Cocktail Hour
Serial Sunday: Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine, by Crash Barry
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Episode Three
[To read Episode 2, please click here][To start at the beginning with Episode One, please click here]
Four-thirty a.m. came quick. I was awake and ready instantly, thanks to my rigorous Coast Guard regime of pre-dawn drug boardings and search-and-rescues. Donald and I drank a cup of tea and ate toast with margarine, then headed to the shore in his beat-up Chevy. It was still dark as we climbed down a ladder attached to the Steamboat Wharf and into his 14-foot aluminum skiff powered by a 10-horse outboard. He stood in the stern and motored us to the mooring. Other men were also en route to their boats. And a couple were already steaming out of the harbor into the dawn. Donald didn’t wave or acknowledge any of them. They ignored him back. Continue reading →
Clearly Now, The Rain
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We will wrap up Eli Hastings week with an excerpt from Clearly Now, The Rain.
If you like it please visit Eli’s website for links to purchase the book!
PROLOGUE
My truck is stalled in the middle of a skinny one-way street in the University District. Rain slides down the windshield and distorts the gray world outside. My fingers are wrapped around the steering wheel, knives and clubs on the floorboards. Hugh is as taut as a stretched bungee cord at my side. The ripping of traffic in the rain comes from Forty-fifth. Luke answers his phone in the backseat. Get out guys, he says. Get out of the car. And there are so many things, so many possible pieces rolling up from the back of my mind, and we’re out of the truck and Hugh is shaking, more scared than I’ve ever seen him, and my hands can’t hold the keys so I put them away. Luke clutches a raspberry smoothie with one hand, holds the cell to his head with the other, marching back and forth in front of the truck, listening, waiting, for what we don’t know because he won’t look at us, won’t answer the broken whisper every few seconds. What’s going on? Who is it? And the rain comes down harder, the mist gets thicker, and commuters stare at us as if we are ghosts. Continue reading →
Guerrilla Marketing with Eli Hastings
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Eli Hastings week continues here at Bill and Dave’s:
Clearly Now, The Rain is a memoir about decade-long relationship between Eli Hastings and his friend Serala. Although Serala’s dark and traumatic journey concluded tragically at age 27, Eli writes with hopeful resolution about his unique friendship.
Yesterday Eli talked about how he wrote the book. Today he shows us one way he is helping usher the book into the world. As an indie author, this of course involves some guerrilla marketing.
Here’s an example: over the last weeks he has published an excerpt from his book every day via photos on social media. He will keep doing so right up until the pub date, May 1.
Check it out:
Bad Advice Wednesday: Listen to Eli!
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
When we first conceived of this website we saw it as not just a celebration of writing and reading, but a party among friends. This week I am very proud to welcome former student, long-time friend and great writer, Eli Hastings to the party. Over the next three days we will highlight him and his forthcoming book, Clearly Now, The Rain.
Kirkus Reviews had this to say about the book: “A candid, bracing memoir of love, addiction and self-destruction……As elemental, lyrical and cringe-inducing a love story as they come.” And Benjamin Percy added: “Eli Hastings will make you fall in love — and then he will punch through your ribcage and rip your heart out — and by the end of his moving memoir, Clearly Now, The Rain, you will thank him for it.”
Eli writes from the heart and in the essay below he describes how his book came to be:
No Straight Lines
I do not crisply remember the various moments that I said it. I think I said it once when Serala tucked me into her bed in 1998. I was raging and heartbroken over a girl; she gave me a few sips of her wine and sat against the wall stroking my head while I bitched and wept. I corkscrewed through black sleep for nine hours. My eyes snapped open on her and she was still dressed, still sitting there, still drinking wine, still stroking my head.
Maybe I said it once when she called from a locked ward’s payphone, the sounds of caged anguish around her, her voice dulled, reporting the cocktail of death she’d prepared and ingested, how all it did was land her there for a stomach pump and cross examinations.
