Cocktail Hour
Table for Two: Bill Interviews Himself
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
comments: 4 comments
The Nervous Breakdown, a terrific cultural website on writing, books, music, and more, asked me to interview myself, which I dutifully did. The result is predictably ambivalent. You can read it there, or read it here and go there for much more.
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Q: Bill, thanks for sitting to talk.
A: Thank you, Q. Continue reading →
Words That Map the Land (By Ecotone Contributors)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
The new Ecotone is almost here. Here are some sentences from former contributors……(It seems to fit better on its side.)
Bad Advice Wednesday: Greetings from a 25-Year Old in His Childhood Bed in His Parents’ House
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 21 comments
Vasilios at a reading from his screenplay, “The Ungettable Get.”
Speaking to Bill after his recent reading at Andover Books in Andover, Massachusetts, I asked for his take on some trouble I was having. We talked for a bit, he gave me some advice (not bad, because it was a Thursday), shared a bit of his own experience, then encouraged me to write in to Bill and Dave’s. I said, “But I haven’t come to any sort of conclusion about anything!” And he said, “Well, then write about how you haven’t come to a conclusion!”
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I’d written a page about the particulars of my situation to send Bill. But when I read it over to edit it, I grew disgusted with myself and immediately deleted it. “For the love of God, man, stop whining,” an inner, much more put-together version of myself surfaced to say (in the voice of Ian McShane, strangely enough). But I mean, I’ve already got this word document open named “for Bill,” so I’ll at least send something. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: First Snow (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 2 comments
Bad Advice Wednesday: Wait till the last minute!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Portland has the best Christmas lights.
Well, it’s still Wednesday, so I think we’re okay here. I’m in Portland, Maine, after a great event at a great store, Longfellow Books (where they sell “that new book smell–not available on the Internet.” This is home territory in some ways, and a lot of fine feathered friends turned up, many of them writers. And talking to a crowd with familiar faces might be the hardest assignment of all. Especially when you know your bad advice is due! Ian McRae, Dave’s friend from third grade, reminded me as we met for the first time: “I’m still waiting for my bad advice!” Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Name That City!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 16 comments
Cities from the air, Atlanta to Boston. Can you name any of them? A couple are obvious, a couple more I couldn’t guess. Positioned in order from Atlanta at the top. Guesses and rationales invited, as it drives me crazy when I don’t know! Window seat for me…
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Where’s Bildo?
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
NOT HERE….
Been getting some flack for this picture but it is related to yesterday’s Bad Advice post. I want to look at the town of Vernal from all sides, and write a portrait of a boom town. This is part of it….
Or as I said yesterday:
Of course I am not just here to visit, not just a tourist. I am here to make something out of my visit. The visit then is raw material, and my job, much like the oil workers I am interviewing, is to extract raw material. My tools are slightly different than theirs: journal, micorcassete recorder, camera, a sometimes unreliable brain. Here in Vernal I am actually double dipping: I am writing a story on fracking for OnEarth magazine (due Decemeber 10th—yikes!) and also gathering notes for a chapter on boomers and stickers for Properly Wild, my Abbey-Stegner book. So like my fellow workers (I can hear them right now through the walls of my Econolodge room, getting up and heading out to their trucks right now) I sleep less and work harder while I’m on the job. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Extract Raw Materials!
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Yesterday I flew from North Carolina over the Rockies and my new favorite city, Salt Lake. The snow cover in the mountains was weak, which might spell bad news for next summer’s fires, but visually it was stunning as we crossed from Colorado into Utah. I stared down at alternating streaks of white snow and red sandstone—that red which always does something to me inside, something good—with rivers, first the White and then the Green, carving snake-like through the landscape. A three hour drive east from Salt Lake and here I am back in Vernal, the town where I spent some time this summer and where I flew the path marked on the map to your right. (Thanks to Ecoflight for the flight and Steve and Ray of SUWA for the map.)
This summer I charged into town, hit the Dinosaur Brew Haus, met a few river rafters and frackers and anti-frackers all in one night. Part of my working method is essentially this: A man walked into a bar. The young whippersnapper over at Terrain.org might have criticized me for drinking too much in my pages but, be that as it may, I find drinking beer with the locals an essential part of taking the temperature of a place. Coffee helps, too, and the next morning I talked to everybody I could at my hotel, at the diner where I ate, and at the Chamber of Commerce. My plan is usually to have no plan. As with writing, I make a lot of lists, and then I throw them out and just trust my instincts. Today’s bad advice is not to do as I do but to evolve your own method of going to a place and learning about it. These places, I keep telling my students, tend to be a lot more interesting, and certainly more surprising, than our own minds. You don’t need to use beer as your social lubricant: maybe sipping green tea and being a wallflower, eavesdropping, is what works for you. But get out there into the world.
For the Love of Water
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
This is a short essay, in part, about Titan Cement, which I should say right up front that I oppose. I don’t like the idea of this company coming to town and dumping poisons in our river while spewing them into our air. For regular readers this is not surprising. But if it’s statistics and facts you are after–the much-debated number of jobs gained, the impact of mercury on human health, the testimony of others from towns where cement has made its mark—you should look elsewhere. Today I am instead interested in talking about something bigger, and, to some, perhaps softer. Rather than cement, I want to talk about water–water and love. And even more I am interested in talking about identity. Both my own and our town’s.
My own relationship with Wilmington is complicated. I come from a tribe of nature writers, a tribe that, as a rule, spends a lot of time braying about the glories of wherever they happen to live. Back when Cape Cod was my home I celebrated it fiercely, with the sort of regional pride recognizable to Southerner and Yankee alike. In fact I wrote a book, a kind of love letter to the place, that ended with my proclamation that I would stay on Cape Cod forever.
Which is how, as I have been telling people for the last nine years, I ended up in Wilmington, the book helping land me a job in the creative writing department at UNCW. Which is all to say: I am an outsider here, a relative newcomer. I have no plans to climb up to the top of a live oak and holler out that I will stay here forever. Mine is a marriage of convenience. Continue reading →
