Cocktail Hour
Independent Bookstore Tuesday: Run Like Hell!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 3 comments
Jonathan Evison
For years, here on Bainbridge Island, there was this great little record store called the Glass Onion. The dude who owned it was named Jeff, and he loved his job. Basically, by buying a record store, he bought himself into a low paying job for life. Or so he thought. He was smart, passionate, and informed in a dizzyingly wide array of musical genres, and always managed to be on the cutting edge, without necessarily looking like a guy who lived on the cutting edge. Is this sounding familiar yet? Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus Island” (Episode 12)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
“The pickup was wedged in at a strange angle…”
.
“Crash, go move the truck,” Donald said, with a hint of a slur in his voice. By October, Donald barely spoke to me, other than to give a direct order. “Just don’t crash it. Hah-hah.” He tossed me the keys.
Mary-Margaret was giving us both the evil eye. We were attending a birthday bash in Lincolnville, a little town just north of Rockland, for an old-time sea captain and maritime pilot. We were already on the mainland for our monthly trip, so Donald and Mary-Margaret decided we’d make a surprise appearance at the party for Cap’n Craiger. The gala was being held at a camp in the woods and there were lots of vehicles. Parking was a chaotic mess, though Donald was able to maneuver his giant Chevy truck among the trees and parked cars. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: The Hissing of Summer Lawns
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 5 comments
Actual footage
I mow as little as possible, or actually quite a bit less than as little as possible. My lawn is only partially grass, and you don’t really need to mow moss, or cinquefoil, or gill-over-the-ground, or white clover, or all those other things probably ever. But to keep the forest at bay, to keep the historical clearing, to keep light on the garden, to make a place for tumbling, and then soccer in the fall, well, you gots to mow. Last year I used 2.5 gallons of gas to do it. The whole summer. But it was dry-ish. Crazy lawn this year. Anyway, this is a mowing poem. The smell, the heat, the boredom, I recall those days forty-five years ago when I mowed the Smith’s lawn for $2.50, and the Holmes’s lawn for $2.00. Neither took me long. You’d walk the neighborhood with the machine, a rotary roar machine, very proud of your status as a working man. Green sneakers, that’s what you’d end up with. And green fingers from clearing the chute. And rocks flying a hundred yards when you nailed them, and the roar. Also the stripes of lawn, 24″ at a time. You worked out the most efficient pattern over time, and knew right where all the stumps and rocks were, and right where the swan hid next to the pond, the one that chased you up the hill in a swan rage. If your sprinted, you could do a two-hour lawn in fifteen minutes, meet your girl for a smooch, and no one the wiser. Today, my friends, I know there are suburban neighborhoods where I’d be in big trouble, but I love to let the dandelions go, the black-eyed susans, the daisies, queen-Anne’s lace, the hawkweed, the fabulous hawkweed, then the grass itself. What’s more lovely than a grass plant in flower? When I finally mow it’s more like haying. But you do have to keep that athletic field open when your kid is 12! She follows the mower doing cartwheels in the fresh. And come morning I’ll rake up the cuttings and mulch the asparagus. It’s a mine, that lawn, and spins gold. Continue reading →
I Used to Play in Bands, Too
categories: Cocktail Hour / I Used to Play in Bands
comments: 5 comments
Pain
I read Bill’s book Temple Stream for the first time a few years ago while camping on Cape Cod. It was tucked into an inviting corner of Brewster Books, and, because it was raining, I sat on the floor and read most of it before finally buying it at the end of the afternoon. It’s been a good friend to me since. I recently took it down from the shelves for another read, but first decided to check out Bill and Dave’s to see what I could learn about what you were up to. There I found “I Used to Play in Bands,” which I watched straight through. I’m writing because…well…I used to play in bands too. Continue reading →
Happy Fourth
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
comments: 5 comments
Ray Charles. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Try Not to Die
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
It’s hard to type when you’re dead.
This past March I drove up the coast, following the path of Hurricane Sandy, with the coastal activist and geologist Orrin Pilkey.
“Maybe they’ll name a building after you too if you stay alive long enough,” he said.
He was referring, lightheartedly, to a building that had just been named in his own honor, Duke University’s new Orrin Pilkey Marine Science and Conservation Genetics Center in Beaufort, North Carolina.
“The trick is to stay alive,” he added.
* * *
I am thinking lately that Orrin is right. Not that I’m angling to have a building named after me—though the David M. Gessner Jr. Creative Writing Plaza and Waterpark does have a nice ring to it—but that staying alive is a pretty key aspect of the writing life.
Hemingway said something like that too, right? That it kind of sucks to finally feel like you’ve really got some sort of mastery over what you are doing, and that you’ve made it through the spastic turmoil of youth, and then your body has to go and crap out on you. Of course he took that into his own hands, didn’t he? He failed pretty miserably at today’s bad advice.
Writing From Inside: “Dear Karla,” by Karla
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 11 comments
Dear Karla
This next post from the ladies at the Maine Correctional Center “Meet the Authors” class came from the following prompt: Write a letter to a person–living or dead, fictional or real–who, for one reason or other, is no longer available to you. Karla wrote to her younger self, a poignant piece filled with both regret and hope. It’s a letter many of us could have written to our younger selves, whether our older selves are in prison or in the corner office on the 100th floor. [MW]
DEAR KARLA, by Karla
Dear Karla at 15,
Listen to your parents.
Now, you may think you’re way too cool and you don’t need them; but when you’re 25, all you’ll want is your mommy and daddy and all their advice. A shoulder to cry on when things get scary. Continue reading →
Don’t Worry, I’m Not Going to Tear My Shirt off and Punch a Critic in the Face, But.
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 33 comments
I’ve just returned from a multi-city book tour. There were happy meetings and reunions, great Q&A sessions, bookstores converted to speakeasies, and at the last stop, a basket of champagne and strawberries from my publisher. I enjoy posting photos from readings and cities I visit to support those who support me–the towns, the bookstores, the reviewers, and the people–but I always hesitate before hitting “upload” because there are quite a few writers out there still trying to find an agent, facing rejection, and unable to get a publisher. This is the exact arrested state of publishing misery in which I resided for nearly a decade, and while I was happy for others and their success, on bad days, seeing it felt like lemon juice in a paper cut. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus” (Episode 11)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
“We’d be in big trouble.”
*
“Dudes!” Paul shouted. “The skiff!”
It was the end of September and the three of us were standing in the middle of Ten Pound Island. Drinking Lord Calvert, but not drunk. High, but not obliterated. Even though it was less than a mile from our shacks, none of us had been on Ten Pound before. I was enamored with the island because of a particularly memorable foggy day, early in the summer, while hauling traps between Matinicus and Ragged Ass. The salt air and mist smelled sweet and fruity because Ten Pound was overrun with wild strawberries. Continue reading →
