Cocktail Hour
My Hall-of-Fame Brother
categories: Cocktail Hour
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As those who read this blog regularly know, I spent twenty years playing ultimate Frisbee. (At last check, 26,000 readers had at least browsed our Bill and Dave’s essay, “Ultimate Glory,” which was noted in this year’s Best American Sports Writing anthology.)
The best thing about the sport, hands down, was getting to be good friends with so many teammates, and two weeks ago one of my teammates, David Barkan, was inducted into the Ultimate Hall of Fame. Ten members of our former team, the Hostages, made it down to Texas for the ceremony. I did not make it but sent along this letter:
He was my first real Frisbee hero.
Others can talk about David Barkan’s long career on the West Coast, his contributions to international Ultimate, and I am a great admirer of these. But it is the early blaze that interests me. That first sighting of this intense guy sprinting around the field, jumping and running and even pivoting faster than anyone else, like some high speed Star Trek creature who moved too fast for the crew to see. I would wager that he still holds the land speed record for the time between conceiving of a huck and the moment the disc left his hand.
Single Parenting and the Aspiring Writer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Joseph and Lillie
When Bill asked me to write about being a single parent and a writer I suddenly realized it has been something like 3 years since I’ve written anything. It has definitely been that long since I’ve published anything. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Our Own Dave Thinking 20 Years Out on MSNBC
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Dave explains the role of dunes on MSNBC’s The Cycle Continue reading →
Five Months after the MFA: Getting Friendly with Reality
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Five months ago, I was elated and exhausted. I’d just completed three years in a creative writing MFA program I loved. I’d accomplished that which I had intended: to become a better reader and writer. As I waited for my diploma to arrive in the mail, I allowed myself to read for pleasure, watch trashy television shows online, and sleep—a lot. I enjoyed a few celebratory meals with friends who bought me crème brulee in shot glasses and hibiscus margaritas. They toasted to my success: Girl, you’re fabulous! Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: My Top Ten Pieces of Advice
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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The top ten pieces of advice I have received, some of it about writing, some of it about life, in no particular order:
1. My friend Melinda Macinnis said, “Always believe what people tell you about themselves when you first know them.” We were in our twenties at the time, and I think the conversation was about potential love interests. But I have found over and over again, in all kinds of relationships, that this is true. Pay particular attention to the things people tell you by accident.
2. I worked in a bookstore in Chatham with a woman who was a therapist – she’d just moved there with her husband and hadn’t decided whether she was going to set up a practice or retire. Sadly, I can’t remember her name, but I liked her enormously. Diane? Maybe it was Diane. She told me that she never read her own work at a certain time of day because that was when she was most critical and apt toward anguish. A bell went off inside my head, and now I never read my own work in the late afternoon.
Table for Two: An interview with Nina de Gramont
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Nina
Bill: Where would you like to have our pretend dinner?
Nina: I wish we could have dinner at The Bombay Club in Harvard Square.
Bill: Ah, perfect! I will order the hydrabadi bagare bagain. Because it sounds like a bargain, at least in Boston talk… And I like eggplant always. So, just quick, before the waiter comes, tell us about your newest novel, Meet Me at the River.
Nina: I will need a moment to choose between the vindaloo and the saag. Also, I just found out The Bombay Club moved to the South End and then closed, which is a travesty, but since this is my imaginary dinner I can be stubborn.
Bill: We can have our imaginary dinner wherever we want! And a ghost restaurant seems appropriate, come to think of it. Though I think they may have reopened in Burlington, Mass. Continue reading →
The New Normal: Meditations from the Rubble Pile
categories: Cocktail Hour
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by Karen Auvinen
A month after the 100-year flood reduced most of Jamestown, CO, my community, to a rubble pile, I hear the click on the door closing as life in the outside world returns to normal. Eyes turn toward the government shut down and the Nobel Prize announcements. Fading from public memory is the image of my friend Nancy’s blue house tipping into James Creek like a collapsed accordion, or the dramatic helicopter rescues—more than Katrina—up and down the Front Range from Lyons and Estes Park to the north, to James, Left Hand, and Fourmile Canyons outside of Boulder. Gone are the visits from the governor and state senators. Fading, too, is the memory of Vice President Joe Biden’s phone message to Tara Schoedinger, our extraordinary mayor.
All Photos by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post
Getting Outside Saturday: The Unmanly Retreat of a Lighthouse
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here’s a little teaser from my current article in Outside:
We drive south to the famous Hatteras Lighthouse, which Orrin and others fought to have moved back 2,900 feet from the eroding shore in the late 1990s, despite the fact that many North Carolinians found the retreat unmanly. “There was one powerful local woman who was virulently opposed to moving it,” Orrin tells us as we approach. “She said, ‘Someone is going to get hurt if they move it.’ A fellow scientist misunderstood and tried to reassure her. ‘No, Mrs. Dillon, we can move it perfectly safely.’ I had to explain that that was not what she meant.”
We pull in at the lighthouse and walk from where it was first built in 1870 to where it was moved in 1999. It rises above us like a giant barber pole.
“Mrs. Dillon always claimed that moving the lighthouse killed her husband,” Orrin says. “The stress, you know.”
I ask if Mrs. Dillon has also passed away.
“She’s still alive. Unfortunately.”
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Alice Munro, perhaps alone among English-speaking writers, can be said to measure up to the artistic genius of Chekhov. Over a career spanning fifteen remarkable collections, Munro has plumbed the mysteries of the human heart, almost exclusively the female heart, in short stories that rival any novel for their depth and breadth and startling view of the capriciousness of lives we pretend to be defined by their stability. And now Munro has been recognized for her life’s work by being awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Continue reading →
