Bad Advice Wednesday: Why Not Say What Happened?
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Robert Lowell
One of the most-asked questions at writer’s conferences and here on the Bill and Dave’s Bad Advice hotline is about the dangers of hurting or offending or simply alerting people who will appear in a memoir or even, disguised, in fiction. Here’s a particularly cogent version of the question, which we’ll keep anonymous by request: “I’m planning a memoir of my growing up partly in Nigeria, partly in London, mostly in the Chicago area. I’m terribly worried about offending my mother, who is sensitive about some of the material in the book (my father ended up in prison, and rightly so). Also, I’m worried about my children reading this material, as they are Continue reading →
The House at the End of the World
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Take a good look at this photo—snapped last December by the marine biologist John Dindo on the west end of Dauphin Island, Alabama—and you can see almost everything that’s wrong about building homes along the coastline in this climate-changed, hurricane-prone, post-Sandy world. You can even make a game of it, if you want—sort of like one of those spot-the-error puzzles that you find on the children’s placemat menus at Red Robin. It’s easy to play along: Just print out the image and draw a big red circle around all the things that make no sense whatsoever.
Here’s what I circled:
It’s obvious that this oversized house was built on an untenable spot. It’s practically asking to be flooded by the next major storm or taken out by the next hurricane. But what I’m really interested in is the owner’s second mistake—the one that ended up compounding the first one. In an Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Debora Black
Table for Two: An Interview with Melissa Falcon Field
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Melissa Falcon Field and Noah
Debora: I’m so pleased to be among the first to announce your debut novel, What Burns Away. Kudos! How does it feel to know that bookstores all over the country are unboxing your book and making room for you on the Newly Released shelf?
Melissa: Well Debora, I have to say that it is wildly exciting. Publishing a novel has been a dream I have been chasing since my college days, back when I had a big spiral perm and wore stonewashed Daisy Duke cutoffs. Always, in those years, I carried an enormous bag full of books with me everywhere I went, furiously reading Stephen Crane, Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, Andre Dubus, Stuart Dybeck, Mary Karr, Annie Dillard, and so many more. I read literally everything I could get my hands on, studying plotlines, and working hard to develop my own with a ferocious appetite, I still read to inform my craft. But the debut, holding my own work in my hands, it feels like a big deal—a graduation of sorts, a kind of birth, and a sense of legitimacy after chasing the dream and working as hard as I have to understand how to write a novel, for some twenty years now. And, mostly, I am full of gratitude for all the great mentors and literary friendships that gave me doses of the necessary tough love along the way. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Create a Tour!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
1 comment
My long-former student and great old friend Melissa Falcon Field had a book coming out, and mine had just been published, and so we put our heads together and thought–Let’s do some a reading together. Just that. And then we figured out where, adding one another to invitations already received, until we had several events lined up, then several more, from Maine to New York City, and back again. We named it after an element both of our books share: TAINTED LOVE. Continue reading →
When Doug Met Arnold
categories: Cocktail Hour
3 comments
During my research on the Abbey-Stegner book, I became fascinated with an episode of the old TV show, “American Sportsman,” in which Doug Peacock spends a week in backcountry of Yellowstone looking for grizzly bears with Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is a younger more innocent Arnold, fresh off his early “Pumping Iron” fame, and one of the pleasures of the show is the odd couple factor. There is Peacock, who was the real Grizzly Man and retains that title in my book despite the Herzog documentary, in archetypal Wildman mode, spouting his radical enviro-philosophy—including some great lines about his goal “preserving an element of risk in wilderness” by keeping an animal around that can kill humans—and there is Arnold, kind of stiff and silly at first, but then getting more and more into it. The two only see tracks the first day but that night they stand in the smoke of the fire to disguise their “foul human scent,” after which Arnold says: “I hope the whole week is going to be as strange as the first night.” When they finally do see grizzlies, a sow and its yearling, Arnold’s whole face lights up with a goofy enthusiasm and he keeps muttering things like “This is fantastic.” In a way he perfectly embodies Peacock’s main point: that we feel more alive when the threat of death is near.
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Whites,” by Harry Brandt, aka Richard Price
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
1 comment
We live in a culture that is obsessed with specialization and categorization. Things that don’t fit easily into a preordained niche make us nervous. The result diminishes work that is unique and difficult to classify, but it also does a disservice to writing that becomes pigeonholed into a category that does not often receive the serious attention it deserves. Continue reading →
Come to Minnesota to Write This Summer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Cold and miserable? Try thinking ahead to summer. Better yet think ahead to the week of summer solstice in beautiful northern Minnesota. Now add writing to the mix…..
Boy I should have gone into advertising and bagged this book-writing thing. Anyway, the above is my attempt to seduce you into signing up for my “Writing from Place” workshop at the Minnesota Northwoods Writing Conference starting this June 20th and running through Friday June 26th.
Here’s a description of my class:
All the Wild That Remains Trailer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Hi folks. Here’s the trailer for All the Wild That Remains:
I’ve pasted below some nice things some people are saying about the book. More at my home site: www.davidgessner.com
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Know Where You’re Going
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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So many people ask if I outline, if I know where I’m going when I start a story, a novel, an essay. The answer is an inefficient but satisfying: No. I’m not even E.L. Doctorow trusting that he’ll get where he’s going even though it’s night and his headlights only illuminate a small part of the way. Because that implies he knows where he’s going, that it’s only the way in question. I’m more like getting in the car blindfolded and seeing how far I can go before I crash. Usually, the crash is more interesting than whatever magnificence I’d planned. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Astonish Me,” by Maggie Shipstead
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
3 comments