Swan Update!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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A week ago I posted about our backyard swans and their many weeks of nesting. Well this Wednesday the eggs hatched and four cygnets waddled out. They swam almost immediately. Yesterday, Hadley and I paddled out to say a cautious hello. Here we are approaching…..
And here is the new family…..
Serial Sunday: Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine, by Crash Barry
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Episode 2
[To start at the beginning with Episode One, please click here]
We met up with The Dotted Eye at a dock in the Rockland Coast Guard Station. I didn’t bring much because I didn’t own much. A half ounce of seedy marijuana and a carton of Camel Filters. A couple tabs of LSD, a cardboard box of books and a green canvas sea bag packed with 40 pounds of clothes. A sleeping bag, a quilt my mother had made, a typewriter, a clock radio and a box of Red Rose tea. Captain Donald shook my hand and grunted as I climbed aboard the boat for the first time. In his mid-sixties, he looked like a caricature of a Maine lobsterman. Salt and pepper beard with no mustache. Arms the size of legs. Legs the size of trees. Hands of a giant. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Random Associations and The Wired Woods
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Yesterday I saw the season’s first painted bunting. Blazing red belly from below.
The better part of the day, however, was spent on the phone with my friend Hones, whose house is 1500 feet or so from the boat where the bombing suspect was finally apprehended. Hones is celebrating that apprehension by going fishing at Wachusett Reservoir this morning (he might be there by now actually). He has promised to write a firsthand account for Bill and Dave’s very soon.
I learned of the events, both the marathon and the chase, through social media, a first for me. And I followed it there, too. I’m not sure what this means.
This morning I was mulling on these things. Then I put the mulling aside and went to Facebook, where I saw this photo that Eric Taubert (great title for his website by the way) had posted:
The State I’m In: Watching North Carolina Destroy Itself
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I published this yesterday over at my OnEarth blog, “Wild Life.”
Only three months into the 2013-2014 General Assembly, Tar Heel senators have already approved a bill that would lift the state moratorium on hydraulic fracturing — a process of drilling for natural gas that poses serious pollution and health concerns — without first enacting adequate safeguards. The bill would also allow drillers to freely inject polluted waste fluids from fracking back into the ground, which is particularly dangerous here, given the fact that the shale gas layer is shallower in North Carolina than in many other parts of the country, and therefore closer to the water table. The same bill would also formally embrace offshore drilling (despite recent disasters like BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, from which tar balls and oil are still washing up on Gulf Coast beaches nearly three years later). These ideas are being seriously considered, even as states that earlier embraced fracking are now facing some dramatic water pollution issues, and despite the fact that our state’s scientists keep warning us about the threats to our own water.
Reading Under the Influence: Lundgren’s Book Lounge
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Maria Semple
[This week we introduce you to Bill Lundgren, who has a thing or two to say about current books, and blogs books at LongfellowBooks.com. He’ll be back!]
Where’d You Go Bernadette, a novel by Maria Semple
While waiting on a mother and daughter at the bookstore recently I asked if they would like to join the customer program. When they responded that they were from Seattle I had to ask whether they’d read Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. “Everybody in Seattle has read that book,” the mother responded, “and it’s all true,” the 14 or 15 year old daughter added with the emphatic disdain that only an adolescent can produce. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Rock the Boat
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
You know those moments when you sit silent in the face of the knuckleheadedness of your boss? When you are in the room and the question–you know the answer!–hovers in the silence? When the contractor tells you he’s not going to finish but wants to be paid anyway and you stand heavy on the manhole cover of your mind to keep the boiling in check and say “Okay”? When you freeze on your butt in the bus while the psychopath screams? When if only you could fly around the world at supersonic speed and cause time to reverse and go to Boston and pick out that whoever it is placing his black backpacks? And that secondary moment when the right riposte comes to you late (l’espirit d’escalier: a useful phrase from the useful French). Or you wake in the next day’s night with the exact plan? Or you over beers inhabit the braver person you might have been, the guy that confronts the villain, the gal who rushes toward danger, the exhausted runner who leaps the fence, attends to the injured and dying? Continue reading →
