Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: Interview Yourself, Interview your Characters
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
He was very, very, very good to me.
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Much has been written in journalism texts about the art of the interview. Basically, I’ve found that interviewing for journalism is a matter of fooling your subject into revealing herself, perhaps in ways she’ll wish later she hadn’t. People love to talk, especially about themselves. Note-taking, the tape recorder, the endless questions, all are flattering, hard to resist. But for the memoirist, interviewing is a more delicate tool. Your subjects aren’t politicians, for example, who are used to public life and tough questions. Your subjects aren’t hapless and immediate victims of accident or disaster. Your subjects aren’t experts you have approached for facts and figures. Your subjects, in fact, are very often well known to you, very often relatives, sometimes even your mother. And Mom isn’t going to be flattered by any tape recorder. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A Visit to the Herring Run with John Hay
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This is adapted slightly from The Prophet of Dry Hill, my book about the great nature writer John Hay.
I hadn’t seen John in a few weeks, and when I called he seemed relieved to hear from me.
“Just to see the shore would bring me some sanity,” he said. “To get outside into the world.”
He suggested I come between two and three, but at two on the dot my phone rang.
“Dave?” he said. “I’m ready to go.”
I threw my binoculars and bird books in the car and drove over to Dry Hill. John was standing outside when I arrived. He looked terribly thin, his own binoculars hanging from his neck like a weight pulling him toward the ground.
“Thank God you’re here,” he said. “I’ve been surrounded by women.”
He said “women” in a way that made you half expect he’d follow it with “folk.” Though hardly a chauvinist, and though women–from Gemma Lockhart to Deborah Diamond to Janice Riley (who was making a film about his book, The Run)–were some of his dearest friends, he was old-fashioned enough so that the word “womenfolk” wouldn’t have seemed entirely out of place.John often did seem from another time. If there were no answering machines to pick up when you called Dry Hill, there sure as hell were no computers or cell phones. I noticed the tennis shirt he wore beneath his coat and thought of a story that the writer Jennifer Ackerman told me. Jennifer had organized an anthology of nature writing, Continue reading →
What has DOBX been buying lately?
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
Who is DOBX? He, as some of you will remember, is the guy who gave my book, Return of the Osprey, a bad review on Amazon. He also wrote “If I want to reread On Walden Pond, I have a well-thumbed copy,” prompting me to wonder if he had confused Thoreau’s book with Henry Fonda’s movie (sorry, I know it’s bad form to repeat jokes.)
A while back I wrote my very own review–of him–that I have pasted below. And now I’ve decided to launch a new regular feature for Bill and Dave’s called “What Has DOBX” bought lately?” (Who says I’m not obsessive?)
As you no doubt remember, DOBX’s recent purchases included a windsock and dog ear cleanser. And now he has bought a neat new case for his Droid. He seems to like it just about as much as he liked Return of the Osprey. And much like with my book, the notches detract from the smooth look. Ospreys, windsocks, Droid Screen Guards. Does DOBX hate everything?
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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
 I also hate the notches,August 23, 2011Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Seidio Ultimate Screen Guard – Crystal Clear – 2 Pack for the HTC Droid Incredible 2/S (Wireless Phone Accessory)
The notches really detract from the smooth look I had hoped for. I never use the front facing camera, so I don’t need them. The top left corner didn’t adhere like the rest of the protector and is unsightly. I have an SGP Ultra Crystal protector on order, but I’m not getting rid of these just yet. |
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Eleven Bumper Stickers You Aren’t Likely to See, Election 2012
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
comments: 8 comments
Guess My Political Views
Okay, a fair and balanced selection of bumper stickers I’d like to see this election cycle:
- Voting Romney? Are You Rich or Stupid?
- Medicare: Don’t Touch My Socialism
- Pay Your Fucking Taxes, MobilExxon!
- Mormon is Fine, Moron is Not!
- Proud to be a Gay Romney Supporter! Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Write a Novel in Just Thirty Years!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It’s really coming together now.
