Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: It’s All About the Gaga
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 29 comments
Precisely one-third of the way into the first day of Composition II, Kent, a fresh-faced college junior, interrupted my course introduction and blurted out, “This is the best English class I’ve had since seventh grade!” My immediate response was a rush of deep pleasure. Could I possibly be the world’s greatest teacher? Did students really want to write papers? Could it be the best kept secret on every American college campus? But then I got a little nervous. This was a throw down, unsolicited, unplanned and stated before the entire class. Could I live up to Kent’s expectation? Could I be the best English class since seventh, or ninth, or fourth grade? Continue reading →
Adventures in Romneyland II: Rise of the Chameleon!
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Serial Sunday: The Weight of Light, Episode 3
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
[Episode 3 of on ongoing story that I’m making by the seat of my pants, 500 words at a time. Eventually we’ll have a category where the whole thing can be read in order, but for now, scroll down to start with Episode One if you missed it! And who didn’t? Written in the sky on the way to Tacoma, Washington]
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The Weight of Light
Episode 3
“Fedora”
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“Mrs. Allway, this is Ted Swallow, Theodore. I was on the subway steps when your husband fell. I tried to help. I’m sorry for you loss. I only call because he said to call you.” And they’d been the poor guy’s last words. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday, and Falling in the Brook
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 2 comments
The other day, my usual morning walk, but my head full of people in offices in various corners of the country, all the work of the day to come, and maybe a little of writing. It had rained and things were slick and walked with the pace of my thoughts–too fast, really, and heedless. Normally it takes twenty minutes or so to notice that I’m in the woods. It’s a sudden moment, usually, looking up and thinking, Wow. The trees! The sky! The birds! And suddenly I’m there. (Exercise releases endorphins after about twenty vigorous minutes, so I’ve read, so no doubt we’re talking just another matter of getting high….) I stepped into the tiny chasm of Nina Brook, as I call it (after a teenage neighbor who passed away suddenly, sadly), stepped over the rocks at normal gate, no thought of moss and wet leaf and no transition, found myself on my back in the water. I held my head up so as not to go under, great surprise as the very cold water made its way through my clothes and to my skin. My arm was under me, so, along with keeping my head up, Continue reading →
From the Archives: The Author Photo
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 14 comments
- October, 2004: unbeatable
Dave and I are practically supermodels, all the camera time we log. But leggy beauty aside, for me it’s still a painful exercise trying to get the right author photo. I knew it was coming–it’s a standard request when you have a new book in the pipeline, but Algonquin’s letter threw me into a panic, a perfectly workaday letter from the very kind publicity assistant down there in North Carolina, one Sarah Rose Nordgren. “Your author photo,” Sarah wrote (and I know she’s never said this before–this missive was for me alone), “along with a copy of the attached photo contract, should be sent to me no later than August 3rd. It’s important that we receive your photo by that date so that we can use it for all promotional materials, including our catalog and advance reader’s copies of your book. Your photo should be in color. We prefer a high-resolution digital file (it must be 300 dpi, 5×7 inches or bigger, and approximately 10 megabytes), but you can send a hard copy instead. Dress for your photo can be casual, but we prefer that you
not wear t-shirts. Please use the attached agreement when you contract a photographer to shoot your author photo. The photographer can be a professional or a friend. Please let me know if you have any questions or if you will have a problem making either of these deadlines. Thank you!” Continue reading →
The Day I Stopped Being an Environmental Writer by Susan Zakin
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
I’ve long been a fan of Susan Zakin’s work, starting with her great book on Earth First!, Coyotes and Town Dogs, and continuing with the essay of hers we published in Ecotone. Below she declares her independence from eco-writing, and she proves it with her new novel, The Afterlife of Victor Kamara. You can read an excerpt here.
The Day I Stopped Being an Environmental Writer
The day I stopped being an environmental writer, I was on a river in Madagascar.
Stop. I hate reading stories like this: the Patagonia catalog, Barry Lopez-Gretel Erlich School of Upper Middle Class Environmentalists Finding Meaning on a $10,000 Trip to a Place No Regular Person Can Afford to Travel.
But there I was, and I wouldn’t mind being there again. I was in Madagascar on a fellowship that I’d applied for during a major case of burnout. After writing my first book, I had been trying to sell the extinction crisis to New York editors for almost ten years, and my career was in the toilet. “I don’t really like sleeping outside,” an editor at The New York Times Magazine confessed to me. “But I just bought these great rock-climbing shoes – you know the ones with the sticky soles?”
That was the scene with magazines. When it came to selling books, the comments usually ran like this: “Susan is clearly a talented writer. Alas, we have never done well with environmental books. If she could find another subject…” (Why, I wonder, do rejections always contain the pretentious word alas?) Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Play with Time!
