Are You a Megalomaniac? A Quiz For Writers
categories: Cocktail Hour
5 comments
1. You think your work will be remembered…
A. fondly
B. by your Mom
C. until next week
D. For All Time
Harbinger Hall
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
Comments Off on Harbinger Hall
#
Here’s a story for our new category, “Our Best American Short Stories.” “Harbinger Hall” appeared in The Atlantic in December, 2004. Readers seemed evenly divided on the question of whether it represents a little boy’s fantasy or something real. I mean, real in a fictional sense, if that’s not too confusing. My answer is that I completely believe in the story we are told. By me. Or more accurately, by my narrator, who is not so much a version of me as he is an extension into adult consciousness of the protagonist, Bobby. And maybe then again an extension of Mr. D’Arcy. In an earlier post, I told the story of the Atlantic’s fact-checking of this story. And now, as we build our new feature, here’s the story itself. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Journey Years
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
9 comments
Bill at the forge
Dave has talked in an earlier spasm of bad advice about the 10,000 hours an apprentice at anything must put in. Now, perhaps, it’s time to talk about the artist’s or writer’s journeyman years, or better, journeyperson years, or better yet, just Journey Years. These are the professional years after your apprenticeship has been served, the cruelly harder but perhaps much more rewarding years. A friend says that after apprenticeship (after, say, the MFA is done, or once the first book is out there, or whatever marks the transition for you in your particular set of circumstances), that after the apprenticeship comes something he Continue reading →
The Meaning of Lance
categories: Cocktail Hour
2 comments
To lose a testicle is to lose a friend.
I wrote that sentence about twenty years ago, soon after moving out to Colorado in the wake of going through an operation and radiation for testicular cancer in Worcester, Ma. A book about my cancer experience poured out of me (and to be honest I haven’t stopped writing hard since.) Soon I also started biking, mostly up steep hills.
Not much later a more famous case of testicular cancer made the headlines. Lance Armstrong also did a little biking after he lost a ball. About ten years ago I wrote, but never published, the essay below about Lance…..it’s far too long for a post so you are excused from reading it if you are busy. Just skim! These days I am more cynical about Lance, and the possibility of his doping, than I was when I wrote the piece, but I still think there is something archetypal about his return from near death.
Table for Two: An Interview with Lea Graham
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
1 comment
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 →
Classic Bill: “Into Woods”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
8 comments
Dave and Poppy, October 12, 2011
Gardening one day in the spring of 1992, first year in Maine, I looked at my dirty and freshly blistered hands, and thought of my days in construction. Idea for an essay. I wrote the words “my hands” on a seed packet and the packet went into the ideas folder. Another idea I’d had was to devote Saturday mornings not to the novel I was working on (eventually to be The Smallest Color) but to shorter work. I went into the ideas file–a bunch of paper scraps and napkins and coasters and pulled out that seed packet. The piece didn’t start out being about my father and Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Write Scenes!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
13 comments
Okay now, you’re saying, I thought the “bad” in bad advice was ironic, but after reading your title I’m thinking maybe what you’re pushing here really is bad bad advice. And I will admit that maybe today’s title overstates a bit, and that I was trying to catch your eye…..But, I mean it. Or partly mean it. What I really mean is “Don’t Write Scenes Exclusively.”
As someone who has read thousands of workshop pieces, both fiction and non-, and who has read over a hundred theses, I can say that there is a certain sameness to the work. Not that the writing and themes and events aren’t wonderfully varied and full of both possibility and dazzling writing. It’s just that almost 99.9% of that writing is in one mode and that mode is the minute by minute, often second by second, dramatic unfolding of events that we have come to call scene. Somewhere along the line the “Show, Don’t Tell” police got hold of America’s young writers and scared them straight. Straight out of summary, exposition, condensed thought, essayistic pace, and idea. Straight out of the notion that time in a book can be manipulated, pushed in and pulled out like an accordion, so that one important event might take ten pages and another a sentence. And straight away from the idea that variety is one of the deepest pleasure in any art, and that reading back to back blocks of same-sized scenes does not constitute variety. Continue reading →
