Cocktail Hour
Getting Outside Saturday: A Haiku in Snow
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Good-bye to An Editor
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This is my intro to the new Ecotone:
Over the last few years I have sometimes been listed on the Ecotone masthead as Editor-in-Chief. I like that, in a vain sort of way. “In-Chief” sounds powerful, something writers seldom get to sound. It makes me want to roll up my sleeves and smoke cigars, maybe even start bossing people around like Lou Grant or Perry White at the Daily Planet. It fulfills something in me, satisfies my inner businessman.
But it isn’t exactly true: at heart I’m not really an editor, let alone an In-Chief. What I am, really, is a writer who has been lucky enough, while working with the original grad student editors of this magazine, Heather Wilson and Kimi Faxon Hemingway, to create a vision of a journal that focuses on place, and on nature, too, but on both in a way that isn’t as restricted as I often found the genres of place and nature writing to be. And then lucky enough to work with a series of great student editors, including Jay Varner, Brian Sandala, and Adam Petry, as the journal began to grow into something special.
It turned out my luck was just starting. In 2008 we hired Ben George as our editor, not a student editor this time but someone who had already gotten his professional chops at Tin House magazine. Immediately things around here Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Throw Your Skis Across the Brook
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Temple Stream. Your skis would land in the middle…
There come days skiing back in the woods, early and late in the season, when it rains and then rains more, and the ice is busted up by the resulting freshet, and you cross even the small brooks without some thought. On my regular route, the first brook is one I’ve named Nina Brook, since no one else seems to have named it. On my first morning of skiing this year, just a few inches of snow, I took my skis off, threw them over, crossed on the usual rocks, put the skis back on and continued. But on the second day came the rain, all day, all night, all the next night, then more snow. You could hear Temple Stream in the night, and you could hear Nina Brook, wow. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A Solstice Swim
categories: Cocktail Hour
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So. As a grumpy middle-aged person I am not a big celebrator. But last week I headed over to Wrightsville Beach with a beer in one hand, a cigar in the other and binoculars (might see gannets) around my neck. The plan was to toast the pagan gods and then take a solstice swim. Why? I had just found out I got a research reassignment–no school– for spring 2014, the closest we get at my school to a sabbatical. And what are my plans for my time off? Well, I might do a little writing…..
It turned out I did see some gannets, between two and three hundred by my best estimate. Still one of my favorite sights in nature. I was beneath some burly clouds but they were lit up by a great slant of sun that turned them radiant white. And they did what they always do: diving like arrows into the surf, one after another, feasting on fish.
And yes the water was cold, though not nearly as cold as the air or as cold as it used to be on Cape Cod. After the swim I had chips and a beer at Tower 7, then a hot bath and nap. A perfect way to start my celebration of both solstice and my coming freedom….
Photo of Wavy Gravy Davey (in fashionable sweats) by a kind stranger.
Giants on the Road: Second Leg of the Mighty Tour. A Photo Epic, Volume II
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Giants at Boston Logan, rah! (And they had an author autograph book–everyone goes through Logan, it seems)
Bad Advice Wednesday: Genre Jump!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The poet Mike White visited our house on Christmas Day. The only thing is I’m not sure if he’s “the poet Mike White” anymore. He now has a forthcoming book of nonfiction that contains, among other things, memoir and art criticism, and is at work on a novel. So maybe “the writer Mike White” is better.
Today’s post-Christmas bad advice is simple: be like Mike. Genre jump, shake it up. Write in a new form and you might just get new results. The truth is I’m still too bloated from Turkey to say much more than that. But as evidence to back up my point I’ll post the first few paragraphs of a short story that appeared in the November-December issue of Orion magazine. It is fiction by the nonfiction writer David Gessner:
BRANT’S REQUIEM
On the first morning of the last week of Kenneth Brant’s life he woke to the mewling of a catbird. Not the most melodic of requiems, but then he wasn’t planning on this being his last Tuesday on earth. He liked that little gray bird despite, or maybe because of, its gregariousness. Catbirds got close fast. Annoying in people—less so in birds. He eased himself out of bed and opened the back door to see what the racket was. His vision was weak, but the bird, unmistakable. It wore a skull cap slightly darker than the rest of its feathers and was standing on the corner of the deck, chittering and yapping as if desperately needing to impart a message to Brant. But Brant, curious despite the early hour and his eighty-six years, couldn’t quite decipher what was being communicated.
“Peace, friend,” he said. “It can’t be all that important.” Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: The Feel Good
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The gondola car, packed full, makes a rough landing at the top of Heavenly, swinging from side to side from a one-handed grip on the thick cable, and bumping at intervals into the long length of dock before settling. There is a dramatic pause, waiting for the doors. I adjust my goggles as if I’m an X-Games contender. It’s a powder day in Steamboat, and I’m about to get my feel good. Continue reading →
