Wesley McNair, Poet

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President Kalikow, Members of the Faculty, Parents and other relatives and friends of the graduates, and most importantly, Graduates of the University of Maine at Farmington class of 2012:

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I am proud that Theo Kalikow invited me to give this address at the last graduation ceremony she will officiate as president, because she is my friend, and one of the most effective presidents this college has ever had. As I’ve told her more than once, I believe she has presided over a kind of renaissance at the University of Maine at Farmington, and I’m glad to have the opportunity now to say so publicly, even though I know that will embarrass her, since she hates talk like this.

Wes at the Library of Congress

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[Wesley McNair is the current Poet Laureate of Maine.  His latest book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems. He has held grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship in literature, and two NEA fellowships. In 2006 he was selected for a United States Artists Fellowship as one of “America’s finest living artists.” Other honors include the Devins Award for Poetry, the Jane Kenyon Award, the Robert Frost Award, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, an Emmy Award, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal. A guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology, he has served four times on the nominating jury for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His work has appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition and The Writer’s Almanac, with Garrison Keillor; two editions of The Best American Poetry; and over fifty anthologies. He has authored or edited eighteen books, including poetry, nonfiction, and anthologies.  He is the co-author with Bill Roorbach and Robert Kimber of A Place on Water, and knows cocktail hour when he sees it.][Wes's guest head drawn by Alan Crichton]

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Bill at his desk, October 1959

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I’m still thinking about how much of any career is luck and accident, especially a career in the arts.  You get an idea or you don’t.  You meet the helpful person or you don’t.  You listen to good advice or fail to.  You ignore bad advice (or Bad Advice) or don’t.  You connect with a mentor or you don’t.  You move here, you move there.  You’re hired, you’re not.  You get a little affirmation, you get a little discouragement, or a lot of one or the other, despite simply being who you are all along.  Slowly you learn what you’re good at, but always you insist on trying things you’re not good at, on doing the thing you can’t do, on reaching higher.  It’s the Peter Principal applied to the arts, though it’s entirely self-imposed.  Call it the Bill-and-Dave’s-Cocktail-Hour Principal: we grow and grow till we get to a place we can’t grow out of.

This week, Bad Advice is interactive.  I’m interested in hearing about other people’s trajectories, no matter where you find yourself in your career, or not-career. What did you used to do and what are you doing now to sustain and nurture the writing bug, or the bug in other arts?  How’d you get where you are, or aren’t?  What did the early years look like?  What accidents pushed you this way or that?  What makes a reader a reader and a writer a writer?  And don’t you have to be a reader to be a writer?

Dave’s first installment of “Talking to Ghosts” compellingly visits his literary influences, his mentors, his youthful artistic vision, wonderful.  But he was also an Ultimate Frisbee champion–how does that history play into the current work?  Or does it?

I was a paperboy for a year or two before I was really old enough to work, a mile or so on my bike each morning.  I stocked groceries at the A&P. I cleared brush for a day with my friend Kurt and the lady paid us in Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.  I played in bands, good and bad, not very remunerative.  I dropped out of college, worked for an electrician for a year of partying, then went back.  I used to wake up and worry at night, but now I just lie there and think.  I don’t know what accounts for the change.  I used to gaze in the mirror for long intervals, trying to see who was there (also secretly vain).  Not so much anymore.

For a short time, a season or two, I worked with cattle and sheep and various machines in Nebraska, rode a horse named Bill.  In various parts of the country I worked construction a little, then a lot.  Sometimes projects come to mind.  A fancy staircase.   A teak counter.  I was a dishwasher for four days once.  The owner told us to recycle any decent-looking pickles.  I got fired when the cook got fired, because he was a friend of mine.  I played in more bands.  I was a bartender in a disco for a year, and then at a jazz club, both in Seattle—I used to travel solo.  I worked as a waiter in a lunch place for tips only since my whole paycheck was taken up by dishes I broke.  I was a musician one place and another, ultimately New York City, which just meant I was sometimes broke.  I was a handyman often—just make a poster and tape them up everywhere and wait for the phone to ring.  I once painted Barbara Walter’s apartment in Manhattan.  She had Egyptian antiquities on display and a poodle that got paint on its butt, big crisis, also a telephone next to her toiwet, first time I ever saw that.  I remodeled kitchens and bathrooms all over the city for people who wanted to save money: I underestimated everything drastically.  I tiled showers and rooftop patios and the floor of a fancy hot-dog shop.  I was asked to build a bar in a bordello, but they wanted to pay in trade.  Me, at that age?  I needed the money more than what they had to offer.  I never wondered what the hell I was doing.  I knew what I was doing: I was making money so I could write.  That was a romantic notion, too.  The artist in his garret.  A few dimes here, bowl of gruel.  At least I didn’t have tuberculosis.  And actually, I lived pretty large–nice big lofts in SoHo then the Meat District, which we called Meat-Ho.