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
I guess it should not be much of a surprise that as I get older, and have more of a past to play with, I increasingly enjoy playing with time on the page. I have a colleague who tells grad students to avoid flashbacks at all costs, and I understand where he is coming from, pushing them to reveal all through active scenes. But for me the constant layering of time is one of the greatest pleasures in both what I write and what I read. For instance, as regular viewers of this page know, I have been reading a lot of Wallace Stegner of late, and almost all of the fiction he wrote after fifty, which is his best fiction, follows the model of a protagonist experiencing relatively brief present moment scenes that in turn spur reflections that send him spiraling back into much longer and fuller scenes from the past. (This holds true of Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety, The Spectator Bird, etc..) This allows for a kind of active reflection in between present and past scenes, a telescoping in and out of time, and gives a sense of depth and texture to the writing. It also frees one from the fetters of what I call play-by-play, that moment by moment purely scene-driven style of writing that so predominates the workshop writing I have encountered. It allows a sense of layering that for me rings true to life, or at least true to the sort of life that is reflected upon as well as lived.
The novel I have been writing, on and off for over twenty years, has this kind of frame. The present moment “action” is that of the narrator cleaning out his old family house on Cape Cod. Not the sexiest of plots and one that would be hard to pitch in New York. But one that allows for sharp present moment descriptions of the weather–both natural and human– while also allowing for an entire family history to emerge from those surroundings. The danger of course is potential sluggishness of plot, but the advantage is that sense of scope, of temporal depth, through which one can move not linearly but impressionistically. Which I like.
Push Polling in Maine, and no doubt Elsewhere. Beware.
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
comments: 3 comments
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Oh, I’ve just been subject to a political scam on the phone—the legendary push poll, this one a pleasant lady telling me that she works for a national firm called Davis Industries. I asked her directly who they were working for and she said directly: no one, neither democrat nor republican. I knew it wasn’t true but said okay. The first ten minutes are fun and innocuous and make you feel you’re taking part in a real poll: which candidate is more favorable, who will you vote for, etc. But then the bullshit starts: “I’m going to read you some facts about each candidate and ask if these facts make you more or less likely to vote for the candidate.” And it’s like, “Did you know [both candidates you’ve expressed interest in] are for health care in Maine that will cut x billions out of Medicare coverage?” No, I didn’t know it because it’s not true. And then more nonsense, none of it true. I said I couldn’t answer because the statement wasn’t true. So she plugged on, and finally I said, Okay, I know this is a push poll now, and I know you’ve lied to me to get me to answer this many questions, and so I’m hanging up.” Bang. I don’t know why it makes me so mad. Something about the psychological space their script gives them access to, and knowing that they succeed, often enough. The method is to put disinformation into the pollee’s head as if the disinformation were the pollee’s own thought. “If you knew [your candidate] has cooked and eaten babies his whole life, would that change your opinion of him?” Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: The Weight of Light, Episode 2
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: Comments Off on Serial Sunday: The Weight of Light, Episode 2
[Episode 2 of on ongoing story that I’m making by the seat of my pants, 500 words at a time. Eventually we’ll have a category where the whole thing can be read in order, but for now, scroll down to start with Episode One if you missed it!]
The Weight of Light
Episode 2
Crumbled
Of course the incident stayed with him. The next day he left the office after the morning meeting. Found he couldn’t concentrate. From the street he called St. Vincent’s Hospital and asked about a man who’d fallen in the subway. “No such report,” the woman at the admit extension said. He asked for the EMT office and she connected him without a goodbye. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A Feeling of Wildness
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
I’m taking off for a week of talking and teaching at Western Illinois University tomorrow, hosted there by the generous and talented Erika Wurth. One of the things I’m going to read from during my talk is my “This I Believe” essay of a few years ago, and when I went to print it out I realized I had never posted it on Bill and Dave’s. Here’s where you can hear it read out loud on the “This I Believe” site. And here are the contents:
I believe in wildness, both in the natural world and within each of us.
As a nature writer, I have traveled all over the world to experience the wild, but some of my own wildest moments have been closer to home, on the same domestic Cape Cod beach I’ve returned to all my life. In summer this beach is covered with kids, umbrellas and beach balls, but in the winter the cold clears it of people and its character changes. From the rocks at the end of this beach, I once watched hundreds of snow-white gannets dive from high in the air and plunge into the cold winter ocean like living javelins. Then, as the birds dove down, I suddenly saw something dive up: a humpback whale breaching through the same fish the gannets were diving for.
“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau, but people often get the quote wrong and use “wilderness” instead. While wilderness might be untrammeled land along the Alaskan coast, wildness can happen anywhere — in the jungle or your backyard. And it’s not just a place; it’s a feeling. It rises up when you least expect it.
