This coming Thursday, January 31, Wesley McNair will launch his new memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Poetry and Family, at the Portland Public Library in Portland, Maine, always a good venue for writers, now a great one in its new renovation. And a brilliant evening is planned. It wasn’t hard to imagine where Wes and I would sit for our pretend meal–the porch of his camp on Drury Pond in in Temple, Maine, where in fact we sit many a summer’s evening, talking, talking. Wes likes a beer and a whiskey. I just go for the whiskey. Continue reading →
The Nervous Breakdown, a terrific cultural website on writing, books, music, and more, asked me to interview myself, which I dutifully did. The result is predictably ambivalent. You can read it there, or read it here and go there for much more.
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Q: Bill, thanks for sitting to talk.
A: Thank you, Q. Continue reading →
Q. What are you doing here?
This is it! Today is the official Bill and Dave’s celebration of the publication of my first book, STRATEGIES AGAINST EXTINCTION. It’s a collection of eight stories and one novella, written over a period of almost seven years. I’m delighted that this book is now out in the world, and just wanted to take a moment to share the joy and toot my own horn (honk!) and let you all know. I’m sure many of you have lots of questions about this earth-shattering event, so I’ll try to answer as many of them as I can. Continue reading →
Bill Roorbach‘s latest novel, Life Among Giants, comes out in November of this year. In anticipation of the award-winning author’s latest book I wanted to find out more about who he is and what he loves about writing. Continue reading →
John Lane
Recently, Dave introduced me to the work of John Lane, a guy who likes to get out on the water as much as we do. John teaches English and environmental studies at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he also directs the Goodall Center for Environmental Studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, among them Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems, which was the named the SIBA Book of the Year in Poetry in 2011. His latest nonfiction is My Paddle to the Sea, published last year by the University of Georgia Press, which has just released it in paperback. He’s got a new essay collection, too, Begin with Rock, End with Water, just published by Mercer University Press, too late for this interview. Continue reading →
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 →
Hot off the presses!
Monica Woods’s new book, When We Were the Kennedys, is being published this week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It’s a superb book, warm and funny and wise and heartbreaking, too, the story of a terrible year in a wonderful life, the year Monica’s father died when she was just nine. And wait—it’s not an entirely terrible year, full of the life of a busy mill town in Maine, the life of a big female family, the life of a country about to lose its president, and the life of a very observant protagonist. Continue reading →
Dinty W. Moore
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BR: As always, Dinty, my first question is this: Where do you want to have our pretend meal?
DM: I would like to have our pretend meal at the base of the Kachemak Bay glacier.
BR: Very near to where we last actually sat down to eat together, in Salmon Bay, at that cool restaurant over the otter-filled waters of Kachemak Bay. But that was then, and involved a boat ride and wine. This of course, will be different. The glacier is a wild place. May require helicopters.
DM: I had my heart set on a tandem kayak.
BR: Okay, a plus-size tandem and the food comes in by helicopter…
DM: No, no. We hunt for our food, or fight to the death and one of us eats the other. That’s the natural way. Continue reading →
What We Know Two Years Later
by David Gessner and Bethany Kraft, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Program at the Ocean Conservancy.
David Gessner: Last Friday was the two-year anniversary of the BP disaster. For many of us, the spill is spoken of in the past tense, but for those who live on the Gulf, it is not. What strikes you the most after two years?
Bethany Kraft: Looking back, there is one moment very early on in the summer of 2010 that really stands out to me as a harbinger of the chaos to come. It was late April and the government response was being mobilized in Alabama. I got on the phone with several officials who were in charge of coordinating the placement of the boom that would ostensibly protect our most environmentally sensitive areas from the onslaught of oil. My questions were simple: where had the boom been placed and where would it go in the coming days? The answer I got was both hilarious and terrifying: “We can’t tell you where the boom is or where it is going in because no one has given us a printer.”
We weren’t prepared for a disaster on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon — we didn’t know how to adequately protect our natural resources or our economies or our most vulnerable coastal communities. We didn’t know how a massive volume of oil would impact the Gulf ecosystem. We didn’t have the technology to respond to a deepwater drilling incident. We couldn’t even find a printer to make the maps to tell us where to put boom.
Two years out, I worry that the lessons we swore we would learn in those early months haven’t been given more than the most cursory consideration. I’m concerned that we still have so much to learn about the impacts of the disaster, and I fear that we aren’t any better prepared to address technological disasters than we were two years ago. Continue reading →
Ira Sukrungruang, Buddhist Boy
I had nothing to do with it–in fact, Ira was invited by my friend Jeff Thomson at the University of Maine at Farmington, but here he came for an evening reading, just last night. I took advantage of his presence to have him for a quick visit here at my house yesterday afternoon, and lucked into a dinner invitation with UMF faculty. I left UMF in 1995 to go to Ohio State. Ira turned up Continue reading →