My theory was you had to have experience if you were going to write.  I still subscribe to this theory, which doesn’t mean it’s correct.  Another theory would be to sit down and write and just keep writing, do and think nothing else.  But I’m always telling students to defer grad school till they’re fully broken, to join the Merchant Marine, to quit their jobs, to forestall marriage, to wander far and wide, impress their parents at a later date.  For my part, I got good at all kinds of things—cards, pinball, shooting, plumbing, mixology, sailing, gardening, birding, memo-writing—and I did a lot of stuff I don’t do now.  I used to fly-fish extensively, for example, and play tennis, play golf, downhill ski, bike to work, go parachuting on a lark, rafting, whatever.  I could drive any size truck (but never learned to drive a motorcycle: too scared after my brother’s roommate was killed in a jumping accident).  I used to drink large amounts of beer, but became allergic at age 45, go figure.  Now it’s Jack Daniel’s or good wine, not such a bad fate.  Before I published anything else I wrote a how-to book called Tips and Tricks for Home Repair.  It was a contract deal, a work for hire, $2500, a vast fortune at the time.  It looked like a phone book, really cheap, illustrated by a film-strip guy, those cheerful stick-figure people pointing out the pliers, thin paper, lots of pages.  It was on my resume for a long time, but then I went to grad school and realized it didn’t count.  For three lovely years there at Columbia in the City of New York I taught a course called Logic and Rhetoric.  Later I taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, then in the grad program at Ohio State.  I got tenure there after just two years but found the fact and nature of tenure depressing and kind of medieval and after a while I quit, moved back to Maine.  Most recently I taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a five-year position, but now that’s done, twenty years of teaching altogether, yet another thing I was good at and loved and did in order to write, and now have quit in order to write.  Till I go broke, that is.  Or miss it too much.

All of these things were accidental.  I mean, I was handy with tools, so I did construction, which I was not always good at.  I found anything outdoors romantic, so I stumbled into one thing after the next, any work, any project, any road trip, farm work, fine, as long as most of it was outside.  I was good at the piano, and could sing at least a little, so I played in bands.  I was comfortable in front of a classroom—a natural entertainer—and took sustenance from the minds of students, so I taught.

When I was five I asked for a desk for Christmas.

My mother told the story often.  Why a desk?  she asked.

Because I am going to be a writer, I said.

I don’t understand this.  Maybe I knew what a writer was because Mom read to us so much.  She’d sit at the kitchen table and read passages from whatever she was reading, didn’t matter.  A page from Elmer Gantry. An Ann Landers column, whole.  At bedtime she read us the unabridged Gulliver’s Travels, with Gulliver climbing around the cleavage of Brobdingnabian women who thought him a pet, these huge disgusting pores and overpowering perfume and quivering bosoms, illustrations, too, awesome.  The desk was a miniature oak roll-top from the Sears Roebuck catalogue.  I gave it to my daughter when she was five, and she loved it for a while, but now she’s already too big for it.

And I wrote, another knack, got through High School on bare verbal talent, college the same, though here and there an English or physics or philosophy teacher lit new fires.

No matter what else I was doing, college forward, I was writing.  Writing was the thing, writing was the point.  I filled notebooks.  I subscribed to literary magazines.  I wrote two, no three, apprentice novels.  I haughtily eschewed writing programs, writing conferences—I can’t quite remember why.  I sent stories to the New Yorker and the Paris Review and Raritan and collected mountains of rejection slips.

Like riding a horse.

I read and wrote so much that the guys in one of my bands called me The Professor.  This long before I’d even considered such a thing.  Everything I did, I did so I could write.  I published nothing of substance until I was, like, 35.  I still don’t know what kept me going.  Bands, maybe.  The instant rewards of playing music pretty well in front of crowds, people dancing, yelling.  That’s where I could be an artist and hear applause, take home some cash.  Just never quite seriously.  What was serious was writing.  And because I was writing and reading so much I was failing to keep up with my peers in music.  Not enough practice, not enough study, not enough focus on the music of the day, the trend-lines, the new equipment, the shifting attitudes, the grimmer lineaments.

And one night in Norway in the back of a friend’s friendly band bus somewhere between Bergen and Stavanger, age thirty or so, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. The two things, music and writing, they came from the same well, so it seemed.  I made a decision, one of the few in life that wasn’t made for me: I quit playing music.  I just simply quit.

I was going to write.

How about you?  Tell us how you do it, and how you did it, and what you’ve got planned.

[Note: This was my first post on Bill and Dave's, a little over two years ago.  We hadn't conceived of Bad Advice yet, but this fits into the mold, and I've recast it to some degree.]

On the day after Rapture,

stone tablets I did find.

That spoke some deep truths

For the modern mind:

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I.  Don’t drink and Facebook.

(It should be somewhere posted.)

Remember that note

You wrote when you were toasted?

* * *

Some have compared the

social sites to a cocktail party

But best not to wear a lanpshade,

And come on over-hearty.

* * *

* * *

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II. Never Hit Send

When angry or aroused.

Better wait a day

Until your fury has been doused.

* * *

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The thing that seemed so urgent,

When you were all hell-bent,

Will make you cringe and redden,

When you look back in Sent.

* * *

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III. Avoid cell phone soliloquies,

You know the kind I mean.

When you go on and on,

But then look down at the screen

And see the other person

has been many minutes gone,

The call was lost, but you, undaunted,

Just went on and on.

* * *

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IV. Don’t spam your friends.

Especially with Jokes.

No cute cats or comedy,

You see we’re busy folks.

* * *

You may think you’re Mr. Funny,

With your great sense of humor,

But the few friends you have left

Will avoid you like a tumor.

