Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Story I Want to Tell,” by The Telling Room
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Shortly after moving to Portland over a decade ago in an attempt to escape the maw of the Big City that was alternately invigorating and trying to devour me, a friend introduced me to Susan Conley. At the time Susan, along with fellow writers Sara Corbett and Mike Paterniti, was in the early stages of creating a non-profit to support student writers in the Portland immigrant community and beyond, with an eye towards publication as a way to raise the stakes for the writers and the collective consciousness of their readers. Having worked extensively with student-generated publications in the NYC public school system, I was aware of both the potential and the limitations of such initiatives… it seems that many readers and critics find the work of student-writers to be endearing and empowering and yet not worthy of consideration as ‘serious’ literature.
Guest contributor: Bill and Dave
We Celebrate our 1000th Post!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Hard to believe but Bill and Dave turn 1000 today. 1000 posts. For many years now we have carried on the tradition of blogging started by our great-grandfathers, Ebenezer Roorbach and Ernst Gessner the eighth. May we live to see 10,000! Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Debora Black
Table for Two: An Interview with Debut Author Annie Weatherwax
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Annie Weatherwax
Debora: Annie, if we were really here at Bistro C.V. here in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where I live, you would be able to see how edgy this place is. It’s a good pairing for your new novel! Let’s go sit at the bar. My friend is bartending this evening. She knows all about the wines—which are fabulous here. And we’ll have the opportunity to sample a nice variety, since I want to find out everything about you and your book. But first, Annie, welcome to Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, cheers and congratulations on All We Had.
Annie: I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for inviting me and I can’t wait to try a little wine! Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Just Write (2)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Blinders are not all bad.
Why did I call my graduate class this coming spring “Just Write”? Well, “Just Write, Baby” seemed potentially sexist. And “Just Fucking Write” (which was my first choice) kind of crude. But the point, and I bet you get the point already, is to, yes, write.
I’m currently at work on what I hope is my tenth published book. I have easily that number of unpublished books. In some ways I’ve learned a lot and tend to think in big narrative, shaping material somewhat naturally (if you can call something earned over three decades “natural”) but in at least one very real way things are no different than when I was working on the three unpublished novels of my twenties. What remains the same is the fact that books don’t come into being through theory, through brainstorming, through gentle musing. Yes, all those things help and are necessary but the moment when something goes from a whimsical nothing into the beginning of a book is exactly the moment you start writing it. Not jotting ideas about it. Not considering point-of-view. Not wondering if a book about an amputee from Seattle who works with baboons will sell. And not writing another outline dear god.
Writing, daily effortful writing toward the goal of making a book, is quite different from any of those things. It requires pushing ahead and, if you keep pushing ahead on a daily basis, gaining the known scientific benefit of pushing: momentum. And then, if you are lucky, the Continue reading →
Drawing Kate
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Friend of Bill and Dave’s Kate Miles is still roaring around on her supertour (I think). But when she dropped by Wilmington she asked, no pleaded, that I draw her a cartoon head in Bill and Dave’s fashion. Be careful what you plead for, Kate. Just found these, scribbled during your talk here at UNCW….
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Memory Game, Redux
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Bill and friends, August, 1972#
One of the many curious things about the act of writing is the way it can give access to the unconscious mind. And in the hidden parts of consciousness lie not only hobgoblins and neurotic glimmers, but lots of regular stuff, the everyday stuff of memory. The invisible face of your grade school bully is in there, somewhere, and the exact smell of the flowers on vines in your grandma’s Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Late Fall in Maine (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Photo Haiku
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Guest contributor: Richard Gilbert
DFW on CNF: Deconstructing David Foster Wallace
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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“. .. personal essays and memoirs, profiles, nature and travel writing, narrative essays, observational or descriptive essays, general-interest technical writing, argumentative or idea-based essays, general-interest criticism, literary journalism, and so on.” —David Foster Wallace’s syllabus definition of creative nonfiction.
As a teacher and writer of nonfiction, I devoured the late David Foster Wallace’s recently released creative nonfiction syllabus. Salon, which published it, called the document “mind-blowing,” evidently referring to its tough-love language. In this blueprint for a night class he taught at Pomona College once a week in Spring 2008—so roughly six months before his death, presumably when he was already suffering from deep depression—Wallace prosecutes a rigorous, distilled aesthetic. He builds toward it in his opening “Description of Class,” which notes that “nonfiction” means it corresponds to real affairs but that creative “signifies that some goal(s) other than sheer truthfulness motivates the writer and informs her work.” Continue reading →
