Cocktail Hour
Friends, Sidekicks, and Disorganized Wanderers
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
As most readers of this blog know, Bill and I just spent some time at the big writing conference in Boston. As businessmen, we did almost everything wrong. I spent a lot of money printing out a book of Bill and Dave cartoons and then essentially gave them away. Bill, who was in charge of our table and general scheduling, managed to schedule a reading for himself in Tucson on the second day of the conference. Tucson, it should be pointed out, is a long way from Boston. And finally we were barely ever at our table. We both like to wander around.
In fact, if it were based solely on time spent at the table, we would re-name this website Hones and Kristen’s Cocktail Hour. Kristen Keckler you will know from her fine guest blogs, most recently this one. Hones might also be familiar to you, if you have read any of my books. (I recently wrote this post about him, too, on the art of sidekicking.) As far as I know he was the only non-writer out of the 11,000 or so people who attended the conference. When people asked him if he was a writer he said “No, I’m a character.” He went on to explain that he was a professional sidekick.
So to Kristen and Hones, Bill and I say thank you. And to those who came by to see us and only found our cartoon selves, we are sorry. Next time we’ll be better. And more organized. We promise.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Write About Animals
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
This morning, on the drive to school, my daughter Hadley issued a complaint.
“One thing I don’t like about third grade is that they say a noun is a person, place or thing.”
I asked her how this was different than earlier grades.
“It used to be a noun was a person, place, thing, or animal.”
We talked about it for a while. Apparently, someone somewhere had decided that third grade was the time for animals to lose their noun-ness, to be reduced to mere things. We agreed that a better definition of a noun would be an animal, place or thing, with humans taking their correct spot as a subset of the first category.
After I dropped her off, I thought about animals, how they are not only nouns but absolutely vital to my own writing life, and to the writing lives of many others. To prove the latter all I had to do was take a sampling of my last sixteen hours: the afternoon before I had taught a workshop that featured a beautiful, funny and ambitious essay on pelicans by my grad student, Lucy Huber. Then, seven hours later, struck my insomnia, I spent some midnight hours reading and editing a chapter of John Lane’s brilliant forthcoming book on Southern coyotes, with the hope of placing it in Ecotone. In my own house the daily evidence was compelling: not a day passed without my daughter writing a story about dogs or wolves; my wife’s first book was called Of Cats and Men, and my breakthrough book was my third, Return of the Osprey.
So today’s bad advice is simple: find an animal, watch it, think about it, empathize with it, read about it, study it, write about it. If you do, it will do something to your writing. Writers, along with primitive people, understand that animals have magic in them. They have the power to transport. I mean this practically, not mystically. When a writer starts looking beyond him or herself, something happens to the work. It becomes less claustrophobic, gets outside of itself, gets out of its own way. It airs itself out. I can think of no better single way of jolting your own writing out of habit than by spending time focused on some of the non-human creatures we share the planet with. Continue reading →
Forever 21 and Grandma’s Attic: The Fashion Report from AWP
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
If you were in a hotel lobby full of normal people—business travelers, Mid-western tourists—with one odd poet among them, you’d surely detect this romantic Waldo in a few quick sweeps. It’s only when thousands of creative writers are all herded together—snaking, skulking, and skipping through a maze of book fair booths, and stuffing free pens from Linguistic Battery Acid Mag into canvas conference totes—that you discern the slight distinctions in genres and stages of degree acquisition. For example, tenured nature writers tend to look like they just packed up the tent and hiked through ten miles of bramble—poking at fresh, steaming bear scat with whittled sticks—to their mud-studded Subarus. Wrinkled, grass-stained Cargo pants and National Geographic T-shirt under a tattered button-down, Swiss Army knife clipped to belt, and hiking-style brown-on-brown mesh sneakers. Other than the back-to-nature types, the rest of us were a fashionable feast almost-but-not-quite-destined for Page Six. Continue reading →
Can You Pay Me?
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 14 comments
Scooby-Doo Live rolled into town recently, and a friend I’d acted with in college was part of the cast. We got hot chocolate after the show at my favorite downtown cafe, and it was there, while grabbing some napkins, that a harmless little poster for a local community theatre production made my stomach clench up and my breath stop short. We sat down and I explained: Continue reading →
Come See Bill and Dave at the Bill and Dave Table!
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Bill and Dave, both their cartoon look-alikes and their real live selves, will be at AWP. Come find us among the thousands of other writers. We are the good-looking, funny ones, and the only writers at the conference with facial hair.
For help finding us here is a recent picture:
Pipedreams: Time and the Insubordinate Writer
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Melissa Falcon, 1996, in The Graduate
Navigating our way through the student center, past the radio station to the English Department, my Dad and I found Bill Roorbach’s office at the University of Maine at Farmington, freshman orientation, 1993. I was 17. With my enormous spiral perm and acid-washed jeans, also a lethal dose of neon blue eye pencil, and Summers with Juliet clenched under my arm, I peered through the narrow window, noted a few smooth river stones, a blonde ponytail and a tanned arm resting on a two-bit desk. Dad, wearing his University of Connecticut sweatshirt (where he’d hoped I would go so he might watch basketball games and slug back beers in the student section), impatiently rapped at the door, calling out in his gruff, pot-bellied bartender sort of fashion, “Hey man, you the writer?” Continue reading →
Thanks to Our Guest Posters!
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Vasilios Askmakos
Getting Outside: Late Winter Edition (More Damn Photo Haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 2 comments
Alder catkins, Temple Stream