* * *

* * *

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* * *

V. And while we’re at it,

Please don’t Reply All,

To a large message,

With points personal and small.

* * *

* *  *

It’s not an invitation,

To climb up on the stage,

You may invite titters,

More likely incur rage.

* * *

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VI. Texting in the car,

Has been much bemoaned.

But there are now very few of us,

Who have not texted or phoned.

* * *

* * *

So you might be forgiven

For looking at your screen.

But please not at the light,

When it is turning green.

* * *

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VII.  Listen to the person

Standing in front of you.

Instead of staring down

Every second or two.

* * *

Spend a quiet moment

with your child or your Mom.

Resist that itching urge,

to look down at your palm.

* * *

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VIII. When going to the Opera,

Or the movies, or the zoo,

Turn off your cell phone,

It’s not so hard to do.

* * *

* * *

We don’t need to hear your ringing,

We don’t need to hear your phone,

We don’t need to hear some cheesy song

re-made as your ring tone.

* * *

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IX. Talk in a quiet voice,

When you are calling home,

Don’t address the airport,

Like an orator in Rome.

* * *

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* * *

Assume that other humans,

Have the capacity to hear,

And please dear god don’t wear a phone,

Jammed right into your ear.

* * *

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X. Take a break once in a while,

Look around, go for a walk.

Cease communication,

Turn off all things that squawk.

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Go to a quiet place,

Where you’re the only one,

Comtemplate the world,

You can post it when you’re done.

Marley and Me

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Up and to Waterville the other night to see Marley, the new documentary of Bob Marley by filmmaker Kevin McDonald.  It’s great.  If you adore Bob Marley, go see it.  If you don’t love him, go see it.  If you think you hate him, go see it.  If you don’t know him, go see it.  It’s not a concert film though there is a lot of tantalizing footage of shows from across the Marley years and around the word.  But at heart, this movie is a biography, maybe a bit of a hagiography, even, but still great.  How pleasing to see Bob Marley’s mother in her colorful home, like a queen holding forth from her throne.  How fascinating to learn she left him on his own in Trenchtown and moved to New Jersey when he was seventeen and already playing music with the local kids, who would soon be the Wailers and part of one of the great irruptions of genius the world seems to produce in certain times and certain places.  And to see his father, an Englishman astride a horse, Marley himself, father to large numbers of Jamaican children, so it seems.  Bob for his part fathered 11 kids with seven women, only two of them with Rita, who tells us their living and love arrangements were no one’s business, and that her job was to get the women out of his dressing room, end of a night.  We meet their beautiful, pained daughter, Cedella, with her educated American accents, and get to look in on son Ziggy, pure Trenchtown.  And other relatives, producers, side men, and stars, including Bunny himself, dissembling away, all of them, but charming, lots of new information, lots of surprises.  Miss World 1976?  Marley’s long-term girlfriend, still a beauty, lots to say.  Shots of Trenchtown in Kingston are heartbreaking in some ways, cheering in others, a colorful panoply, but devastation, too.  The house our man grew up in?  A tin shack.  The house he ended up in?  A mansion two doors down from the prime minister’s, stuffed with friends and musicians and women and hangers on, the place he was shot and survived.  Remember that?  Marley shot?  Who did it?  Still a mystery.   Thuggery, druggery, love and religion, that nutty religion, Rastafarianism, as fanciful as Mormonism, its own brand of fundamentalism, the worship of Hailie Selassie, who rejected his adorers.

Once riding my bike home from a construction job in New York City I saw a stretch limousine pull up in front of Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, followed by police cars.  Numerous bodyguards leapt out and I stopped to watch–who could it be?–it was Bob Marley, weak and helpless and helped into a wheelchair.  He’d collapsed in Central Park, I saw later on the news.  And later yet that he had cancer.

This is a sad movie in many ways.  Sad about cancer, sad about death, sad about the damage famous parents cause, sad about poverty, sad about friendships, sad about business, sad about drugs, sad about religion, sad mostly about a guy who died at 36 and was one of the great musical minds in the history of the world. I cried throughout.  It makes me cry to think of it now, sad.  But there’s joy there too, joy to go with all the memories of every song and all the visions those songs call up, all the friends, all the parties, all the dancing, all the singing along.

I still love him.

Reba Burkhardt about age 16, with pearls.

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A couple of years ago I called my dad to ask if he knew the whereabouts of any family photos or other memorabilia of my time playing in bands. I particularly wanted a photo of equipment set up in the big room over our garage, which we called the Hideaway, and where my friends and I rocked out. He said, Oh, I’ve got photos all right.  The older of my two younger sisters, Carol, had boxed them all when Poppy moved down to Atlanta to live with my younger brother, Doug, and his family. And, well, they were still in the boxes.

#

Which arrived three days later via Fedex ground–seven large U-Haul cartons taped shut at the end of 2006, beginning of 2007. These I put in the barn, but today cleaning up a little I spied them (very close to blending in to the permanent warp and woof of barn stuff). And for no particular reason dragged one inside and slit the tape and inside a bursting cornucopia of forgotten faces and beloved ones, mostly my mother’s side of the family, and mostly theForsyth clan, her mother’s crowd. Gradually I realized that the collection was from my mother’s aunt Pearl, her favorite aunt and middle-name sake (my daughter’s, too: Elysia Pearl). Aunt Pearl had written names on many photos, but many were unmarked. My grandparents I recognized–this pair of people born in 1887 and 1890 respectively. Grandfather is serious in every photo, Grandmother a touch less so. Their eight children arrive one-by-one, my mother near the end of the line-up.