Which I guess is a funny thing to say about a project I started in 1983.
But it’s true. I had a breakthrough last week and I understand the novel like I never have before.
Mind you I’m not really recommending that anyone else—you for instance—should take thirty years to write a book. Just saying that that is how long it’s taken to write this one. And while I may not really recommend you take thirty years, there are some advantages to playing what my friend Robert Siegel calls “the long game.”
For one thing, the scenes have been written and re-written so many times that they have begun to feel like actual memories. And in some cases, the things I wrote about long before they happened—my father’s death for instance—have actually come to pass.
As you can imagine, a lot has changed since I started working on the book when I was twenty three. When I first “finished” the book, in Continue reading →
Origami and the Art of Fiction
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Origami Box by Chris Palmer
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If you’re reading this and hoping it will be a piece about how folding origami helped me become a better writer, you can stop right now. It’s not about that. It’s about how when my son Angus asked if we could go to the National Origami Convention, I nearly started bleating with fear and panic—but also about how a very small part of me thought: Maybe I could write a story about it. Continue reading →
The Overnight Sensation: Reflections on a Year of Edith Pearlmania
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It was a giddy year on the hallway where I work. Giddy isn’t a word you hear much in the publishing industry today, what with talk of the death of the book and countless stories about the coming lit-pocalypse, usually featuring subtle images like a picture of a burning tome.
But giddy we are. The excitement springs from a publishing enterprise I’ve mentioned in this space before, Lookout Books, started and led by two of my colleagues here at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Emily Smith and Ben George, and manned mostly by graduate students in the creative writing department. Lookout started in 2010 and part of its mission was to represent underrepresented writers and, just as important, underrepresented forms like the short story and essay, forms that have for the most part been deemed uncommercial by New York presses.
Now I Know my ABCs, My XTC, MIA, ELO, REM, RZA, ODB…
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Standard Fare
[Today we welcome Mac Bates from All Those Wasted Hours, a website devoted to vinyl. And more. Essays, playlists, and Flipping Through the Record Bin. Mac is a writer and middle school teacher in Snohomish, Washington]
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Last week one of my TA’s, either Aja, Emma, Remi or Aly, asked me what my favorite song of all time was, an impossible question, fer sure. I said I would get back to them, knowing I probably would not. Then I thought, “These 8th grade girls probably do have favorite songs of all time, songs they play over and over and over again.” And I was heartened to think that in the age of musical overload, one melody could jump out of the digital ocean–Oh God, I’m heading for some ridiculous fish in the sea metaphor, Mayday, Mayday!–Nope, I’m not going to do it. No hook, line and sinker for me. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Remembering a Couple of Fine Ol’ Dogs
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Prince Desmond and new puppy Wally, c. 1993
One of the great pleasures of writing is the way incidentals are captured. In my collection Into Woodsthere are glimpses throughout the essays of my late great dogs Desi and Wally, who were mutts, no better than that, though Desi had pretensions. We’d take them to the city and because they were both black and white people would ask the breed. We invented one: Muzzman Terriers. Because one of Desi’s thousand nicknames was Muzzman. One woman, hearing that, exclaimed, “Oh, I ADORE Muzzman Terriers!” Anyway, poking through Into Woods I found this Continue reading →
Gusto (and Schlitz)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My Father and His Schlitz (Almost Hidden)
RE-CLAIMING GUSTO
We have grown used to the power of advertising to strip words of their meaning, beauty, and power. But of all the words that have been denuded in the long history of that insidious industry, none may have been so completely and thoroughly gutted as “gusto.”
Celebrated in 1816 by the essayist William Hazlitt as one of the highest qualities of art, it remains in most of our minds thanks to an almost extinct brand of beer called Schlitz. “Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object,” wrote Hazlitt. Memorable words, but how can they compare with these: “You only go around once in life, so you have to grab for all the gusto you can get!” Continue reading →
