Donald Trump’s Secret Diary. Entry1.

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Publication Day: Where’s my Marching Band?

smallteaching When I was a child, my father’s best friend hired a marching band to show up at our house on my mother’s birthday one year. This was one in a series of outlandish birthday events he arranged for her, but it remains the most memorable in my mind, seeing that band marching up our street with the neighbors wondering in disbelief whether they had forgotten to mark some holiday or parade on our calendar.

That event left such a permanent mark on me that I still consider the arrival of a marching band as the ideal way to celebrate a momentous event in one’s life—which, in my case these days, takes the form of the publication of a new book. Each time one of my books has been published, I sit around the house expectantly all day secretly hoping that a marching band will appear around the corner at any moment, the leader carrying a box of my author copies, neighbors standing agog in their driveways, my family smiling and proud.

marching band

It hasn’t happened yet.

The publication day for my newest book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, came and went in mid-March without so much as an oboist serenading me from the driveway. But even though that has Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren

Lundgren’s Lounge: “Innocents and Others,” by Dana Spiotta

categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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The tumultuous ’60s and their aftermath were occasion for a seismic cultural shift, a ‘subversion of the dominant paradigm,’ in the parlance of the times. Few novels have come close to capturing the mercurial complexity and staying power of this period. Roth’s American Pastoral nibbled at the edges, while Susan Choi’s American Woman offered a fascinating glimpse of the radical left… and then there was Eat the Document, a haunting National Book Award nominee by Dana Spiotta, a tale of two radical survivors of the chaos of those times whose lives intersect again, years later, after they have re-assimilated into mainstream culture… as though that were possible. Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Debora Black

Table for Two: Debora Black talks with Steve Almond about Football, Hate Mail, Life, and Art

categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews

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Steve Almond football

Debora: Steve you’re everywhere—The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The New York Times Magazine’s Riff, The Rumpus online magazine, and you host the Dear Sugar podcasts with Cheryl Strayed. You are into journalism, fiction, life advice, and politics. You are Football, candy, rock and roll, hate letters, open letters, writing strategies, and book reviews. What is your mission as a writer, what impulses drive your work?

Steve: Oh, I’m like the rest of you suckers. I have this persistent dream that I’ll build a bridge of love to the rest of the species. For the most part, I chase my obsessions down. Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Believe What You Think

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Actual photograph of Jesus dancing with the Disney kids

A great place for a personal essay to start is with a long-cherished belief. Like that vitamin C helps colds, or that Jesus wasn’t married, or that the ocean is too vast to harm, or that such-and-such a writer is great or horrible, or that such-and-such type of music is boring, or that such-and-such city sucks. And on and on. Continue reading →