on letters and conversations, and some pretty good reviews.
But one person who clearly did not enjoy the experience was a man who goes by the alias of “Dobx.” In fact Dobx disliked it so much that he chose to reveal his displeasure in a review on Amazon.com.
I have been understating so far: Dobx hated the book.
Here is Dobx’s review:
A poor version of Walden Pond redux, June 3, 2010
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
One of Four Stars
This review is from: Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder (Paperback)
We live on a sound on the Outer Banks and erected a nesting box, perhaps 50 feet from our dock, this March. We were fortunate enough to attract a nesting pair who built their nest, and we currently have three chicks in the nest.
I was hoping to get facts about ospreys from the book, but alas instead I got ruminations and regrets and etc. The author really wishes he was an osprey.
I think this is one of the worst books I have ever bought.
If you want osprey facts, simply Google osprey facts and save yourself from the author’s angst.
If I want to reread On Walden Pond, I have a well-thumbed copy.
