A Book Spine Poem

categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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Just the titles, not the authors…

Alise Hamilton is a bookseller at Andover Books in Andover, Massachusetts, and is the events and marketing coordinator for HugoBookstores.  In addition, she’s an MFA student at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working on a collection of linked stories.  In honest fashion, she says: “The book spine poetry I created, but the idea to do it is stolen: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/16/book-spine-poetry-future/ ” This is her first guest post at Bill and Dave’s. Continue reading →

Getting Outside Saturday: Birthday Edition

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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Ah, but the kids keep you young!

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They say it’s my birthday, nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!  A year of no importance: 59.  Next year, major party (“A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.” ~ Arnold Bennett ).  This year, meh.  I feel a lot like I’ve made it up the hill like the little train that could, crested the hill  proudly, lingered a moment at the top, and now find myself plummeting down the other side at speeds unheard of, and no brakes!  It’s all in the mind, my sister-in-law said this afternoon (she’s visiting with her lovely kids from Los Angeles).  No, I replied, It’s all in the body!  And I’ve got some new bumper stickers to counter all the pabulum about aging I’ve been hearing: Continue reading →

The Piano Lesson

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Thierry Kauffman at the piano

[Today Bill and Dave’s International welcomes guest poster Thierry Kauffman.  Drumroll, please!]

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I am a writer, musician, painter with Parkinson. I live in France with my parents. I spent seventeen years in the Midwest, first as a graduate student in science.  Then I taught for a few years before finding a job as financial analyst. After I was diagnosed, I lost everything except my family and my sense of humor.  I start my day at the absolute bottom, unable to walk, so I sit, take my pill, turn facebook on. I connect with a world of amazing friends, such as Bill Roorbach. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Road Trip

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Hadley and Me in Saskatchewan

Over the last week I have been traveling the country with my daughter.  Since my Kickstarter campaign fell through, I have supported us mostly by selling bibles to recently deceased widows and other scams.  Wait, no, that’s a movie.  Let me start again.  Over the last two months I have been roaming the country, hopping trains and hitching rides, and staying up late snapping my fingers and smoking grass and having visions with my beatnik friends in Denver and San Fran.  Or was my travelling companion a poodle named Eddie?

As you can see, I’m tired and confused.  But also, really, quite happy.  I’m pretty sure that this whole on the road thing is good for my Art, but I know it is good for my Life.  A few years ago I wrote a book called Soaring with Fidel, about following the osprey migration from Cape Cod to Cuba and beyond.  It was the beginning of a phase where my nonfiction, which until then had usually focused on one place or subject, took its show on the road.  I found I enjoyed living the story in this way, throwing myself into an adventure and talking to whomever I bumped into.  The story revealed itself as I went and I, armed with journal and tape recorder, took dictation.  My various journeys have had the effect of taking me out of both myself and my comfort zone.  And if you simply talk to people–something my nonfiction students are sometimes loath to do–they often give you all you need.  Finally, a journey gives a project shape, a natural beginning and end, though often the shape is not the one you imagine when you start. Continue reading →

Table For Two: An Interview with John Lane

categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews

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John Lane

Recently, Dave introduced me to the work of John Lane, a guy who likes to get out on the water as much as we do.  John teaches English and environmental studies at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he also directs the Goodall Center for Environmental Studies.  He is the author of over a dozen books, among them Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems, which was the named the SIBA Book of the Year in Poetry in 2011. His latest nonfiction is My Paddle to the Sea, published last year by the University of Georgia Press, which has just released it in paperback.  He’s got a new essay collection, too, Begin with Rock, End with Water, just published by Mercer University Press, too late for this interview. Continue reading →

Getting Outside Saturday: Garlic Girl

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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Garlic Girl

It’s the night before my “work” visit to Stoneledge Farm in Leeds, New York, and I’m in bed, wide awake, thinking about vampires. I’m going to spend the next day picking garlic, tons of it, and garlic makes me think of salsa, pesto, and, inevitably, a natural repellant for blood suckers. Instead of winding down, I’m wired, feel as if I’ve been popping chocolate-covered espresso beans. I feel like I did when I was a little kid—my body abuzz with anticipation—the night before a school trip. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Have an Idea

