Gold
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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There it is, the first fiery leaf at the edge of the forest, and only mid-August. And now that I’m looking, I spy several distinctly yellowing popple trees off in the distance, and a shade of purple taking over some of the grand ashes spotted through the canopy. The broken old box elders in the shedyard are all but bare. I tell myself these are stressed trees, not harbingers. But the field weeds are dying back, too, really only the golden rod in its glory, not even any monarch butterflies unfolding and drying their wings out of chrysalis: frost in Mexico three winters ago, and recovery uncertain. Continue reading →
The Perils of Irene: Will the Shack Survive?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The question on everyone’s mind this morning–the one that Jim Cantore has already asked in stentorian tones on the weather channel and that has Mr. Obama making a frowny face up on the Vineyard–is will the shack survive?
“We don’t really care about Gessner’s house,” said a local official who refused to be named. “We don’t even really care that much about his life. But that shack is an important local landmark. We will do everything we can to protect it.”
Some locals expressed anger toward the storm for seeming to make a beeline toward the famous writing shack. “It’s like it has a vendetta,” said a guy in a hat. Other locals, bitter folk, expressed resentment that so much media attention was being focused on an 8′ by 8′ plywood shed. “Human lives are at stake here,” one woman whined.
President Obama was said to be heard wondering if parts of My Green Manifesto were written in the shack. Secret Servicmen assured him it was not, but, coincidence or not, soon after The President issued a state of emergency for North Carolina. Meanwhile, despite Governor Bev Perdue’s order to evacuate the shack, Gessner has stayed put.
“Fuck Ya,”he said. I’m riding this one out. I’m going down with the ship.”
Sadly, despite other conscientious preparations, including sending his wife and daughter inland to his sister’s house in Chapel Hill, he somehow managed to neglect that most vital of hurricane supplies–beer. At his news conference this morning he admitted, to gasps from the crowd, that he only had three Ranger IPAs.
Still, at the moment, Gessner, remains highly caffeinated and relatively happy. In fact, he has decided to spend the morning writing and watching the wind build as birds shoot across the marsh.
“It’s peaceful,” Gessner said. “Except for Cantore yakking away outside my screen door.”
Bad Advice Wednesday: Break Your Book Out Into the World
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This post is about ambition. It’s a scary word, no doubt about it. It’s a word a lot of writers tip-toe around, though it’s always there, lurking nearby. As others have said, too much or too little can doom a writer; you need the right formula or at least the right balance. For some, grand ideas about the work, and the way the work will make its way into the world, can paralyze. This, I think, is particularly true of young writers, since it is hard to take those first tentative, stumbling steps while your mind is leaping ahead to future acrobatic feats.
But this is not a warning about ambition to young writers. It is instead a warning about not enough ambition to not-so-young writers. In fact, if this post were a ski run, and this post had an actual post, with a sign on that post, it would be marked, not with a blue circle but with a square, or maybe even with a black diamond. The type of ambition I’m talking about today is not about visions of glory, or maybe it is but a very specific sort of vision of glory, which is to say a vision of glory for your book, your project. Because there are times when we all play it too safe, when we get too comfortable within a particularly form, a genre and Continue reading →
Obamas and Ospreys: A Vacation Tip
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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You are half-way through your vacation, Mr. President. The kids are bored, and you’re getting antsy, too. Now that we are friends (sort of) I want to give you a little tip about the island you are on. Here’s the thing about it: it is lousy with ospreys! “Ospreys?” you ask in your almost-as-deep-as mine deep voice. “What do I, the leader of the free world, and my kids, the kids of the leader of the free world, care about birds?”
A fair question, Mr. President, but I have an answer for you. You are a sports fan, right? And out there on the Vineyard you aren’t seeing much in the way of pro sports. But right around the corner, in fact maybe right in your backyard at the Blue Heron Farm, the greatest athletes in the world are flying and hovering and diving. If you don’t believe me take a gander at this video that my friend Ian just sent me: WILD OSPREY DIVES
Impressive, right? They really are. They are big, black-masked birds that hover like giant Continue reading →
Obama’s Summer Reading: A Look Inside
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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I hope it’s a nice day up on Martha’s Vineyard. Nice, but not too nice. Actually a little rain would be good—good reading weather. Enough time for the president to find a little corner of the house, away from the girls and Michelle, and, with some rain pattering on the roof, finally get a chance to through the books he bought the other day at Bunch of Grapes.
