Cocktail Hour
Getting Outside Saturday: Secret Sharers (a Photo Haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Woodchuck. Waddled out of the lettuce, across the lawn, and into this little tree. I let him go to chomp another day.
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “City of Bohane,” by Kevin Barry
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Kevin Barry
Just published in paperback (Graywolf) and recipient of one of the world’s most prestigious prizes, The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, City of Bohane by Kevin Barry is a mesmerizing magic passport to another world, a futuristic Ireland conjured up by the author’s relentless re-imagining of the use of language. Just as the subversion and re-working of language created Joyce’s Dublin or the future in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Barry has conceived a city sometime in the future of the Emerald Isle, an Irish metropolis ruled by ritual and violence and described in an idiom all its own. Continue reading →
Be a part of the Debut of Iota: The Conference of Short Prose
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Campobello, site of Iota
I believe short forms are worthy of a long weekend.
That’s why I set out to create Iota: the conference of short prose. We’ve got a unique little focus: short writing. Iota celebrates and inspires an economy of words in a largesse of place. We’ve recruited Sven Birkerts (essays), Arielle Greenberg (poetry and hybrid forms), and Lewis Robinson (fiction) to spend four days working with participants on how to say more with fewer words. You can write in the morning, then attend workshops and cross-genre discussions in the afternoon. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Twelve Habits of People Who Don’t Give A Shit About Your Inner Peace
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Katherine Fritz
Every damn time someone in my facebook feed posts something like this, I click it. Every damn time.
We all have this facebook friend, right? People you genuinely love and admire. People you like hanging out with. People you invite to your birthday parties. You know. Actual friends. Until you’ve clicked links exactly like this again and again and again. For YEARS. And all of a sudden, you start to wonder if this is some elaborate hoax, if you’ve actually just been reading the same article over and over.
It’s not like I have anything against happiness, or success, or meditation, or yoga, or being nice, or smiling more, or eating healthy, or losing weight, or being your best you, or embracing the day with a positive attitude. Those all sound great. Honestly, they do. And there are some really smart, simple truths to be found in all of those articles. There truly are. Continue reading →
Southern Fried Scribes: Success
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Walking around town with some of the kids from the program
Our first two weeks of Southern Fried Scribes have come to a close. We’re a quarter of the way through and we can honestly say that we haven’t made a single mistake. Sure, there have been a few hitches, a couple of hiccups, maybe one literal squeak of a fart that slipped by in the early morning. There have been hordes of little flies that buzz around the classroom before setting down in someone’s hair to poop and throwup in the most microscopic of manners. There has been a hornet or two that fancies our lessons on Southern Mysticism. I even managed to break our HDMI cord on the day that I had been hyping up as “Movie Day.” Still, even with our glitches and hitches and hiccups, we have experienced some truly wonderful things. Continue reading →
My Passive-Aggressive Serenity Prayer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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God, I am sorry to be calling so
late, but please grant me the
serenity to passively-
aggressively confront the
things I cannot comfortably
change for example the way I
never ask for things, and then
get things because I never
asked for them until I have a
melt down, and to find within
tiny adorably modest me the
passive courage to change the
things I can with my
aggression which is really just
assertiveness, sort of, not
really,
And wisdom to know the
difference but i do not want to
bother you.
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine” (Episode Ten)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The salvaged table improved the décor of my pad. I paid 60 bucks to a handy fella on the mainland to build a new base for it out of pipe. My typewriter fit well on the table, next to a couple piles of books, papers, and a big ashtray. I made a special spot for a whiskey bottle and my small bong, and there was still enough room for a plate of potatoes or a bowl of pasta or a heap of mussels or a couple short lobsters. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Things in NYC that Reminded Me of Dave
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Up at dawn! (Sunrise over Central Park, 5:25 a.m. I? Well, I went back to sleep.)
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Transatlantic,” by Colum McCann
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Colum McCann by Seamus Kearney
[Author disclaimer: During portions of my reading of the following novel I was in a bit of a narcotic haze after hip replacement surgery–BL]
There are authors we read for the deeply satisfying and exquisite sensual pleasure to be found in their words. These writers may demur, claiming the story to be the thing, stepping into the pages of their novels is to enter a different, sharper, more immediate reality, a place of heightened senses and the lurking expectation that something important about existence might be revealed at any moment: think Ondaatjie, Harrison, Didion, Toibin… Colum McCann’s most recent work, Transatlantic reaffirms his inclusion in this company. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Writing the First Draft
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I just finished spending a couple of months writing a draft of a new book and I thought I’d focus today’s bad advice on the routines of writing that I tried to put in place during that time. The draft I just finished, technically a first draft but not really (I’ll explain), is the most tense, scariest, most exciting and pleasurable and life-sucking. The reason for all this is it is the part where you make something from nothing. For me this means there has usually been a long period of gestation before I begin—of reading, travelling, brooding, journal-writing, osprey-watching, note-taking, outline-making, file-putting in, tape-recording during walks, anxiety attack-having—but when I do begin, I usually really blast off.
This time around my daily schedule during the draft went like this:
4:30/5:00: Get up/feed dog and cat/boil water for tea/make coffee for later/stretch back/eat banana
5:00/5:30: Write Continue reading →