Robert, her immediate senior, died at age 5, polio. Our beloved angel, his mother writes on the back of one photo. I recognize my other uncles’ faces, but not this one. And there are many shots of my mother. Perhaps Aunt Pearl organized these photos, sent selected shots to the right Burkhardt households before her death. Anyway, photos, photos: Mom at 15 years old, Mom and Dad arm in arm age 16 or so, going steady.  And then, a photo I’ve never seen, the two of them at their wedding, Dad in his navy uniform, her siblings flanking, both sets of parents dour at the two far ends of the tableau.  My future folks are 19 and look it, cheerful and resolute, a bit stunned.

Jack Roorbach, age 18.

It was my job to go through all these boxes and try to divide things a little. I get out a stack of large envelopes and label them sibling by sibling and cousin by cousin (I have 36 first cousins, all on Mom’s side–I pick just one per family). My two uncles, Bill and Carl, my Aunt Connie, and my mother (Reba Elaine Pearl Burkhardt) had all died in the previous four years. Photos of each of them, photos of all of them, photos of their living siblings, women in their 80s and 90s now. Photos of the living, photos of the dead. I tuck images of Uncle Bill into an envelope for cousin Lindy. I tuck Uncle Carl into an envelope for cousin June. Who knew how carefree and how good-looking and how gangly these people used to be!

In a stationery box, Robert’s baby book, all carefully filled out, beloved boy. It’s kept as a journal in the Victorian style, rather stiff until late in the pages, which include a description in my Grandmother’s hand of his last words: a prayer, which she spells out complete, blue fountain pen, on the page titled “Baby’s First Prayer,” an addendum to the old book of hopes she must have pulled out for comfort, a thought continued from somewhere else: “Later he wanted a different prayer from sister Reba Pearl’s so he used ‘Dear God we thank thee for this day, for home, and work and play, for loving care, and everything in Jesus’ name, Amen.’ He repeated this in gasps before his dear little soul left us.”

Me and Bobby McGee, my mother used to sing. Me and Bobby, me and Bobby McGee.

Bill, Randy, Janet, Carol, Doug, c. 1967

One day singing it with her late in her life it occurred to me why this unlikely Janis Joplin hit would become her favorite song, why she sang it out at the top of her lungs, why she awakened us with it all through high school, full blast on the console hi-fi. And why the 45 version was on our little pink record player in my sister’s old room when I went to help clean the Connecticut house out before Dad’s move.

Me and Bobby, Me and Bobby McGee.

After dinner that summer’s night, having embarked on this project by accident, I opened a second box, this one containing Roorbach family photos, lots of laughs, lots of sitting there on the couch trying to figure out who was who, which baby which, which haircut when, lots of tossing photos into labeled envelopes: Randy, Bill, Carol, Doug, Janet.

When the box was empty and sorted I went to the old computer to work on whatever was at hand, the novel, no doubt. And saw at the bottom of my Mac screen the little calendar with the date: July 17, of course.  Which happens to be my mother’s birthday. Or was. Or always will be, however these things work.  [Originally posted July 17, 2010]

Reba, about my age now (late-50s?), still with the pearls

Johnny Jump-ups

Yellow violets under blue cohosh

White violets in the lawn among gill-over-the-ground

Wild in the woods

On April 17th, I wrote an open letter, a plea for equality, asking North Carolinians to vote Against Amendment One. I was heartened by the response; the letter was posted on blogs and translated into other languages, including Italian, Finnish, and Spanish. My fiancé and I voted early, and On May 7th, we were married in the District of Columbia. On that day, I believed in us, our home, and our nation.

The next day, we returned home to church signs commanding their congregations to vote for the amendment, to yard signs asking neighbors to deny rights to their neighbors.

Still, I believed in us, in our home state, and in our nation.

But when we woke the next morning, that had changed. I still believed in us, but, when I looked at my wedding band (which I’d worn for less than two days), I no longer believed in our nation. And I knew that I was no longer home.

Daniel Nathan Terry
May 10, 2012

 Here is the original letter:

Dear Friends and Fellow North Carolina Residents,

 On May 7th, my partner and I will be married in Washington, DC. After sixteen years together, of facing many of the difficulties most couples endure, we are overjoyed that this day is finally on our doorstep.

 Well, not on our doorstep, but on the doorstep of an office in a courthouse in DC.

 We are not wealthy, although we work most of our waking lives. We both teach six classes a semester at NC colleges, and we work year-round. As an adjunct for two colleges, I have no health insurance, and (although we have been together for over a decade and a half) NC does not recognize us as domestic partners; therefore, I am not eligible to gain insurance under my partner’s policy. As many of you know, I suffered a spinal injury 9 years ago. My current medical expenses add up to about $1000.00 a month. It is, to say the least, a strain on our family.

 Also, as we are unable to marry in our home state, we will spend thousands on airfare, hotels, and so on–something we would not do. If we had a choice, we would spend what money we can muster on a party for our friends. We do not want new suits, flowers, a DJ, or any of the other trappings. But we will still spend the money others might spend on such things just to have the right to be legally married elsewhere–in DC, where we are given the “right” to marry.

