Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: Just Say No
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
“Just Write” by the Haystack nonfiction workshop, 2011. [Photo Lisa Cirando]
“What is the best advice you ever received about writing?”
“Just write.”
The above is from an interview with Madeline L’Engle that I found in the back of my daughter’s copy of A Wind in the Door. L’Engle certainly earned the right to dispense advice, however terse, having written more than forty books for which she won numerous honors, including a Newberry Medal and a National Humanities Medal. Continue reading →
The Video Essay: A New Way to Say (with John Bresland)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies / Table For Two: Interviews
comments: 2 comments
John Bresland
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John Bresland found me on Facebook a few months ago to ask if I’d want to take part in a video project for TriQuarterly Online. Yes, of course. Now he’s completed it, it’s up and running, and you can find it here. But before you do that, let’s ask John a few questions: Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Once More to the Lake
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 4 comments
Once More to the Lake
Where’s Bildo?
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
Bill Among the Booksellers
While Dave’s braving the San Juan River in search of his next book I’m in teeming Boston, enjoying the other end of the process, pre-publication. Algonquin, publisher of my next book, Life Among Giants (have I ever mentioned this to you?), put on a dinner for Boston area booksellers and invited me and another of their Boston area writers, Barbara (B.A) Shapiro, in to speak. Barbara, who’s actually from Boston, followed instructions and spoke briefly. Her book, forthcoming in October, is called The Art Forger, and gives a novelist’s take on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, good stuff! I, after a 3.5 hour drive that ended in a wrong turn and a maze of bridge ramps and tunnels and finally a bus yard and despair, talked for three hours and fifteen minutes about my economic theories, which follow those of Secretary of War Dearborn during the zzzzzzzzzz. After, we all ate a fine meal, Barbara and I shifting tables at intervals and talking to everyone at least a little, really fun. I’m looking forward to visiting the 15 stores represented, sooner or later, as customer or event, mostly to continue the conversations. These are really interesting and funny folks! Plus, they sell books. Kudos to Craig Popelars, Algonquin director of marketing, who puts on a good show and is hilarious.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Day Off, Really Off
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Loafing Zone
Carl Jung would take two weeks off from everything and take vacations in order to dream. Because he knew as we all do that dreams come most vivid when we’re relaxed and receptive, also that they come when we’re asleep. Even the memory of dreams takes lassitude–you can’t get that thread back once you’re fully awake, the ice skates that helped you fly to see your farm (the farm you don’t have). Continue reading →
The Book Guys
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
NOT BILL AND DAVE
I am about to head out for a week on the San Juan River. To paraphrase Abbey, “Saving the world is a good hobby. But I’m going down the river.”
Yesterday, a marathon drive from Hurricane, Utah to Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of the high points was when the Car Guys came on the radio. Which reminded me that I had an old, unused post hidden back somewhere in the Bill and Dave files. Which reminded me I could be lazy and post it here:
Many of you are no doubt fascinated by the origin story of Bill and Dave’s. Not the origins of our cartoon superhero alter egos, but our humble selves.
It started at Holy Cross, where Bill was teaching and had me in to speak. We did a Q and A in front of his class, and I think we were a little funny, maybe even pretty funny. Anyway, we were pleased with ourselves. We had a good rapport and afterward one of us said: “We should do a radio show together. Like the Car Guys.’
“Ya,” said the other. “Except we’d be the Book Guys.”
We quickly sketched it out. People would call in with their book problems—the carbeurator was clogged on their novella or the in-valve for their sonnet wasn’t working. And like the famous goofballs from MIT we would kick around a few possible solutions and have a few laughs. The trouble was that no one was offering us a radio show at the time. So later that evening—over drinks, appropriately—it occurred to us that we might be able to start up a website. About which we knew absolutely nothing. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A Dog Day Photographic Crown of Sonnets
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 1 comment
Cheerful Rosy!
The Trip So Far in Pictures
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
Visiting the Stegner family in Greensboro, Vermont was like walking into the landscape of one of my favorite books, Crossing to Safety.
Life Among Giants
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 16 comments
Forthcoming from Algonquin November 13, 2012
It’s a great day when your next book cover turns up. If you like it, and I like this one. (It’s not a great day when a bad cover turns up…) I’ve had this image in hand a while, and an image appears in my post about Book Expo America, but let this be the official unveiling! Not only of the cover, come to think of it, but the title. My pen name was a foregone conclusion, as I’ve used Bill Roorbach a long time, though I did contemplate using my real name for a change: Roxford Lumpenworth (numerous high-school friends still call me Roxy, college friends Lumpy). Continue reading →
