Cocktail Hour
Happy New Year from Bill and Dave’s
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 6 comments
Rough skating in 2012?
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Happy New Year! Elysia and I were out till all hours dancing with twenty or thirty kids who are all suddenly huge and take up a lot more room on the dance floor than in years past. There were parents involved, too (Elysia says, Uh, Dad, there were parents going nuts on the dance floor!), and great costumes. We slept this morning till all hours, too! Juliet is in NYC to look after her dad and see the Dark Star New Year’s Eve show. 2012 sounds like the future to me, who wrote 1998 on a check a few weeks ago. After a breakfast of chocolate-chip pancakes, Elysia and I ventured out wrapped for cold weather, but found it mild. The stream was frozen last week, but a Continue reading →
Back on the Cape: An Elemental Interlude
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 1 comment
My Favorite Tree (from a bit earlier in the year)
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I am taking my first true break in a year and a half and I have to say I am loving it. Eating a lot, walking the dogs through the deserted summer camp near Slough Pond, sleeping a good nine hours, not checking the internet (much), reading Hadley the adventure book I wrote and gave her for Christmas. And, while it may not go with the rest, drinking beer while staring up Continue reading →
10 Bad New Year’s Resolutions for Writers (Bad Advice Wednesday: The Holiday Edition)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
1. Stop writing this year. Just quit. You can do it. Writing’s an addiction.
2. Stop reading. No media. Nothing. Listen to the rain.
3. Quit your job and roam the planet going broke. Continue reading →
Mapping the Night Trees
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
It’s been getting dark a little after 5 here. Or about two hours after it gets dark for Bill.
Hadley (my eight year old daughter) and I spent a night last week down in the shack making a map of the trees that line the opposite shore of our tidal marsh. Once the sun goes down they appear as black silhouettes across the horizon. We’ve been naming them, too. You likely won’t have much trouble finding the “Poodle Head” for instance. Here’s our map so far:
Winter Solstice
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
comments: 2 comments
From my book Temple Stream [then as now, though the dogs are gone, and a new one in their place, pretty Baila, Elysia not only born since (her birth part of the narrative) but eleven years old!]:
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Winter Solstice
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Starting as early as October, but more likely November in a given year [and not till mid-December in 2011], Temple Stream begins to freeze. Every day the ice changes, grows, shrinks back, advances.
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And every morning the dogs and I hiked down there to have a look, and hiked down again each evening, just to see what had changed. Ice paved the way: the muddy parts of the path were thrown up in frost castles, delicate keeps and crenellations of dirt and ice that collapsed with a satisfying crunch underfoot. The kingfisher was quietly gone, the mallard Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Writer, Edit Thyself!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
Here’s a few thoughts on editing your own work:
1. “I hate it,” isn’t an uncommon reaction when returning to a piece of writing after a time away from it, just as “This is the greatest thing ever written” isn’t uncommon when in the throes of inspiration. The trick is to come back to a piece with a mindset somewhere in between the two extremes. That is to come back with a “new head,” calm, practical, aware that what you are approaching isn’t either the worse or greatest piece of writing ever produced, but something that can be tackled, re-worked, improved.
2. It’s easier to have a “new head” when there’s actually another head. That’s the reason that editors exist. You simply can’t see everything yourself. Is there another individual, hopefully a writer who knows something about craft, who can read for you consistently? Sometimes a single external sensibility (that is, a person) can help as much as a class. (I know this one contradicts my title.) Continue reading →
Audubon Christmas Bird Count 2011-2012
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 5 comments
I saw this rainbow bee-eater in Australia, and in my dreams at naptime, but not during the X-mas bird count this year.
This year marks the 112th Audubon Christmas bird count. It was begun in 1900 by my hero Frank M. Chapman to replace the Christmas bird hunt, wherein teams of well-heeled sharpshooters went out on Christmas day to see who could destroy the most birds, which they did in the millions. Even then declining populations of birds had conservationists (if not conservatives) concerned. The bird count caught on, and the deadly version of the hunt ended.
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Last year, according to the Audubon Society count summary, “All counts combined tallied 61,359,451 birds; 57,542,123 in the United States, 3,355,759 in Canada, and 461,569 in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands species totals were impressive as well. In the United States during the 111th count, the total tally was 646 species, plus an additional 45 field-identifiable forms.” These numbers can be used to spot trends, find trouble spots, and Continue reading →
My Wind Journey
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Bill gave us his take on wind energy not long ago. Here is mine, published this week on my NRDC blog (yes, I’m double dipping): David Gessner’s ‘Wild Life’.Let’s start with love. A good place to start, yes? In this case love of a place and love of a book. The book is Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which I read as a young man, and the place is Cape Cod, or, more specifically, the East Dennis beaches I have been coming to since I was very young. My love of those beaches is, at first, a young man’s love, but later it grows into something deeper. Inspired in part by Thoreau’s book, I move there after college and work part-time as a carpenter while writing my own first book. Though I have now lived all over the country, it is still the first place I think of when people mention “home.” It is my Walden and Cape Cod Bay is my Walden Pond.
So of course when someone — a businessman no less — suggests that he wants to place 130 wind turbines — bird-killing turbines! — in Nantucket Sound off the shores of my Walden, I react with outrage. Not in my backyard? Not in my backyard! This is a sacred place, a place apart, and if this is a sacred place then these wind turbines are, as I tell anyone who will listen, a desecration. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t be Stupid
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 31 comments
One thing I’ve noticed about good writers, even the most demotic, even the most seemingly down to earth and simple-hearted, even (god help us), the raving right wingers: they’re pretty smart. So that’s this week’s bad advice for writers: Don’t be stupid.
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For example, don’t have the phrase “legs akimbo” in the first paragraph (or any other paragraph) of your short story, as a fellow hoping to work with me in private study recently did. Because if you use the phrase “legs akimbo” in the first paragraph of your submission, I will stop reading. Continue reading →