 Among the other 50-plus rights that married couples have which are denied to Ben and me, is the right of hospital visitation. The last time I was taken to an emergency room, Ben had to claim he was my brother. And, should one of us leave this life before the other (the saddest thing two in love may endure), the one left behind would have no legal claim to all that we have built together–this includes the poetry and art we have produced since we met (something we prize beyond most things).

 Beyond these legal and practical matters, there is also the emotional and psychological damage that is done by knowing that in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of some of your neighbors, you are considered inferior–even as you struggle to do good work for your community, your students, and your country.

 I know that many of you are already with us. I know that you love and support us. But I am asking you to consider reposting and widely circulating this open letter–this plea–for equality.

 Early voting begins on the 19th. Please vote AGAINST Amendment One.

As always, my best wishes and love to you,

Daniel Nathan Terry

 Daniel Nathan Terry, a former landscaper and horticulturist, is the author of Capturing the Dead (NFSPS 2008), which won The Stevens Prize, and a chapbook, Days of Dark Miracles (Seven Kitchens Press 2011). His second full-length book, Waxwings, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in July of 2012. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in many journals and anthologies, including New South, Poet Lore, Chautauqua, and Collective Brightness. He teaches English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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.

VOICEOVER: Every year, as all citizens know, the overlords in the Capitol oversee a pageant, a lottery to see which writers will represent their districts in a battle against one another and against the elements, also hunger.  This all started because writers got too big for their britches in a time not so long ago, the age of Mailer, and what’s her name, with the white stripe in her hair.  (Crowd in capitol hisses.)

BR: (Working out in preparation, a blur of one-armed pushups): You’re going to be a hell of a meal, Dinty.  But first, let me introduce you.  Dinty W. Moore, as you know, is the author of a number of books: Toothpick Men (short stories), Between Panic and Desire (nonfiction), The Accidental Buddhist (immersive nonfiction), and Crafting the Personal Essay (instruction).  He’s also an editor and teacher and administrator, and past president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).  His newest book, and the occasion for this interview, is The Mindful Writer, and has just been published by Wisdom Publications. It’s a brilliant application of Buddhist thought to the trials and processes of writing, and it’s also a book of quotations, each glossed and discussed in the great light of Buddha.

VOICEOVER: Dinty and Bill, old friends.  But today, one of them must die.

BR:  I met Dinty W. Moore at Lee Gutkind’s Creative Nonfiction Conference at Goucher College, where I fumbled an introduction Lee asked me to make, calling our man Dinky in front of a vast crowd of hopeful writers.  But Dinty is not Dinky in any way. We next met right here in Alaska, across the water there on the Homer spit in Kachemak Bay, where we were teaching at the wonderful Kachemak Bay Writers Conference, in probably the most beautiful spot on Earth.

VOICEOVER: And then they were picked for the Writer Games.

BR: Dumped on the glacier!

VOICEOVER (film clip background): Dinty and Bill scrambled for tools, the things that would keep them alive, clearly visible in diabolical piles protected by their deadly fellow scribes.  Bic pens and yellow pads.  Facebook.  A toaster.  One of those bagel-cutting guillotines.  Also numchuks.  Dinty Moore darts in and recovers a letter opener, not bad, and then—risky—a yellow highlighter.  And here comes Bill, full sprint, agile as a dump truck.  He passes the huge advance, turns his nose up at tenure, darts past the spears and arrows and bowls of acid flung in his direction and grabs a small, beautiful book.  It’s.  It’s.  It’s The Mindful Writer!  Brilliant—the most powerful tool in the mix!  Days have passed.  Writers are falling like, like people who are falling.  And here in the late going Dinty and Bill have found one another on the glacier, and formed an alliance.  Pacifists both, it’s going to be a difficult finish: only one may live.  Meantime, safe in their hiding place, a pile of glacier-strewn boulders, they chat.

BR:  Dinty, my friend, you are an impressive collector of quotations.  I know this from talking with you and from Brevity Blog, also from Facebook, and now, of course, from The Mindful Writer.  What’s your method, and why quotations?  And what should the epigraph for our interview be?  (These snow fleas are delicious.)

Dinty on Kachemak Bay

DM (scanning the glacier, the ocean, the mountain for danger, eating snow fleas): I have a few books of quotations, and a few internet sites I can go quickly if I’m looking for a quote of the day.  Sometimes I just Google in the name of an author followed by the word ‘quote,’ if it is that author’s birthday, for instance.  Lately though I’ve enjoyed pulling quotes out of the middle of craft articles that I am reading. I feel as if I am adding something new to the recurring stream of writerly advice.  Why quotations?  They are quick to absorb, perfect for a status line, and frankly, we shouldn’t be spending so much time on Facebook, Twitter, and these infinite blogs.  We should be writing.

BR: Infinite Blog, great title for a book.  I believe you killed the author of that one with that typewriter that came down by mini-parachute.

DM: (grim-faced, remorseful) The epigraph for this interview should be this from theoretical physicist Wheeler: “Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.”

