Table for Two: An Interview with Patricia Henley
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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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 →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Just Write
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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This is no time to get ready!
My old grad student and now friend Connie writes from beautiful New Zealand to say, “Help! How do I get back to my book?” I know her book. She’s been working on it for some years, and it’s already really good, the story of how she ended up where she is (small jets are involved, and an ad in the newspaper, also running away cold from a certain husband and falling in with a kind of sky pirate, now dead.) And then someone I’ve never met, Roger K., writes to say, “I’m just about started on THE BOOK.” This is not the first email from Roger K. We’ve been back and forth for years. As a former roadie, he has access to Mick Jagger. Well, not actually Mick Jagger, but someone just as big whose name I shouldn’t say so as not to give away Roger’s proposed project. Notebook after notebook of interviews and confidences and inside dope to make your knees wobble, also permission to use it all! Written permission. Just about started! And from a friend, call her Ishmaela, the author of several good novels, Continue reading →
Confessions of a Nature Writer
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Let me say this straight out: it’s not easy. You see the fame, the interviews on ET, the magazine covers, the late night chats with the President, all the trappings, and you say, “Man, I could do that, I could write lyrically about plovers and shit.” But then there’s what you don’t see. You don’t see the stress, the constant media scrutiny, the prying into your personal life, the paparazzi chasing after you as you try to take a solitary walk along the beach to contemplate sanderlings and profoundities. What you don’t see is how hard it is to focus on the sublime with all those flashbulbs flashing; what you don’t see is the mudslinging, the interviews, the fierce rivalries with the Matthiessens and Dillards. And of course the sex. A godawful lot of sex.
Perhaps I am revealing a little too much of what goes on behind the scenes in the life of a nature writer. But I do so in the name of honesty so that young people out there who are considering getting into this game will know it’s not all leaves and acorns and quoting Thoreau. Being quietly meditative is the least of it. There are the three martini lunches with Wendell Continue reading →
Green Headed Jelly Babies and Other Fruiting Bodies: Mushroom Day at Bill and Dave’s
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Green headed jelly babies
The woods have been full of mushrooms this year, as I think I’ve mentioned. Not yet a ton of edibles, as in years past, though I passed up a generous fruiting of black trumpets in the Big Reed Reserve, where you generally want to leave things alone. But I took photos, which I hereby share. This is by no means the best mycological fruiting season I’ve ever seen. That has to belong to the late summer of 2006, in the Kit Carson National Forest near Taos. Never before or since have I seen so many species fruiting in such profusion. But Big Reed this past month won the prize for corals, and for species I’d never seen before. Some of which I haven’t yet identified. Photos may not be adequate–but if you know any of these, let me know! 32 species here, and a lot left in my camera… My personal favorite? Green headed jelly babies!
Really Bad Advice Wednesday: Accept Being Poor!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Boy, this is a hard one. Even as I type these words I’m worried that no one wants to follow me down on this depressing bummer of a trip. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll try to convince you it’s not that depressing, but in a society that values wealth above else it’s hard to tell someone that the career you choose, even if you are talented and work as hard as humanly possible, will not likely bring you wealth. There are exceptions, you’ll argue–Charles Frazier, Tom Perrotta—quality writers who also are able to afford to pay for both home and car. It’s true, it’s true, but the vast majority of us who spend our time trying to make great sentences and books can barely pay our bills. This hardly makes us exceptional in these tough times, but that may not be much reassurance to a young writer choosing to pursue a life of word making.
So why do it? As hundreds have said before me, because you have to do it, you are compelled to, and you ain’t in it for the money. But more than that. Because there is joy in it. Joy in making your own worlds, thinking your own thoughts, creating individual art in our increasingly pre-packaged, Continue reading →
Table for Two: An Interview with John Clayton
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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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 →
Boletus Edulis?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Boletus edulis
In my Big Reed post I mentioned all the mushrooms and other fungi we spotted. I’m still working on a more general mushroom post, with tons of photos… But yesterday morning I spotted a tall, lone Boletus edulis under a white pine in a mixed forest on the daily walk. My daily walk–the mushroom was standing still. This time of year the bugs aren’t bad and beetles hadn’t gotten to it, nor slugs. King bolete! I hadn’t seen one for a few years, luck of the weather. This one was fairly pale on top with a heavy stem–every other mushroom on the morning’s walk Continue reading →
Movie Time! The Tarball Trailer…..
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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It’s five in the morning in Mobile. Yesterday walked the beaches at Fort Morgan and it was deja vu all over again. Tarballs and orange smears and dozens of tarball farmers with giant nets. Same as it ever was. Too bad the story is over!
Here’s my trailer for The Tarball Chronicles. Hope you like it!
Bad Advice Wednesday Live!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
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This week, Bill and Dave discuss reading, but they do it two months ago sitting in Temple Stream behind Bill’s house in Maine. Here’s the video.
