Cocktail Hour
Reading Under the Influence: “Leaving Tuscaloosa” by Walter Bennet
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Walter Bennett
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Leaving Tuscaloosa is set in the Deep South of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1962. This is the year before Bull Connor turned his fire hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham and the Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. Walter Bennett paints a raw, violent, and realistic landscape of racial tensions that existed prior to the eruption of Connor’s fire hoses. Yet what draws the reader into this novel are not its historical implications but the characters’ authentic voices and Bennett’s skillful weaving of plot and storytelling abilities. Simply put, Bennett is a master storyteller. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: That Time My Plane Almost Crashed
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Madeline Roorbach, Alive and Well in South Africa
You always wonder how you might react: calmly, a stony demeanor; screaming, rivulets of tears streaming down your face; praying, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” There I sat, seat 21D—the aisle seat which is clutch for airplane travel—as smoke poured into the cabin through every vent onboard. I pushed the home button of my iPhone and saw that it was just before 2 p.m. CST. My hands were numb but I pushed the shortcut to my mom’s cell phone. No service at 30,000 feet. “Call me ASAP,” I wrote, and pushed send: Delivery Failure. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Sea and Civilization,” by Lincoln Paine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Lincoln Paine (photo: Nellie Large)
Bad Advice Wednesday: Choose Your Own Adventure
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Adventure! Sex! Daring! Fun!
Well, I’m sure those things are out there somewhere but not in a lot of the nonfiction I read. Granted, the stuff I read is of the literary, and sometimes apprentice, sort, and tends to be concerned mostly with the thoughts, feelings, and memories of the writer him or herself. But I am consistently confused by how little adventuring occurs in most of the work. Haven’t these writers heard that great books have been written by climbing mountains, spending some time in prison, hopping trains, or even taking drugs and driving to Vegas? It is true that going down this road presents dangers of its own, chiefly, aside from physical danger, the dangers of superficiality and gimmick. If you are just being bold to be bold it usually doesn’t fly. But what if you matched up your own personal obsessions and ideas, and yes, even your important memories, with an appropriate adventure or quest? What if it turns out that getting out of your room for a while is the answer or at least the beginning of the answer to some of the stuff that’s been bugging you? (Our minds, John Hay once reminded me, are not the best tools for getting out of our minds.)
If I were a young nonfiction writer I would think long and hard—or maybe not long and hard but fast and spontaneously—about this possibility. For one thing, doing things out in the world can prove lucrative, and can help you straddle the literary and commercial worlds. For another, it’s a lot of fun. And to get you started we here at Bill and Dave’s will make it simple. Yes, we’ll help you choose your own adventure.
Here’s how you begin. Get out a pen and paper and get ready to write. For each category be prepared to write down 5 answers. Write them fast and without much thought. The idea is to get the brain moving. Okay….
Caught in Cuba
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The following is a small excerpt from my book, Soaring with Fidel. The book follows ospreys as they migrate from their summer homes on Cape Cod to their winter ones in South America with a stopover in Cuba on the way. The birds require no passports to do this, which is more than I can say for me. My own trip landed me in hot water with both the Cuban government and my own. After a week in Cuba I was ready to head home when the following occurred:
I was about to carry my bags to the cab when the manager came out of his office and walked up to me with a piece of paper. It was a ticket, a summons from the immigration office inSantiago. My plane left in two hours and I had been told to be there early. I felt a mild panic rising.
“It is not uncommon to get this kind of ticket,” Freddy said calmly. “And the office is just a kilometer away.”
He volunteered to accompany me, but the directions sounded easy enough. Rather than take a cab, I headed down the street on foot, carrying my backpack and suitcase. The streets were crowded, and I watched as a commuting businessman with a briefcase climbed up into the back of an old truck with two dozen other men. When I got to the address on the ticket there were just a series of rundown houses, nothing that looked even vaguely like an office. I stopped a woman holding hands with a five year old boy, and asked where the immigration office was, and she said the office had moved and pointed down the street, making a leftward sweeping motion with her hand. I took the street and the left, lugging my bags, and found nothing except another crowd of people. The next two strangers I questioned offered up completely different answers to my query and by then I was covered in sweat and tamping down a deeper panic. My trip was over; I’d seen my birds; I wanted to go home. But instead I was walking through the crowded maze of Santiago, lugging my luggage, sweating through my clothes, and getting different directions from every person I met. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: It Was the Best of Times
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Lymphoma isn’t curable in canines, but the last of your savings account buys you a nine-month remission. You and your white dog, Io, sit on the floor with Tycho during his treatments. You bring Tycho back to strong with soft-mashed eggs and warm chicken. It will be the three of you for as long as you can. You are all together in your home when Tycho dies. You are pressed against him and watching his life pass out of your hands. You don’t make a sound because there is no sound to make. The next day you load Tycho’s body into your SUV, and you and Io drive him the four hours down the mountain to the crematory in Fort Collins. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday Holiday Edition
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Joan R. Wigglesworth of Manhattan, Kansas, writes: “To be a real writer, must I write on Thanksgiving Day?” Continue reading →
America’s Next Top Nature Writer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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You might have seen me recently on the new reality show, America’s Next Top Nature Writer. Or you might have missed me since, as it turns out, our ratings were pretty slim. I don’t want to kick the show’s producers while they’re down, but I need to say that fairly early on I saw some basic flaws in the show’s premise. The trouble was there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for conflict. They invited twelve nature writers to build cabins in the woods and live there alone, never interacting with the other writers. This made it tough to form alliances. Continue reading →
Thankful Things
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Here’s a very short essay I wrote for the Maine Sunday Telegram, and which appeared yesterday with pieces by other Maine writers, like the fabulous Monica Wood. See the whole feature online here, and here us read. My bit goes like this:
Getting Outside Saturday: The Falcon and the Sparrow
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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I want to tell you about something I saw one day while I was out trying to get some new peregrine falcon pictures for the book project I am working on when I saw a falcon circling above me, climbing for altitude. Higher and higher it climbed, and then suddenly it folded in its wings, and dove out of the sky like a rocket! Continue reading →