BR:  Love it.  Though in some ways everything IS happening at once.  I’m sad my leg was sawn off by that poet we ran into, for example.  But the starfish balm is working and I’m almost back together.  Speaking of legs, you’re a great dancer–no, no, I’ve seen you, down there in Homer at Alice’s Champagne Palace? After Stephanie Elionzo Greist’s reading?  With all the movement she put into it, brilliant?  You were up next—hard act to follow—and just broke a few steps to much delight and by way of segue (or segway, as a student once wrote).  And then you read a really affecting memoir about family. A great reading altogether.  But tell us, tell us about your dance days.

DM (chipping at the ice with his letter opener, delicate rhythm): For about four or five years, in my younger, considerably slimmer days, I earned my living as a professional modern dancer.  I worked with an experimental dance theater company that toured up and down the East Coast in a ramshackle van, hauling lights and curtains in a trailer.  We would pop up on a college campus early in the morning, assemble the stage in a cafeteria or student union, and perform that evening.  Sometimes we performed on real stages – The Walnut Street in Philadelphia, Riverside Church in NYC – but usually not.

BR: Does dance turn out to have anything to do with writing?

Kachemak Bay

DM: What I learned from dance is something I still struggle to put into words.  In many ways, the dancer is the paint, or the words.  So in the studio, when the choreographer, Trina Collins, would move me around – do that faster, do this slower, start on the ground and then come to standing – I was being revised upon.  I learned that the creative process involved trying a phrase fifteen different ways, and then settling on either the best placement and execution of that phrase, or throwing that phrase away and starting over.  Endless revision.  Often in dance the reason a certain movement phrase worked best couldn’t be put into words: it belonged in the kinetic/visual realm. Often in my writing, I rely more on my ear than my intellect.  So all of that is related and all of that is still difficult for me to put into words. But it was a gift, having been a dancer.  Truly a gift.

BR: Were you already involved in Buddhist study and practice?

[The sound of shouting and clobbering is heard in the distance, anxious voices, a scream]

DM: I’ve been a toe-dipper in the great Dharma since my college days, which is a fancy way of saying I approach Buddhism in a rather hit-and-miss fashion.  I never donned orange robes or turned away from a regular life to allow steady meditation, except every once in a while when I would go off to a week-long retreat.  But slowly the ideas behind Buddhist practice worked their way into my daily life, and even if I don’t outwardly seem any more Buddhist than your neighborhood auto mechanic, the ideas are in my mind and influencing how I approach trouble, conflict, and self.

BR: My neighborhood auto mechanic is Buddhist, in fact.  And holy kazolies!  Here comes a pack of screenwriters wielding razor-sharp clichés and unassailable, pat structure!  What do we do?

DM: Buddhism teaches me that I can’t control certain events and challenges in my life, but I can control how I react to those events and challenges, and in that control, I can waste a lot less energy and create a lot less pain by not struggling against something that cannot be changed. That’s Buddhism to me, in a nutshell.  Plus you try to breathe.  Plus you try to sit still sometimes.  Plus you are kind to other people. Plus you wake up every couple of weeks and realize what a miracle it is that there are red and black birds in the cherry tree in your backyard, and they are singing.

BR: Nice.  I love that.  And a great quotation stops me cold.  I have to sit and think about it, sometimes for days, and usually say it to someone, just to get their help understanding it.  Because we all find different layers of meaning in the simplest statements.  In your book, Dinty, you are right there after each quotation to offer your thoughts, add them to mine as reader, help me understand the depths.  So I loved, for example, having your voice after hearing this thought from Stephen Dunn, who once kicked my ass at tennis (and is at this moment, in fact, beheading Carol Muske-Dukes out there on that seagull island): “Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you’ve surprised or startled yourself.”  Were there moments in the making of The Mindful Writer that startled you?

DM:  What startled me was just how much agreement there is between writers, and for that matter, between artists of all stripes, about the mystery of it, about the voices that come in the middle of the night showing you a path you hadn’t seen, about the beauty of “accidents” and how they can set you out on an unexpected, beautiful new direction.  I was also struck by how many of these writers came back to the power of words: not words as markers that are used to set down meaning, but words as guides and signals to help locate meaning.

BR: “Accidents.”

DM (brandishing his highlighter as if it were a sword, sharpening his letter opener against it comically):  “Accidents.”

BR:  Any particular favorite quotes we should mention here?

DM: Actually, the Dunn quote you just cited is among my favorites, but in the end I love them all. Of particular pleasure was exploring the words of Flannery O’Connor, a staunch Catholic who would likely have spit in my eye if I told her that I thought she was Buddhist.  Well, she wasn’t Buddhist, of course, but her discussions of grace and of that “peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet” reminded me so much of karma and enlightenment, that I came back to a conclusion that many others have had over the years, the conclusion that our world religions are not all that different.  The giant institutions, the Vaticans and Holy Cities and Potala Palaces create very different ritual and ceremony, but the basic messages are so much the same.

BR: “Thou shalt not kill,” etc.

DM:  “Do unto others.” Also, “Anger poisons the one who is angry, so turn the other cheek.”

BR:  You treat writing as a spiritual practice, which it certainly is.  But in the case of writing, or the making of art in general, what’s the spirit?

DM:  The human spirit.  That part of us, whatever it is, that makes us think and love and wonder.

BR:  Is it all so rosy though?  And aren’t things a little broken much of the time?  How do we fix it?  Is writing enough?

DM: I’m not much of an activist.  I admire so much those folks who have the energy and inclination to protest, to face arrest, to give speeches and knock on doors. I’m pretty quiet in my politics, and despite the book, I’m pretty quiet about my spiritual beliefs. That’s just me.