I imagine him picking them up, looking them over, skimming here and there, and then doing what we all do despite the famous admonition—judging them by their covers. He likes the novel he bought, and is looking forward to starting it, but it seems more of a nighttime book. He dips into the one that’s gotten all the praise but the first sentences seem lifeless and dull. He puts it down and stares out the window. One thing he has been noticing since landing on the Vineyard is how green everything is, the world full and bursting, but at the same time the salt winds nudging it toward fall. He likes those moments of Continue reading →
My Presidential Address: Obama and I go one on one….
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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Watch this new video as I try to convince the prez that, rather than read the five books the Boston Globe said he should read while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, he should just read one. I think this is going to be big, people. Soon I’ll be invited to hoops in the White House, beers with O and Clooney, the whole deal…….I love Bill R., I really do. But I also like the sound of Barack and Dave’s Cocktail Hour……
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Character Files
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Notes in the dark at a movie, then put through the wash, all on the way to my new novel...
It may be a legacy of minimalism, or of a misreading of so-called minimalists like Raymond Carver, but in so much of the work of new writers, both fiction and nonfiction, characters get almost no, um, characterization. There’s a lot in a name, Shakespeare notwithstanding, but a name is often all we get to go on, that and a voice, if there’s dialogue, sometimes not even a name. I like a writer who lingers over a character, especially at first appearance, but only if the lingering is deft and vivid and puts a person in front of me. Even better I like a writer who captures some essential, unforgettable thing about her character in a line, nothing to slow the action down, but Continue reading →
A Moonlight Paddle
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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After dinner last night I thought to take a break from the usual work session, picked up my canoe paddle and drove the three miles over to Drury Pond, which I usually visit in the afternoon for a swim. Drury is big as beaver impoundments go, held in a natural bowl by very extensive and actually ancient log dams, likely maintained for millennia. It’s not a quarter mile wide, and not a half mile long, with just a few active camps, as cabins are called around here, one of them owned by my fine friends Wes and Diane McNair. Continue reading →
We Are Not Alone: The Other Bill and Daves’
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Bill and Dave During the War Years
We’re tired here at the Bill and Dave’s Lit Shop. Weary. Perhaps you can tell…..the summer doldrums have set in. I blame the string of near 100 degree days, but a thousand miles to the North Bill reports the same symptoms. Suddenly writing–that thing I do all the time–is not happening, and the projects that come relatively easily during the rest of the year now seem daunting, stripped as I am of the super power of momentum. Or maybe I’m just resting…..
But don’t fret. Soon enough we will once again be delivering those crisp and brilliant posts that help you make it through your day. But, just this once, we are going to lean on others. Like pro-wrestlers tagging out, we are, for today only, going to hand you off to the other Bill and Daves. Because, as it turns out, we are not the only Bill and Dave out there. And we are confident that these fine websites can fill your void:
* First and foremost, as anyone who has ever tried to google us knows, there’s Bill and Dave’s Smokin’ Pit. True, they don’t quip much and rarely make fancy highbrow comments about lit-er-rat-ture, but Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Keep a Writing Chart
categories: Cocktail Hour
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A few weeks ago I posted a piece about getting on a roll. Today I’m writing about a very specific tool to help you get rolling and stay rolling. Up front warning: it’s going to seem a little dorky at first. And I admit that the idea of keeping a chart where you record the hours that you write sounds somewhat un-artistic and self-help-y. But my experience keeping charts over the years reveals this important aspect of the activity: it works.
As a younger writer, I was prone to self-exhortation, to making great vows and resolutions to work more and harder, and then, when my actual writing days fell short of those vows, to plunge into despair. For a while in my twenties I kept this Isak Dinesen quote above my desk:”write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” But despite that scrap of paper, I was always full of both hope and despair, often within the same hour or minute, and at heart I never really did like the whole “a little” part. I was also facing an inherent problem, one that any young writer faces. Your workday is formless and you don’t know how to fill it. It isn’t just your writing voice you haven’t found yet but your work habits. If you turn to “normal” standards of work—an eight hour workday, right?—and Continue reading →
