Cocktail Hour
Getting Outside Saturday: Taylor Swift in Nashville (An Ode upon Elysia’s 13th Birthday)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 2 comments
12 tractor trailers.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Pick the Flowers! An Un-Fairy Tale
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
The context: We learned at the beginning of the school year that kids on the Radford, Virginia, High School Cross Country Team could no longer run on roads. The boys were state champs last year and they have a tradition of roaming all over the place, hilly streets, through neighborhoods, waved at by friends. Parents pushed back, and the administration gave no good rationale for it, or shifting ones, or they changed what is was called (a policy, then a directive?). Anyway, the overprotective fear of kids getting hurt is something I touched on in in A Natural Sense of Wonder. The original piece led to a sequel after a board meeting and there will be at least one more. As we discuss a ban on road running in Radford, you may be interested in a similar town that banned flower picking. It was written by one Jonathan Slow, a little-known friend of Jonathan Swift’s. Tune in for the next installment when the queen herself speaks. Continue reading →
What Every Kid Wants….An Ultimate Frisbee Bubblegum Card
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
Table for Two: An Interview with Elizabeth Cohen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
comments: 6 comments
I read The Hypothetical Girl because my friend Elizabeth Cohen wrote it. That’s what you do when a friend writes a book, you buy it and read – it’s like if a friend opened a barbershop, you’d go and get your hair cut. But I was so knocked out by the collection that I wound up emailing Elizabeth after nearly every story, because each is more wonderful than the one before. All the stories are about looking for relationships online, and finding heartache, surprise, betrayal, and – just maybe – love. Elizabeth’s writing is funny, wise, insightful, and memorable. All the things you want fiction to be that it hardly ever is. In the end, I had to ask her more questions, and she was kind enough to answer.
Katherine Heiny: Did you set out to write a collection about Internet dating or did you realize as you went along that that’s where the book was headed? Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Booktopia, Petoskey Michigan (a photo decastich)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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An intermediate milkweed species, lakeside
Pick You Own Caption: A Bill and Dave’s Contest
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 28 comments
I opened my drawing pad the other day and found that my daughter had drawn this. It seemed to demand a caption and I thought “Let’s put it up on Bill and Dave’s and see what people can come up with.” Winner gets their own cartoon head!
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Maid’s Version,” by Daniel Woodrell
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Daniel Woodrell
Daniel Woodrell is a writer’s writer, the kind of literary artist that too frequently in a culture driven by the whims of publishers interested only in the next big thing, might quietly churn out unnoticed masterpieces. Fortunately Woodrell was rescued from a lifetime of being praised mostly by his fellow writers and literary juries, when his novel Winter’s Bone was adapted for the screen and won widespread praise at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for four Academy Awards. And now he has shared with us another small masterpiece, The Maid’s Version. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Become a Planning, List-Making Freak
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 19 comments
Telegram
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
The following is by my friend and colleague, Wendy Brenner:
A couple years ago I began running into Tully Beatty everywhere, which was odd, because we’d both lived in Wilmington for more than a decade, yet since Tully graduated from UNCW’s MFA program in 2000 we had never once crossed paths. (In fact, when I first bumped into him in Harris Teeter I thought: That guy looks like Tully Beatty. I was about to apologize for staring when he turned out to actually be Tully.) Thereafter, on Facebook, I followed the cool, haunted-looking old photos and writings Tully sometimes posted about his famous father, Jim Beatty, who broke the world record for running an indoor mile in under four minutes in 1962. One image in particular captured my imagination: a grainy newspaper clipping showing three excited people holding a super-long Western Union telegram that had just been sent to Jimmy Beatty, then a 21-year-old junior at University of North Carolina, wishing him good luck in the 1956 Olympic track and field trials. The telegram was sent on behalf of more than 1200 friends and fans.
