Table For Two: Interviews
Table for Two: An Interview with Monica Wood
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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 →
The Writer Games: An Interview with Dinty W. Moore
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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 →
Is It Safe to Eat the Fish? And Other Questions Two Years After the Spill
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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 Comes to Maine
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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 →
Table for Two: An Interview with Michael Martone
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Michael Martone
Recently I got a postcard from Michael Martone announcing his newest book, Four for a Quarter. Beneath several vintage-looking photo strips, the postcard and book cover show an old photo booth tucked into a tattered post-no-bills wall somewhere in post-industrial America. The booth sports a sign that says PHOTOS, of course, but it took a little staring to notice that the designer (Lou Robinson) has inserted the word FICTIONS in a font so much the same size as PHOTOS that at first (and then for several weeks) I didn’t notice it. It’s as if the booth sold PHOTOS FICTIONS. But the fictions referred to are Mr. Martone’s. The book is nicely made, beautifully printed and presented, kudos to the The University of Alabama Press (and a notation that much of the great literary work being produced these days is being picked up by university and other small presses).
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Four for a Quarter is a delightful book on the page, as well, a stream of meditations, of stories, of collectibles, of comedy, of tragedy, of every possible thing grouped in four. Or it seems every possible thing until you walk away and find the world falling into infinite fours, yet another organizing principle and OCD tic to contend with. Continue reading →
Table for Two: an Interview with Maureen Stanton
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Today I’m going to meet Maureen Stanton, a native New Englander (or Massachusetts, anyway, good enough, and not her fault) whose first book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, was published this past summer by Penguin. It’s a work of anthropology as much as it’s anything, with a deep look at the psychology, the social dynamics, and the caveman economics of flea market and antiquing culture. The book soars way beyond the multiple TV shows on the subject, which tend to focus on objects more than people, on dollars and cents rather than the mechanics of deals made on folding tables and in barns. And don’t forget the Internet. Maureen teaches at Missou, now, the University of Missouri, in Columbia, Missouri, and though this is a virtual meeting that could have taken place anywhere (Paris would have been nice, with its vast and famous flea markets—Les Puces, par example!—or in Georgetown, Maine, where Mo lives in summer, only a couple of hours from here, and Maine practically a flea market on its own), I find myself at Shotgun Pete’s BBQ Shack, at 701 Business Loop I-71 W, hardly a romantic address. Continue reading →
Table for Two: An Interview with Lea Graham
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Crushed in Galicia (photo Jen O'Leary)
Lea Graham is a traveler. Fluent in Spanish, and a poet to reckon with, she also speaks wine. Her first book of poems, Hough and Helix, has just been published by No Tell books, and it is a wonder, a confluence of image and story and meaning and mood. I first met Lea in Worcester, Massachusetts when we were both teaching there (she at Clark, I at Holy Cross), and we had meals together from time to time and good conversation. So this “Table for Two” isn’t entirely a fantasy, though we’ll make free with the location:
Lea, in answer to my query: “A beach in Cadiz (the oldest Western city, you know, because of the Phoenician trade route, I believe). We’ll eat tortitas de camarones (small thin crispy omlettes with tiny prawns), calamares en su tinta (squid in its ink), all kinds of shellfish including sea urchin, crab and lobster… Continue reading →
Table for Two: An Interview with Patricia Henley
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Patricia Henley with Jack
Patricia Henley has hiked a long way to get where she is, and yet she’s someone who knows how to stay put. She’s taught at Purdue for 24 years, for one example, and she’s just kept writing, even when the weather got rough. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, three short story collections, two novels, a stage play, and numerous essays. Her first book of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star (Graywolf, 1986), was the winner of the Montana First Book Award. Her first novel, Hummingbird House (from the once brilliant house of literary discovery, MacMurray & Beck), was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999. She’s kept writing stories (Glimmer Train, Seattle Review), and recently her trail crossed that of the writer Victoria Barrett, also an editor (Freight Stories, Puerto del Sol, good lit mags in which Patricia has published), who had just started Engine Books, a new press dedicated to finding the best fiction and to getting it out in the world. And, in a triumph for the press and author alike, Engine Books has just published Patricia’s 4th collection of stories, Other Heartbreaks. By email, I asked Patricia where in the whole world she’d like to sit for our interview if we could actually be together. “Camping,” she said, or rather, “Camping,” she typed. So instead Continue reading →
Table for Two: An Interview with John Clayton
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Mitzvah Man!
Today’s post marks the debut of a new feature on Bill and Dave’s: Table for Two. We’ll be talking to authors and editors and agents and just about anyone else we like, often in conjunction with the publication of a new book, often a book published by a small press. Our first interview is with John Clayton, whose latest book, Mitzvah Man, has just been published by Texas Tech University Press. Recently, John sent an email out to friends: “Tomorrow is my pub date. It would be terrific if you could ‘like’ my book on Facebook or even become a ‘fan.’ I remember Annie Lamott laughing, in Bird by Bird, at her own expectation that her pub date would change her life. What happened? Nothing. Her life went on. I don’t have any such expectations. But I do intend to enjoy tomorrow.”
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I first met John in 1997, when I was part of the graduate faculty in the English Department at Ohio State, newly tenured. I’d helped start the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction and was running it with the help of a large pool of our graduate students, a lot of work, also a lot of Continue reading →