VOICEOVER:  There has been a change of rules, writers.  Repeat.  A change of rules.  We are entering conscientious pacifism into the mix of weaponry!

BR:  Tell us about your career.  I ask this of everyone before I eat them, because so many readers of Bill and Dave’s are grad students or newer writers looking for reassurance and/or role models.

DM: Probably the most important thing to know about my writing career is that I didn’t even begin getting serious about it until I was in my thirties. Then I went off to grad school and started publishing some short fiction, wrote three failed novels, and eventually published a book of nonfiction.  That part of the journey took about ten years, and since then I’ve published many more books, but it was the stubbornness and doggedness in the early days that got me here, in my comfortable modest success.  So many writers I know tell the same story: when others gave up, they got twice as tenacious.

VOICEOVER:  We were kidding.  About the pacifism.  This Writer Games interview ends with dinner!

BR:  From the book, Dinty, and from hanging out with you, also from talking to people who’ve sat under your tree, I know you’re a wonderful teacher.  How does teaching fit into your writing practice?  And how do you get the time to do anything else?

DM: I love teaching because I love people, and I love conversation, and I love thinking about the mechanics of writing, so it is pretty much a happy part of my career. But yes, there is always the juggling, and always the wish that maybe we could perhaps comment on a few less manuscripts and have a few more hours for writing. I do a lot of department service as well as serving as director of the creative writing graduate program, so balance is always an issue.  My answer is to write first thing in the morning, before other concerns and responsibilities intrude.

BR:  And speaking of time, how have you fit family into your writing and thinking career?

DM: Probably not well enough.  You would have to ask my daughter and wife.  They are certainly patient with me, and they both love writing and books, so at least I have a sympathetic team, but there are so many times I’m banging away at the keyboard instead of just sitting around at the kitchen table talking, and I worry I will someday regret those times.  Oh, Bill, you do ask the hardest questions!  I thought this interview was going to be fun.

BR: You were born on my older brother’s birthday, August 11, and yet you’re younger than I.  What’s that all about?

DM: I’ve warped the time-space continuum.   Plus I actually am your brother.  We are one and the same person, in two different bodies.  There is much you do not understand.

BR:  Randy?

DM: Quickly as you can, snatch the pebble from my hand.

BR:  Ouch!  Mom!  Mahm!

VOICEOVER (in an eerie Mom voice):  Sort it out between you boys.

BR: But he….

VOICEOVER (as Mom, and mocking):  The big fish eat the littler fish, and the littler fish eat the littler.

RODNEY KING (hurrying past, huge crowd of white cops chasing):  Can’t we all just get along?

BR: Fine, Rodney, and by the way, good book.  Dinty, you invented and built and have overseen and loved the on-line magazine Brevity.  Which is, I think, is the first Internet literary magazine.  Could you tell us about its inception?  And what’s happening with it now?

DM:  No, we are not the first, but this is our fifteenth birthday or so, which makes us one of the first, and one of the few to survive this long.  We are probably the first in nonfiction.  I’m proud that we are now paying our writers, even if just a modest $45 per essay.  And I’m proud that so many people visit our blog and magazine site.  But it is exhausting work to keep it going some days.  Any literary magazine editor, paper or digital, will tell you that. You do it out of love.

BR:  But I hate Bill and Dave’s.  Is the Internet a curse or a blessing for the spirit?

DM: Both.

BR: For the writer?

DM: Both.

BR:  For writing?

DM: Both.

BR:  For the world?

DM: It probably depends where you are sitting, but information seems to be more free because of the Internet, and the truth is a powerful tool.  As long as people—dissidents and artists and grass roots organizers and parents of autistic children and gay folks and soldiers and bullied children—continue to find ways to use the internet to spread honest information, to speak against forces that would lie and distort, I think the technology is going to be more good than bad.

BR:  Anything else you want to say?

DM:  Where’s my cocktail?

BR:  It’s right here, my friend.  It’s right here….

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But back to academics.  The point I want to make is that when I teach, during spring and fall terms, I get used to doing a hundred things at once.  I also, naturally enough, start to long for a simpler schedule.  For instance, this spring, while rushing from thing to thing, I started imagining my life once school ended: I would stop shaving and showering and hole up in some writing cave and never come out again.  Specifically, I would get to spend a couple of weeks on my Cape Cod novel—nothing else—and I would focus all the creative energy that, for most of year, shoots off in some many directions.

And now that time is here.  Sure, it isn’t ever quite as perfect as in imagination.  Sure, there are still irritants and bills and things that get in the way.  But for the most part it is good.  I am back to doing what I like most—writing—and what I think I do best.  There’s a healthy obsessiveness on focusing on one thing in a culture that insists you do a thousand.  Fuck ‘em.  Every now and then you need to blow everything else off—to let the room get messy and the recommendations go unwritten—and get back to the business of what you were put on this earth to do.

So how does this translate to Bad Advice?  This way: let yourself get obsessed for a while.  Stop being so responsible.  Or rather, be responsible to the work.  The world won’t fall apart without you.   Do one thing.  Work on one book.  Don’t let the nagging insects of things-to-do (or other projects) get in your way.

