Soon enough I will be putting on my Cassandra Wig again. Soon it will be time to return to yelling “The world is doomed!” Soon…..
But for now I need a rest. Being an Eco Prophet is tough work, and frustrating work as this week’s convention shows. In writing their Big Story, the Dems got the plot pretty much right, and most of the characters, good and evil, but they forgot all about the setting. Barely a mention of the environment. As if there were no stage for all the dramas they described, as if the world took place without an earth.
Oh well. The earth will have the last laugh soon enough. In the meantime, as the President takes a brief post-convention rest, I will take my own. A break from those tried and true topics: doom and gloom. Instead I find myself focusing on two seasons that I am very much looking forward to. The first is the pro football season, and I go into it dreaming that this will be the year my Pats win that fourth title (ideally by beating the accursed Giants and the oh-so-lucky Eli Manning.). For that season I will prepare by cleaning the pollen off my TV screen and stocking up on beer (Ranger is my current preferred brand) and potato chips (Cape Cod, of course). Continue reading →
Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head.
In your head.
Did no one ever tell you this?
—Verlyn Klinkenborg, from Several Short Sentences About Writing
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In his intense little essay http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/where-do-sentences-come-from/ August 13 in The New York Times promoting his new book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, Veryln Klinkenborg clears his throat for three paragraphs, takes a swipe at American education, and unveils how beginners might learn to write. He’s a stylist I admire, so I drew near. Continue reading →
I spend a lot of time at this blog ridiculing technology. So I thought it was time to finally sing the praises of technology that I like. In that spirit, I present the jPad. Please note it’s slick, user-friendly design, its accessibility and clean lines. A must for all young writers!
“Do not hurry. Do not rest.” These are Goethe’s words, and I’ve always liked them. Especially the “do not rest” part. But even Goethe would admit, if he had, say, a Bad Advice Wednesday due, that sometimes you gotta hurry. One imagines Goethe in his book-lined study in Weimer, producing his great body of work at a stately pace. Like any writer, he must have often felt words, sentences and whole future books pressing on him, making him excitable and uneasy, but maybe, unlike most writers, he managed to keep calm and take one thing at a time.
Good for him. No one will ever call me stately. Over the last decade, or more realistically over the last two, I’ve shoved words furiously into the world, my pace more charge than stroll. When I was in Colorado this July, Reg Saner, who was once my teacher and now a friend, suggested something that I myself have thought (and written): that my bout with cancer at 30 served as a kind of starting gun for my career. Twenty years later I don’t claim to have reached any sort of finish line, but I do feel I deserve a bit of a rest. Call it, with fingers crossed, a half-way pit stop.
What does this mean for me, and, more importantly, for you (since this is supposed to be advice). It means that sometimes we’ve got to change it up. I means that travelling this summer was a sort of revelation, mainly because three things were impossible on the road: regular e-mail, cell phone conversation, and daily writing. Which should mean that the whole world fell apart, right? How wonderful when it didn’t. How nice to find my body rhythms slowing down, and to continue that slowing down now that I’ve returned home. Continue reading →
Bill Roorbach‘s latest novel, Life Among Giants, comes out in November of this year. In anticipation of the award-winning author’s latest book I wanted to find out more about who he is and what he loves about writing. Continue reading →
King boletes from the morning walk
One-piece steel hammer
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A great way to approach an essay and eventually a book is to become an expert at something. You might start with the idea of writing about your summer fishing in the Adirondacks, or about your history as a dancer, or your years working construction, all good–great stories, and fascinating. But as you begin your draft, also study up. You’ve already done your research in that you’ve done the fishing or dancing or building, also in that you’ve read extensively in dance history, or fly-tying books, or building code manuals. But there are many experts in these wildly diverse fields. I’m talking about going micro. So, for the fisherman, Stone flies. For the dancer, say, pointe shoes. For the builder, not tools, but the hammer. Continue reading →
It was a small moment during this hottest of summers. I had already driven through the crisped cornfields of the Midwest and witnessed a smoke cloud that seemed to cover the whole state of New Mexico. Meanwhile, back home in North Carolina, my wife described the weeklong string of 100-degree days with 99 percent humidity as being “like living in someone’s mouth.” So I had already grown used to heat, and to scenes of heat’s destruction.
But this was the moment that got me thinking: I was flying in a small plane over the dry cracked wilderness of northeastern Utah, courtesy of Bruce Gordon, a pilot and owner of EcoFlight (see “The Plane Truth”). With us were a documentary filmmaker and two representatives of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which works to preserve Utah’s remaining wild desert lands. We had just flown over a sight of stunning beauty: a brown river named the Green snaking through canyons of purpled gray. We banked down over Nine Mile Canyon toward great towers of rock. They looked like giant red sand doodle castles, and atop these castles the Ute Indians had built dwellings that stood high above the desert floor. If ever I had a sense of the land as remote, sacred, vast, and removed from the unrelenting assault of our own hectic time, this was it. Continue reading →
