Cocktail Hour
Serial Sunday: Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine, by Crash Barry
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
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Episode 1
March 1991
I’d just finished a stint as a sailor in the Coast Guard, fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Haitian Refugees. No money. No job. No leads. A rudderless 23-year-old couch-surfer crossing back and forth over the state line between Portsmouth and Kittery.
Then the message came from a Coastie pal’s wife. Her dad, a lobsterman on Matinicus, Maine’s most remote inhabited island, needed a helper immediately. A sternman. A hired hand. A modern indentured servant paid with 15 percent of the catch, plus free housing, on an island 20 miles out to sea. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: The Swan in Our Backyard
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For two months now she has been sitting, sitting, sitting. Through rain and storms, through cold and heat. Sometimes the water covers all the grass, everything but her nest.
And the Winner Is:
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The votes are in, and a dynasty is emerging: Vermont College once again takes the 2013 Bill and Dave’s Best Writin’ Program in the Land Tourney. But close behind are two other fine low-res programs, Fairfield University (these folks meet for their residencies on an island, okay?), and Goddard. Fairfield arrived this year from nowhere as a write-in campaign, whoa! Ashland, too, a great performance, and it rocks and rules over all other traditional MFA programs, with McNeese State, UNCW, Ohio State, Alabama, and Stony Brook all scoring in the double digits, and deserving of congratulations for fine school spirit. Bath Street Elementary, with one vote, takes first place in its surprise category, who knew! Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Do Anything
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Don’t do anything you don’t have to do. Write instead. It’s not easy. For one thing, you need to come up with a different version of “have to” than non-writers. As in, you don’t have to do those dishes piled up in the sink. Even if your most fastidious sister is on her way over. Instead, write. The only other thing I’ll let you do is text your sister and tell her it’s not a good time. You don’t have to have visitors, even family! You just have to write.
Life makes this difficult. I thought that Alice Munro said “Laundry will wait very patiently,” but a Google search corrected me. It was Nora Roberts, which is fine, because I’m slightly more comfortable disagreeing with her. Laundry does not wait patiently. It grows and glowers and rises like an angry beast, threatening to take over your closet and sometimes your bedroom. Ignore it anyway! You have to write.
The friend you haven’t seen in weeks wants to go out to lunch? I’m very sorry to tell you, but you can’t go. You have to write. Your neighbor points out that your front lawn is looking more Jungle Book than Suburbia? You have to endure the dig, because there’s no time for mowers. You have to write. A former student e-mails, asking you to read her newest short story? That’s a little tougher. You need to be generous, as people have been to you. You shouldn’t have checked your email. But you did, so go ahead and say yes, but warn that it may take a while, and then read it during time allotted for other things. Not writing. During writing time, you have to write. You can’t use that time for housework or socializing or reading or catching up on ANYTHING. You just have to write.
Southern Fried Scribes
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Jennifer and Matt by Jennifer and Matt
We came from different places, she from the Midwest, all over really, most recently Minnesota, but New York, Pennsylvania, and even Louisiana before that. I moved to Tuscaloosa from Austin, Texas, and it was there, here really, Alabama, that Field Tiger Press came into being. Continue reading →
Diary of a Comeback: Part I
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Facing the usual quadruple team…
I’ve become soft, pampered and isolated, living up in this big house that all my Frisbee money bought me. I’m tired of it all—the money, the fame, the servants. I need to get back to my roots. Need to train like I did when I first came up, just a Frisbee-throwing street urchin from Worcester, MA.
Day 2.
Decided drastic action was required. Told Fox Searchlight to can the movie about my life as an Ultimate player. Instead of heading to L.A., I ordered my pilot to fly Hammer 1 down to Tampa. It took all afternoon searching downtown but I finally found Gus in a seedy, rat-infested hotel. He was drooling, could barely speak, clearly strung out. But still I knew that he was the man who held the secret to my comeback. Only someone who had stared into the fires of hell could help me go through what I had to if I was to once again become who I was. My first job is cleaning him up. Then the training begins.
Day 3.
On Gus’s counsel, I ate the brain of a sharp-shinned hawk for breakfast. He tells me it will help me acquire raptor-like skills.
I told him that I’m made of money and am looking into buying a bionic right arm. He said no. He insists this has to be all natural, like Rocky training in Siberia. No steroids for me, not this time around. Need to throw rocks into a rock haulers chute and chop trees and climb mountains.
I started today with a half-mile jog, Gus biking alongside, screaming at me through a megaphone. Now packed in ice. Continue reading →
The Bill and Dave’s Even Sweeter Sixteen: Voting Extended to April 11, 2013
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The Patented Bill and Dave’s Sweet Sixteen Algorithmic Computational Matrix
Our 100% guaranteed fully scientific ratings system is working better than ever (explanation below). Voting continues till Thursday, April 11, 2013 when all hell will break loose, guaranteed. Vote by naming your school in the comments pane below. We’re looking for 1000 total votes, but if we don’t get there, we’ll apportion the missing number to low-turnout schools where we have friends, such as Wyoming and Ohio University. Also Ashland, why not? We predict a surge by Western Quebec U in the final moments (Quebec is part of Vermont, so counts as part of “The Land” in the phrase “Best Writin’ Program in the Land.” Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Coyote!
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Reading Under the Influence: A Look Back at Antonya Nelson’s Expendables
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Some years ago, in 2000, to be precise, I won a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. I rented a fancy tux and headed Milledgeville and a grand award ceremony. But the real prize was seeing my collection, Big Bend, beautifully published. This yaer marks the 30th anniversary of the prize, and the editors asked us winners if we’d write brief posts about one another’s books for their blog. They are also offering a pair of e-anthologies of work from all the winners, coming soon. And before long, an e-book of Big Bend will finally be available, hoorah! Below, I’ll offer my post for the “30 Days of the Flannery O’Connor award,” this one about Antonya Nelson’s winning collection from 1990, The Expendables. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: It’s a Brave Old World
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 2 comments
Just what I pictured: Public House
A couple of months back, at a reading by Kate Miles at Devanney, Doak, and Garrett Booksellers here in Farmington, Maine, I found myself seated across from the Dover Editions rack. These are decent paperback editions of classics, or at least just work in the public domain, priced to reach the masses. While I listened to Kate beautifully read from her new book of the sea, All Standing, my eye kept returning to that rack. And after the reading among the milling crowd I made my way to it, the old bibliomania surfacing. I bought Kate’s book (which she signed to someone else, long story) and grabbed J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, one of those books I’ve meant to read lo these many years, first entering my consciousness in college (I thought it might be the Hugh Hefner story then, but was disappointed), and growing there over the years (various Irish kicks), blooming when A. Walton Litz mentioned it in a great Yeats and Joyce seminar I joined in graduate school. Something about the repression and stifling and conformity of Irish society, back in the day. I didn’t read it then, but I did read Ulysses, finally, A. Walton Litz having loaned me a complete set of cassette tapes: the Irish National Theatre doing a complete reading on Bloomsday, 25 hours. Finally I heard the Joyce’s voices, glorious; finally I could read and understand the book, the secret being to listen. Continue reading →