Be like the Bolivian hunter who slipped a bone of an osprey under the skin of his arm in “hopes of absorbing hawk-like skills in hunting.”  Better yet be like an osprey itself, diving for fish.  Focus on that one thing that gives you life and dive for it.

Here is what Shakespeare had to say about the conquering  Coriolanus:  “I think he’ll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature.”

Get it?  So that’s my advice.  Be to your work as an osprey is to fish.

It may of course be possible that you have never seen an osprey dive.  In which case I offer this:

 The Dive

(From Return of the Osprey)

            Ospreys are the only raptors that dive fully into the water to catch their prey.  Try to imagine the physical sensation.  To skim across the sky, above the ocean, peering down with eyes that can see into the shallows from forty, sixty, even a hundred feet up.  To catch a glint or the shadow of a movement and know it to be a fish, the one thing that keeps you alive.  To hover, adjust, beating your wings so that you stay in place, like a giant kingfisher or hummingbird.  Then to dive, to commit, to tuck with folded wings and plunge downward at over forty miles an hour while still keeping your eyes on the prey, calculating its size and movement.  To adjust in mid-air, re-directing, considering even the refraction of the fish’s image in the water, before pulling in your wings and diving again.  And then, at the last second before hitting the water, to throw your wings back and your talons forward, striking feet first.  To plunge in, splash, immerse, and make contact at the same time, trapping, piercing, clutching a slippery, scaled, cold-blooded creature.

            Now imagine what comes next.  Securing the fish, aided by the sharp, horny scales on the pads beneath your toes.  For a moment being out of your element and in your prey’s, feeling wet, awkward, ungainly.  Then lifting off from the water with a great thrust of exertion, soaked and heavy, hefting an animal that may weigh half of what you do.  Beating your wings furiously and rising, shaking the water off like a wet dog, already using your reversible outer talon to adjust the squirming fish, turning it so that it faces forward to reduce drag as you lift into the air, triumphant (or at the very least successful), shaking off silver flecks of spray.

To even imagine a dive is to get excited.  What a bold way to live!  To find one thing you do well and then to stake your life on it.  It’s as simple and direct as passion.  It is passion.  Peter Matthiessen wrote: “Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.”  If so, the ospreys have got it figured out.  It isn’t hard to picture a band of primitive osprey tribesmen watching the birds and learning from them.  One thing they might have learned, and one thing that appeals to me, is how the osprey’s dive weds calculated patience to wild aggression.  He who hesitates is smart, at least if when he finally commits he commits fully.  For the ospreys the hesitation is as important as the dive.  The birds have a remarkable success rate, some catching well over fifty percent of what they dive for, (like humans, athleticism varies; a few particularly adept birds catch close to ninety), and this is due in good part to the pre-dive patience, the search for the right target.  This careful adjustment will often carry over into the dive itself.  After the bird has tucked its wings and dropped down thirty feet, it may pause and readjust, and it may continue this a time or two again as if descending imaginary stairs.  But while the pre-dive ritual demands control and calculation, the plunge itself is about the opposite of control.  It is a moment of full commitment, of abandon, and finally, of immersion.

.

No more questions.  No more methodologies.  No more knife fights in the back stacks of the great libraries.  Science has spoken.  The greatest writing program in the country is…  VERMONT COLLEGE!

And what’s more, this unseeded, non-traditional, low-res, upstart CRUSHED the competition at every juncture.

The match-ups:

The inevitable Iowa will live to see another day of course, but George Mason advanced from the Sweet Sixteen on an upset, crushing Arizona state only to face the Alabama juggernaut and their vatic chants (dicks, elephants, tides, RTR, RFMT, and so forth, boo-rah!), enthusiasm unbounded, gentlemanly Michael Martone at the helm.  A mix-up in Bill’s head led to two San Diego programs taking the floor at the same time against the New School, hardly fair, but it all worked out for the bleached blondies down there at SDSU, that is till the Crimosn Tide came back strong, the moon more full than usual, and swamped their beaches.  The blood feud in Arizona had exhausted its combatants, it seemed, a lackluster match that barely made it to the buzzer, the teams just standing there panting.  What a game between OSU and UNCW, however.  Coach Gessner throwing chairs and his dog Missy onto the court shouting “Simplify, simplify!” and getting ejected, wonderful stuff.  But the cooler heads (and Lee K. Abbott) of OSU prevailed.  Ashland and Virginia tech played a nailbiter, but in the end it was scrappy Ashland who prevailed, and maybe got a little cocky: because here came the Monster from Montpelier!  Who’da thunk Vermont could take on OSU?  But they did so with ease, garnering more votes than their whole half of the bracket combined.

The final matchup, Vermont vs. Alabama, was a shocker, tied at the half, then no contest, ‘Bama tripping over their extraordinarily long dicks while meanwhile, triple-triples for the whole Vermont team.

Vermont!

Bill and Dave are speechless, but the system has spoken.  Best MFA program in the land?  Vermont College of Fine Arts, ladies and gentlemen, VERMONT!

This is the last word, of course, at least for 2012.  Bill and Dave’s has spoken.  All other rankings are obsolete, refer to them no more.  Let’s celebrate in the comments column.  And don’t forget to drink responsibly.  Riot police are standing by.

VERMONT!

Our top 16 programs in the country:

Unlike in the Abramson system, these voters have tasted the food, baby.

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