Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: Guest Contributor Joshua Bodwell
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
This Won't Hurt A Bit
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This piece by MWPA director and all-around good guy Joshua Bodwell appeared originally in Maine Ahead, and speaks directly to business leaders, nice idea: Hire a writer! And of course Bill is available for any type of surgery. Bring your own hospital gown. Bill has a Leatherman and a hack saw. Dave is in charge of anesthesia. Rates are competitive with the best garages.
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Please, Hire a Writer
My pal Bill Roorbach is an exceptional storyteller. He is descriptive yet concise on the page, and perfectly meandering when he shares a story over a beer. Continue reading →
Vernal Equinox
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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23.4 degrees
Here is the equal night again, so different from that of autumn, which comes dressed in summer. In fact, the first day of spring comes to Maine in high winter drag. Often it comes dressed in snow, thick and wet, mixed with rain.
For me in March most of the pleasure in watching snow accumulate has fled. I decline to shovel the driveway, thinking, Snow’ll be gone soon enough, and pay for that when the slush left over freezes in deep ridges that last weeks in a cold snap. I consider the skis—but the snow is so wet and heavy, and I’ve been thinking about my bicycle, my hiking boots. Soon enough.
But, of course, it’s not soon enough. It’s weeks, sometimes, in grinding cycles of melt and freeze, and melt and freeze again. And again. Time never moves so slowly as in the transition from winter to spring in Maine. By March the mind’s night has got very long, and I have gotten used to it, gotten cozy alone in there, in my thoughts. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Learning the Island
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 3 comments
LEARNING THEISLAND
Journal Entries from my first year in the South and My Daughter’s First Year
September 28
The swallow migration is coming through. These shield-like aerodynamic birds dip and shoot over the sea oats like hallucinogenic flecks. Meanwhile the sanderlings work the tideline with their sewing machine bills, searching for mole crabs, while Black Skimmers get active at dusk. The skimmers let loose a noise like the wahh-wahh-wahh. of adults talking on Charlie Brown.
On the way in to work this morning I saw a bumper sticker on the back of a pick-up. Other details hinted that the truck was owned by a hunter, but it was the sticker that really gave it away. It read:
“If it Flies, It Dies.” Continue reading →
Where’s Billdo?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 2 comments
Treasure Map
Today, Juliet and Elysia and I hand the keys over to the housesitter, shake hands with the chickens, hug the dog, and head off to Costa Rica. I’ve been before and enjoyed both rainforest and dry-forest so much that I vowed to go back. Then, I was inland; then I stayed at biological research stations (and took a course on teaching in the tropics). This trip we’ll be on the Pacific Ocean, two different stops, and staying in lodges. The first is on the Osa Peninsula (that elegant Continue reading →
Happy (Pagan) Birthday to Me!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My wife was recently reading Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, and found out this about March 15th, my birthday:
Bad Advice Wednesday: Revel in Creation
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Is creativity its own reward? As someone who has written eight unpublished books or so, which amounts to about 16 years of life, this is not an academic question. Rather it’s a pressing one.
Let’s throw out the easy answers. Yes, a couple of these were “apprentice” works that later books built off of. But most were the real thing, from brainstorm to rough draft to many revisions over weeks and months and years. So, since they did not see the light of day, were they “failures”?
In a way, yes. For me writing is a drive for truth but it is also a drive to communicate, and even when that communication takes years of solitary work it is a final goal. This final goal was not realized in these stillborn books, and so yes, on that level they failed.
But they did give me something and that something has become the most reliable source of pleasure in Continue reading →
Dummy Downhill
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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In my ongoing coverage of small town events, I can’t forget to offer a glimpse of the annual Dummy Downhill race at Titcomb Hill, the terrific little ski area here in Farmington. It’s a community treasure, not three miles from our house. Various endowments fund free downhill lessons, free cross-country lessons, free racing lessons, a kids’ race team (F.A.S.T: Farmington Area Ski Team). Little wonder that the Mount Blue High School are state ski champs more often than not, and this year once again. The lodge is a simple barn of a building with volunteer-staffed snack bar. The hill is steep enough for some fun, big enough for a number of trails, and sports a Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Ice Out
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 1 comment
2012: Very Early, Very Gentle
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Ice out on the Temple might come slowly, weeks of warming temperatures, stream slowly emerging, easily swallowing all the melt, or it might come all at once—a day’s work after hard rain. It’s an equinoctial event, coming generally within a week either way of the equinox. After an all-night downpour, the ice we’ve admired all winter, the ice we’ve come to regard as permanent, starts to float. Guessing it’s imminent, one rushes down there in the morning, early. At the bend in the path, one sees that the Dairyman’s lowest field is full of water. More rain than one thought? So to the bluff and lookout, where one sees it: a muddy river flowing over the ice. And though this kind of overflow may have happened in a thaw back in February, this time it’s different, this time the ice is lifting on the voluminous flow, folding and breaking in huge slow movements, damming the stream just enough to flood the low parts of the field. Continue reading →
Edith Pearlman Wins! (And so do small presses!)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Congratulations to Edith Pearlman on the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. And to Lookout Books. It’s just amazing that this could happen to a tiny press with their very first book. Credit Emily Smith and Ben George, who worked tirelessly (and brilliantly) to make their dream a reality. Talk about an underdog winning….
Emily Smith, Edith Pearlman, and Ben George celebrate!
