Cocktail Hour
Getting Outside Saturday: Death of a Bridge
categories: Cocktail Hour
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These are the woods where Missy and I walk most every day.
And this is the bridge that tried to kill me last winter, now dead itself.
Justice!
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: Eduardo Galleano’s “Children of the Days”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Throughout his writing life Eduardo Galeano has given voice to the silenced. Hopscotching the globe to elude the death squads of right-wing military dictatorships, he has offered up a steady succession of works of brilliance, mostly chronicling the history of the Americas. He has described himself as “… a writer obsessed with remembering the past of America… intimate land condemned to amnesia.” His newest work, Children of the Days, continues to expand notions of literary genre. Is he a journalist? An essayist, a historian or novelist? Certainly a poet… Children of the Days follows the days of the calendar to offer up vignettes from the forgotten annals of history. While it is impossible to adequately characterize the cumulative power of the writing, here is a small sampling: Continue reading →
Meet the Authors
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The gents have chivalrously agreed to post some writing from a group of women inmates whom I work with in a program called “Meet the Authors.” (The women don’t have internet access, but your comments will get back to them, through me, after being vetted through the chain of command.)
The program runs in 12-week rounds, two hours per week, with a different group of students for each round, always with a few repeaters. We read the work of Maine women writers, who come to discuss their work and offer a writing exercise in their respective genres. The women then write short pieces, using prompts from me or the guest writers, and revise them according to feedback from the group. The guest authors’ books, I should add, are purchased by a generous couple from Portland, who have been steadfast supporters of this concept. Continue reading →
An Interview with Caroline Leavitt
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Meg Pokrass: So tell us about your new book.
Caroline Leavitt: Is this Tomorrow is the first novel I ever wrote set in the past, the 1950s. It’s set in a time when everything was supposed to be perfect and everyone was supposed to be the same, and it centers around Ava Lark, a Jewish divorcee with a son, at a time when being divorced was a scandal and being Jewish was suspect. None of the neighbors like or trust her, and her boyfriends make them suspicious. But when her son’s best friend vanishes one day, the cops and the neighbors use it as an opportunity to ostracize her further. The novel flashes forward to when Ava’s son Lewis, and the missing boy’s sister Rose are adults who never got over the disappearance. And then the case seems solved–but is it really? Continue reading →
James Dickey’s Fan Letters to Wallace Stegner
categories: Cocktail Hour
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To feel like you haven’t gotten a fair shake, haven’t gotten your due, is pretty much a constant for 99 % of all writers writing at any time, aside from the luck-soaked few. But within the writing community itself we kind of know who can write, really write. For those not blinded by fame (at last count about six people on planet earth), it isn’t hard to figure out: It takes a few sentences, a page, a book or two, but you can tell if someone can write. It must be a little like being a great carpenter and watching someone sink a nail. You know.
When I set out to write a book about Wallace Stegner and Ed Abbey, I didn’t expect to find that this whole recognition thing was an issue that bothered these great writers, too, but then again I shouldn’t have been surprised. They were just like the rest of us poor suckers.
Luckily, there are other ways of knowing you are good than having the world celebrate you as so. One way is this: A great writer can tell you that you are a great writer.
Last summer around this time I spent a few days with Wallace Stegner’s papers at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I came across a lot of great stuff but one of the real pleasant surprises was to discover the letters that James Dickey wrote to Stegner. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island”: Episode Eight
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Then he spotted the VW Bus parked 10 feet in front of his wharf, the rising sea lapping at the driver’s side-view mirror.”
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The tide was halfway to high when I drove The Dotted Eye toward the dock and nearly crashed into a Volkswagen bus. I threw her in reverse and backed down hard. Donald, who’d been astern and was almost thrown to the deck, came running forward. “WHAT THE HELL?” he hollered. Then he spotted the VW parked 10 feet in front of his wharf, the rising sea lapping at the driver’s side-view mirror. “What the frig?” Continue reading →
My Acceptance Speech
categories: Cocktail Hour
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ASLE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
The Tarball Chronicles just won the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) biennial creative writing award. I was not in Kansas to accept the award (and get killed by a tornado). But this is what I asked the great eco-critic and writer, Mike Branch, to read:
First let me say that it is difficult writing this speech without knowing exactly who is going to deliver it. My first choice was John Lane, in part due to our similar facial hair. True, John is a little older than me, but I figured that in a pinch he would do as a stand in. When John said he wouldn’t be there on Thursday night, he suggested Michael Branch. This seemed a good choice (and he may well be reading this to you now) since we also have more or less similar facial hair and, if Google images is accurate, roughly the same amount of gray in our hair and beards. So if this is Michael reading this right now, thanks. I should add that my third option for a reader was Patrick Thomas who has no facial hair at all and who, if he is the one reading this, will soon be in the awkward position of thanking himself
Enough preliminaries. The main purpose of this speech is to thank you, the ASLE folks, for choosing The Tarball Chronicles for your creative writing award. It means a lot for both obvious and less than obvious reasons. The less than obvious have to do with getting this story out there. The book, on the most obvious level, is about the BP oil spill during the summer of 2010. But I like to think it is also about a lot of other things, and one of those is how we, as a country, tell our stories. At the moment we are almost constantly assaulted by such a babel-like cacophony of voices telling so many stories from so many angles that we often feel like plugging our ears. And, after several months of studying the spill, I realized that I was also studying the way we tell our national stories. We do so in a way that Continue reading →
Chess Champ
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Game in Progress
The first time I realized what I had lost to Parkinson, and how much I had lost, was on Yahoo. I was watching a chess game on the internet. These are games played against humans. In live chess, slow games last ten minutes. Fast games range from two down to one minute. That’s for the whole game, not for one move. What they call bullet chess. It’s like blitz, in accelerated motion. Two players, ranked 2000 and over, and me, watching. Stupefied by the speed, I could not comprehend what was happening, except that it was happening without me, beyond the reach of my brain, or mind, and body. Continue reading →