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Juno just last week, in restoration at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Ideas are abstract by nature. Unbidden, ideas (like memories) arrive in our brains in pieces: a bit of evidence, a blast of emotion, a sentence of logic, a shot of paranoia, a visceral reaction to film on the news, a vision clear as wind and descended as if from heaven. The pieces float around, coalescing in various and partial shapes, wrapped and then rewrapped in layers of preconceptions, blankets of family custom (or pathology), clear sheets of wisdom, sturdy pockets of knowledge. The problem is getting what seems whole and vital in our brains onto the page whole and vital. Seldom as we sit with pencil in hand will the idea come at once (though many experienced writers are skilled at doing earliest drafts in their heads). Most often, an idea will reveal itself fully—move from amorphous blob to elegant artifact—only in the writing. Honest first drafts often look like the mind as described above: aswirl with conflicting notions, half-baked insight, generous impulse, hackneyed platitude, opinionated surety, brilliant strings of words, silence. Continue reading →

Stay Awake for the End is Near: Literature Meets Slumber Party at a Moby-Dick Marathon

categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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Under the bones at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

Call me Willy. My father does.

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I traveled down from the forests of Maine through Boston and further yet to the sea like a young man in another century looking for his ship. My paler but still daunting adventure was simply this: attendance at the sixteenth annual marathon reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Twenty-five hours, 160 readers, “light whaleship fare” the only sustenance promised. Continue reading →

Sacred Water

categories: Cocktail Hour

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I am feeling ragged, water-logged, and sunburned.  I have a new love for pillows, beds, and showers.

I spent the last week living on the water by day and sleeping in a tent by night, floating down the San Juan River in Southeast Utah, courtesy of a wonderful outfit called Wild Rivers.  One of the best things about the trip was the fact that many of my fellow rafters were Navahos, members of a group named Rethink Dine Power, who were reacquainting themselves with a river that their people once believed was sacred.  Another of the best things were the side canyons, rock staircases of sandstone, limestone and stunning beauty, that led up and out of the cliffs that we were paddling between. 

As magnificent as the cathedral-like side canyons were, I didn’t really see them as they are meant to be seen until the last night of the trip. That night, at around Seven O’clock, our dinner was interrupted by the loudest crack of thunder I’ve ever heard, a sound that echoed around the amphitheater of the canyon.  Suddenly rain was pouring. And just as suddenly spontaneous waterfalls were flowing from five hundred feet above us and we were all running around, yelling and pointing and ducking our heads under the flowing water, wildly happy to see the red rock come to wet life.  The next morning, when I should have been packing my tent, I walked far up the side canyon. It was not like my earlier walks.  As beautiful as they had been, something had been missing. Until then seeing the canyons had been like seeing a body without blood. Now the blood was back.  A rich red blood with a tint of tabasco sauce orange.       Continue reading →

Getting Outside Saturday: Hog Island

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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A Hog Island lagoon

I had the good fortune this past week to be part of the first ever Damariscotta Lake Writers Conference, which is a conference for educators who write.  I had the august title of Hog Island Lecturer.  The conference took place at the Kennedy Learning Center at Camp Kieve, which is a gorgeous boys’ camp and adventure center (my words–they take those kids on amazing trips all around the state and out to sea).  Hog Island is off of Damariscotta, and was once owned by Mabel Loomis Todd, the executor and editor of Emily Dickinson’s poems, also the illicit (as they would have said in those days) lover of Emily’s brother.  The cabin that Mabel worked in is still there.  Her daughter, Millicent Todd, continued the tradition.  Later, the Audubon Society took over the property, 300 pristine acres of spruce-fir forest and rocky coast.  They run programs there to this day, and have an osprey nest cam set up.  We watched two new birds as they made tentative approaches to the edge of the nest and squawked when their mother flew in with snacks.  A third had already fledged.  See them live and in person here.  Then we enjoyed a talk by Steve Kress, founder of Project Puffin, which has been working to restore puffin and other alcid populations on islands all along the Maine coast, including Hog. Continue reading →