Cocktail Hour
Getting Outside Saturday: Fern Walk and Turtle Sign
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Sensitive Fern
Bad Advice Wednesday: Goodbye to the University, Goodbye
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Just Visiting
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Today’s advice (apropos Dave’s post yesterday), is for writers who teach in the university, and it is very simple: You don’t necessarily have to. I’ve quit several times, and have lived to tell the tale. Simple, I said. But not easy. While I was teaching–two decades worth–I often had to remind myself that I’d set out to be a writer, not a professor. I really loved the classroom and often the students, and didn’t really mind committee work, even got into it, wrote wicked minutes. The common enterprise of learning and making and knowing and investigating (also administrating), that’s the best. It’s great work if you can get it, and I did get it and did appreciate it—summers off, semesters or quarters of research leave, adjustable hours, health insurance, a paycheck, mostly agreeable
colleagues, the constant plumbing of the self, and so on. But was that writing? Continue reading →
Those Who Write, Teach
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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In 2008, Scott Malcomson of the New York Times Magazine approached me and asked me to write an essay about the fact that almost all of this generation of writers are also teachers. He wanted me to consider how this might detract from our work. Since I worked at a University he worried about my biting the hand.
“I know this may seem like career suicide,” he said. “But somehow after seeing your Youtube video I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”
The video he was referring to was “Transformation,” which features me tearing off my clothes and jumping up on a desk off in the middle of a lecture, and he was right, I didn’t mind.
Here is the piece I wrote for him, which did get me in some trouble, though mostly with other writers who claimed I “hated teaching.” I don’t. I love teaching. I just hate when it gets in the way of my writing.
In Captivity
Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a tranquilizer gun, tagged and shipped off to a university. I underwent this conversion more or less of my own free will, drawn by the Continue reading →
Book Expo America and Me
categories: Cocktail Hour
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That's a big book!
The Jacob Javits center over the old train yards in New York City is enormous, vast. And BEA barely fits in there, huge booths from hundreds of publishers and distributors and other giants, also little hopeful booths of all kinds, some staffed by a single writer in front of her single title, maybe a little sad. BEA is Book Expo America, put on, I believe, by the American Booksellers Association, and it’s overwhelming, puzzling, and really lot of fun. I have been there this week as the guest of Algonquin Books and it’s been nuts. My only job was to sign books for an hour and a half, like speed dating, quick, really wonderful conversations with I don’t know how many people, though I know Algonquin was aiming to give away five hundred bound galleys of the new book. Bound galleys are advanced reading copies (ARCs), and a lot of people come to the expo just to get them. And tote bags galore. But tote bags aren’t enough. In fact, there’s a corral downstairs where people check their roller suitcases. I saw more than one filled entirely with books. And nice to know mine are in there. Life Among Giants will be published in November–but BEA offers a chance to preview things. Plus we made the Publisher’s Lunch BEA Buzz Books list, and they offer a teaser here. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Be a Snob!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Dave is on a trip this week and I promised him that while he was gone I would read Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, Angle of Repose. Instead I’ve been reading Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen. There are several reasons I could feel guilty about this, the most obvious being a broken promise, or at least a delayed one. The others involve a kind of intellectual guilt – the nagging, unfinished-homework voice inside your head that believes every moment should involve edification, enlightenment, and improving the mind through High Art. “Nina,” my voice has a way of asking. “Is this really how you want to spend your time?” Continue reading →
The Real Avengers Vs. The Forces of Facebook!
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
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Spring Freshet
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Beaver canal and ostrich ferns.
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We get ’em in Maine spring and fall, these days of hard rain and then the floods. The old timers called them freshets. A famous fall one was the pumpkin freshet of 1868, when high water took out all the Sandy River bridges (a tradition–quite a few have gone down over the years) and stripped the fields of pumpkins, which took off in the thousands and filled the ponds behind dams downstream. Consensus was to fish them out and divide them up among the farmers. I took the photo above the other day in high spirits and sunshine and low water, just a scruffy spot over a beaver canal, Temple Stream back behind and out of sight. t I took the photo below 24 hours ago after wading up to my thighs where the path used to be, Temple Stream ascendant. It has not stopped raining since. I could get a shot of even higher water, but I’d have to swim. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Puffins.
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Puffin, looking worried as usual, Machias Seal Island.
Last weekend we attended the Down East Birding Festival, which took place down in Lubec, Cutler, Baring, Eastport and many others spots at the farthest east point of the good ole’ USA. Highlights were a boat ride ten miles straight south to Machias Seal Island, which both Canada and the U.S. claim. There’s a light out there and a very serious birding fellow, a pirate of a man, a Canadian who watches the rookery and the amazing migratory fall outs of warblers and just about any other kind of bird you can think of. They put you into a bird blind, just a plywood booth full of little hatch-door windows, and you get an hour within a few feet of the birds. Razorbills, Arctic Terns, Common Murres, and Atlantic Puffins, also various seagulls. The puffins are comical, busy Continue reading →
