Cocktail Hour
Flatball!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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If you liked “Ultimate Glory,” you’re going to love this.
Help support Flatball: A History of Ultimate at Indiegogo here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flatball-a-history-of-ultimate
Colchester, England. August 3, 1994. The plush, green pitch is lined with diagonal stripes marking the end zones, and fans from around the world are on hand to witness the final match of the World Championships between Sweden and the USA. When the USA drops a pass, it appears as though Sweden, just 30 yards away from their goal, will win the game and avenge a devastating 1988 semifinal loss to the same American team. The Americans are stunned and appear to be looking for a foul call on the throw – but none comes. In fact, no referees are around to make a call, because this is a game of ultimate frisbee – and in ultimate, there are no referees.
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “White Girls” by Hilton Als
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Hilton Als
Since its beginnings in 2006 McSweeney’s has developed a reputation for publishing eclectic books and periodicals, including Portland, Maine, author Jessica Anthony’s startlingly original, award-winning debut novel, The Convalsecent. Add to that impressive and intriguing list Hilton’s Als newest offering, White Girls. White Girls is a mesmerizing extended essay on race, culture, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and what it means to be a gay black man in the modern world. It includes pieces on Flannery O’Connor, Eminem, Richard Pryor, Truman Capote, Michael Jackson and style and theater and cinema (Gone With the Wind), that will reshape forever the way that you consider these cultural tropes. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island” by Crash Barry, Episode 17
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last summer, Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour began serializing Crash Barry’s gritty memoir Tough Island. Then, in August, Crash took a break from Bill and Dave’s in order to turn his novel Sex, Drugs and Blueberries into a feature film. Now, he’s back and ready to finish telling the rest of his true stories from his time living and working on Maine’s most remote island. Click here for episodes 1 to 16.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Donald being dragged, fore to aft, headed overboard, to be drowned by the churning, greenish gray-blue February sea. I’d been focused on filling bait bags with greasy herring, so I hadn’t seen his right leg get tangled in pot warp, the long piece of rope that connects a lobster trap to a buoy. When I looked sternward, Donald was being stretched into the ocean. His arms, thick as legs, saved him. He’d wrapped them around the steel bar that spanned the width of his boat’s transom. I dashed forward, throttled back and threw the engine into neutral. Continue reading →
Happy Birthday to Dave!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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From all your friends and fans, who are legion! Continue reading →
Astoria to Zion
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This week marks Lookout Books’ official publication of Astoria to Zion, a collection of some of the best short stories from the first decade of the literary magazine Ecotone. As many readers of this site know, Ecotone is the magazine I founded, along with my grad students Kimi Faxon Hemingway and Heather Wilson, and it has always emphasized “places in between.” Emily Smith, now the publisher of both Ecotone and its sister literary imprint, Lookout Books, has been with the magazine from the start, and with the help of her graduate publishing practicum classes at UNCW, as well as Ecotone’s two newest editors, Anna Lena Phillips and Beth Staples, she spearheaded the publication of this anthology of great stories. In her remarks at the release party for Astoria to Zion, held last week in Seattle, she said:
Emily Smith in Seattle
“Though the word ecotone might at first seem to lend itself better to nonfiction, nowhere has the metaphor proven richer than in Ecotone’s fiction. In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories in 2008, guest editor Salman Rushdie called Ecotone one of ‘a handful of journals on which the health of the American short story depends,’ referring of course to Kevin Brockmeier’s startlingly beautiful story ‘The Year of Silence.’ To celebrate our first award-winning decade, we’ve selected twenty-six of our favorites, many of which were also reprinted in the Best American, New Stories from the South, Pushcart, and PEN/O. Henry series.”
Before going any further, I should point out that one of these stories, “Broadax Inc,” is by a young writer named Bill Roorbach (sometimes known simply as “Bill” in these parts). Other contributors include regulars in the pages of Ecotone, Brad Watson, Steve Almond, Rick Bass, Karen Bender, Cary Holladay, Edith Pearlman, Shawn Vestal, and Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Get Me To the World on Time (Six Thoughts on Place in Writing)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Bill and Dave are thrilled and honored to have the prolific and brilliant Luis Alberto Urrea doling out today’s advice. This talk was originally delivered at the Tin House writer’s conference in Portland, July 2013.
Take it away, Luis:
Here’s what I’ve been thinking: In the real world, we can only visit Place, but in the alchemy of writing, we become Place, and Place becomes us.
I–My First Thought.
I am here to discuss Place in writing. I imagine you are expecting to hear about form and function, critical choices and possible pedagogical formulations to further your theorems about the primacy of Place in modern literature. Well, didn’t Aristotle say that Place is that part of space where you are what is? If he didn’t, he should have.
At its basest level, Place is imagery. Setting. Or, God help us, it is metaphor. Thus do hacks torture us, making the world into bad greeting cards. For a masterful version of Place-as-more-than-setting, see Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.” I defy anyone to use landscape and weather and color and sound any better.
Reading Under the Influence: The Twitter Fiction Festival
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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I, @billroorbach, am still trying to understand Twitter after a year of tweeting and re-tweeting and the translating of tweet code language, even that as simple as say, RT, which means re-tweet. Remember, I was the guy who until a year ago thought LOL meant Lots of Luck, which always seemed mean. Like, “But you’ve always been older than Dave, LOL.” So I felt more trepidation than joy when I was invited to take part in the 2014 Twitter Fiction Festival. The Future of Fiction, one of the tweets I’ve been asked to RT proclaims. LFHN! Continue reading →
Writing for Our Lives
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From Dave: The following guest post is by my sister, Heidi, who works as the University of North Carolina Bereavement Coordinator and Palliative Care Chaplain.
They say that 90% of our thoughts are redundant. For people who are grieving the loss of a loved one, or going thru a major life-change, their thoughts are usually full of ‘what-ifs’ and ‘if only’ about their loved one. Usually by the time people find their way to my office, they think they are losing their minds. “Actually what you’re saying sounds pretty normal,” I affirm. As a palliative care chaplain and bereavement counselor I’ve learned that people need to hear that they are grieving, and not going crazy.
Grieving is a profoundly humanizing experience, but it can also feel really scary. CS Lewis said, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” So while it is universal and we will all experience loss in this life, people hide their repetitive or unpleasant thoughts because they are embarrassed, or think something is wrong with them, or feel a need to protect family members and friends. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island” by Crash Barry, Episode 16
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last summer, Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour began serializing Crash Barry’s gritty memoir Tough Island. Then, in August, Crash took a break from Bill and Dave’s in order to turn his novel Sex, Drugs and Blueberries into a feature film. Now, he’s back and ready to finish telling the rest of his true stories from his time living and working on Maine’s most remote island. Click here for episodes 1 to 15.
“C’mon down,” Frankie yelled into the phone. He was one of my best pals from the Coast Guard. He always called around two in the morning after a night out in Boston or New York or Baltimore or Halifax or whichever eastern port his tugboat was visiting. “I met this awesome chick.” He was always drunk when he called. “She musta weighed two-fifty. She was beautiful.” Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Progress of Spring I (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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