Cocktail Hour
A Tale for Christmas Eve
categories: Cocktail Hour
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In 1991, well before I returned to live in France, I went to New Orleans with my childhood friend, musician, blind. Jean-Marie, a name that sings like quaint rivers of France where he was born, in my hometown, Grenoble, less than a block away from me. We grew close, playing together as children, attending the same public school. Piano was our bond, our shared language. We both went to the music conservatory. I would stop by his house to ask for a bottle of milk my mother had not had time to buy, and he would be sitting at the piano, playing the same prelude I was. With time, his eyes began failing him, but not his spirit. There was joy in him, a joy that to this day flows uninterrupted. His link to the world, what allows him to live, is sound. When his mother called–just two days ago– to tell us he had suddenly lost hearing through one ear, my heart sank. The next day I spent sitting by the phone, waiting for test results. At 10pm the call came. He had recovered. We sang Halelujahs, we opened a bottle of wine. We told again the stories of our youth, the moments of glory and failings. The world of sound, that year, was New Orleans. Continue reading →
Oh, You’re a Writer? (Reasons I’ve Started to Bite My Tongue)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Oh, you’re a writer? You must have a lot of time on your hands. Would you like to do some editing for me for FREE?
Oh, you’re a writer? Would you like to get some coffee sometime?
Read, Read, Read Everything: An Interview with Poet Cynthia Atkins
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Cynthia Atkins (photo Alexis Rhone Fancher)
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I have known Cynthia Atkins for years as a fellow teacher, wonderful poet, and generous friend. What her poetry has taught me, however, is that she’s also a powerful mental health advocate. We spoke on the occasion of the publication of Cynthia’s latest work, In the Event of Full Disclosure, which takes on issues of family and mental health with a voice that is both wry and wise.
Mary: “In Plain Sight” begins with contradiction: “I am certain of only one thing– / I am in a team of (n)one.” I love how the confidence of the voice is undercut by the impossibility of any certainty in this world view. Where did this poem start for you in its initial draft, with those lines or something else? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Live on Osprey Time
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last week I wrote a column for OnEarth.org about learning patience through watching a great blue heron. As it turned out, that heron was just a warm up for another bird. A few years after I watched the heron, I set out to write a book about ospreys. As a kid on Cape Cod I had never seen the birds; they had been all but wiped out by DDT. When I moved back to Cape Cod as an adult I found that the birds had moved back too. I spent six months watching four nesting pairs of ospreys, spending several hours each day observing them in the way I’d watched the heron. I did this because I had come to love the birds—their enormous and sloppy nests, their daring dives, their flashing wings—but also for another more practical reason. I had sold a proposal for a book to a publisher about the birds and their comeback from DDT, and so watching ospreys became my daily work, my job, my sod-breaking.
But even though I was getting paid to do it, sitting still was not easy. “You’ve got to learn to live on osprey time,” said Alan Poole, the osprey expert who served as my adventure’s Obi Wan Kenobe. “It’s a good life the birds lead,” he added. “You’ve got to watch them do nothing. And they do a whole lot of nothing.” Continue reading →
American Sign Language: A Photo Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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Getting Outside Saturday: Patience, Patience
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This month OnEarth.org is sponsoring a series of essays called “Answers From the Past,” which explores how old values are relevant in today’s world. So far there have been great pieces by Elizabeth Kolbert, Elizabeth Royte, and George Black. Here is my entry on the value of patience in today’s fast-twitch world. It was inspired by an article called “The Power of Patience,” by Jennifer L. Roberts, a Harvard art historian, and by Linda Hogan, my former writing teacher.“Pick an animal. Any animal.”
The words came not from a magician, but from a professor: Linda Hogan, the Native American writer who was my teacher in a University of Colorado creative-writing class back in the early 1990s. I picked a common-enough animal—a great blue heron—and, following Linda’s assignment, spent two weeks watching it, sketching it, taking notes on its movements.
And, well, how do I put this? It changed everything. The assignment had seemed dully straightforward. The experience turned out to be anything but. It turned out to be thrilling.
At first, clomping out to the creek every day with my sketchpad in hand, I tended to scare the bird off—and so I saw it mostly in flight. But even that was something. With its wingbeats deep and slow, its long neck pulled back into its chest, the heron was graceful, ghostly, and ungainly all at once: a gray vision—except for its chest, which seemed to absorb the blue of the creek below it.
During those two weeks, my schedule was simple: I sat still. In our contemporary fast-twitch culture, there may not be a less-fashionable virtue than patience. But here’s the funny thing about patience: It’s practical. It works. It gets things done. Continue reading →
Gertrude’s Steins
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This Thanksgiving my mother gave me my father’s beer steins. Didn’t get the full family story but because it makes for a snappy Bill and Dave’s title let’s say they belonged to my great-great grandmother Gertrude. One of my grad students here, Toni Blackwell Willis, looked up the translations for the German inscriptions, which are pretty funny. Like this one for the top stein above:
Je schöner die Kneip,
desto schlimmer für’s Weib.
Je schlimmer das Weib,
um so schöner die Kneip.
The nicer the tavern,
the worse it is for the wife.
The worse the wife,
so much nicer is the tavern. Earliest known cartoon of Bill and Dave
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Men We Reaped,” by Jesmyn Ward
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Bad Advice Wednesday: UCLA Q and A, with T. Locke
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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My Virtual Presence
Recently writer and professor Shawna Kenney invited me to take part in an online class at the UCLA Extension Writers Program, visiting virtually by way of Blackboard. Students asked questions, I did my best to answer, and discussion ensued. I got permission from a number of students to use their questions, and I got permission from myself to use my answers. First up is T. Locke.
Q. Hello Bill,
Thank you for sharing your time and thoughts with our class. It has been such a pleasure to get to know you through your book! It’s a treat to have you in here in person, so to speak. Here are my questions. Continue reading →
