Blues Machine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
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Here’s a story from my collection Big Bend, one that appeared in a very small magazine called Whetstone, which I think has since disappeared. It was edited by a kind poet named Jean Tolle, and came out of Barrington, Illinois, published not by a college but by some dedicated writers working from the Barrington Area Arts Council. I visited once, gave a reading, would love to hear if the group is still active, as I find no current refs on the Internet. But many thanks to them, as this was one of my first publications. The story must have been written–at least an early draft–sometime in the mid-eighties. I can feel where it came from, memory of Ithaca years a decade previous, and particularly Trumansburg summers, when all of we young musicians moved from farmhouse to farmhouse and apartment to apartment, depending on the band we happened to be in. The famous old guys would come staggering back to refresh their lives, if they weren’t dead, and it was possible to make friends with some real rock stars here and there, or at least drink too much with them. But this is a love story. I can’t say where the boy came from, but I do recall a kid who worked hard to help his mom find a partner. And I fixed someone’s water system once in exchange for some meals… Continue reading →
If Hemingway Wrote Portnoy’s Complaint
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It was cold and clean in the city during those years and I would walk home to the neighborhood past the butcher shops with the meat hanging down and past the dry cleaners to our warm apartment. I would sit at the hard table and I would sharpen my pencil and then do my work, my home work, and then I would retire to the bathroom and click the lock into place. The bathroom door was oak and solid and hard and you could feel the spot where the wood knotted above the lock. It was the one private, well-lighted place in that crowded house and there I would take my penis from my pants and massage it many times. It was a good place, and I was young and strong, and my penis was young and strong too and able to withstand repeated massagings. When I was done there was always a moment of clarity, a clean moment despite the mess, and for a while, before the remorse set in, I would feel a little less afraid of death. But the remorse and guilt would always return, as would my mother, always my mother, banging on the locked door to find out just what her eldest son had been doing behind it.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Start a Writers Group?
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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My Writing Group
A long time ago I would write a story, feel good about it, and send it out to the Paris Review or the New Yorker. I recall putting the very first of these in a blue mailbox in Ithaca, New York (which dates it early ’70s), and actually going to visit the mailbox for the next week or so. After a month I got the rejection slip and the story back (remember paper? envelopes? “stamps”? one-month manuscript turnaround?) and then I’d decide one of two things, or I’d pick both: 1) The story sucked. 2) The magazine and its editors and readers and the whole culture that spawned it and them and pretty much everyone in the world sucked. And so back to my typewriter (remember typewriters?), a fresh story. Because why would you revise something that sucked? Continue reading →
Investigation
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
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Talus House at Bandolier National Monument
“Investigation” appeared in The Iron Horse Literary Review 12.6/13.1, “The Fiction Issue,” which appeared this past spring. The fiction issue is a great number with some terrific writers, highly recommended, and comes with a taxonomy. That is, the editors have divided their offerings into sub-categories: the short story, flash fiction, one-sentence stories (Michael Martone has a great example here), the long story, and the novel, excerpted. “Investigation,” at 8300 words, fell into their long-story category, but folks, it’s still a short story! As are all the others except the novel excerpts. I was awfully happy to be in such wonderful company. Lee Martin, who succeeded me at Ohio State and is now the MFA program director there (but more importantly a wonderful writer of both fiction and nonfiction), emailed last summer and asked if I had a story to submit. As it happened, I’d just finished the one I’m posting here. The idea for “Investigation” came from a place I love, simple as that. I wanted to set a story there, and this is what emerged. At first it was just a kind of strange love story, but in subsequent drafts the politics turned up, and welcome. Continue reading →
Elvis Costello at the State
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Months ago Juliet bought tickets for Elvis Costello at the recently renovated State Theater down in Portland (our Portland, the one in Maine), and last night was the show. We drove a couple of hours behind logging trucks, got a fine dinner (I added a gin and tonic and club soda or two to the mix), and then to the State. It’s a pretty relaxed place, and we walked around a while looking at the renovation. It’s a pretty clever approach, if a lot of cement, and clearly done on a slim budget, but the theater was preserved and now offers a steady stream of concerts. It seats about 15oo people, nice. Very nice, actually, since the place shut down in 2006, slated for demolition, rescued by saints, just reopened last fall. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take Down your 10,000 Hours
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Most of the talks I gave over the last month were Environmental with a capital E. But one was more specifically about writing, given to some young writing students, and in it I gave an overview of the first decade of my own writing career (“career” being a word I wouldn’t have used, even loosely, back then). That chapter of my writing life could be aptly titled Banging My Head Against the Wall. I wrote two novels, the first better than the second, that were big, clunky, and ultimately unpublished. When I finished each novel, I sent them along to 5 or 6 big New York publishers and they sent back the obligatory form letter rejections. One editor wrote a personal letter, that included the phrase “You are a writer of considerable talent,” a phrase that I clung to like a lifeline through my (roaring) 20s. I revised the book along the lines of her criticisms and sent it back to her, only to get a form letter in return. Continue reading →
A Sad Ending, or at Least Compost
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Well, our experiment with incubating hen’s eggs has ended at the compost pile. Four weeks and you know it’s been too long, though Elysia stayed patient and true. Our confidence was bolstered around the two-week mark, when we candled the eggs and saw all the positive signs we were supposed to in at least half the eggs. But in the last week we had several mishaps. First, the light bulb in our makeshift styrofoam-cooler incubator burned out. Next time around, I’ll install a car alarm to go off when this happens, but we didn’t know how long the eggs had gone dark. They weren’t freezing cold, as Continue reading →
Wuthering
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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So I spent some time in the last month on Cape Cod and I also spent some time re-reading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. These two facts conspired to get me thinking about a novel I’ve been trying to write for the last 26 years, a novel that is a family melodrama set on the bluff on a fictional neck on Cape Cod. I’d love to start it right now, to take the advice I’ve been giving you, dear readers, on Bad Advice Wednesdays, and plunge right in. But in this case it is other writing that is getting in the way of writing, and the likelihood is that my novel will have to slumber again, at least until December when school ends for the term……
In the meantime I’ve been immersed in Bronte’s miserable, beautiful book. It really is horrible in a way, specifically the way that Heathcliff, regarded as a grand romantic character by those who have not actually opened the pages, sets about systematically destroying the two families who have wronged him. Despite his sadism, I’ve always been a sucker for a good primal character, and he certainly is that. He is described by his lover Cathy herself as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation….a fierce pitiless wolfish Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday (Thursday Edition): Take a Break
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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MacDowell Colony Cabin
I’m in New Hampshire as I write, enjoying the annual Roorbach family gathering at the lake. Five or six hundred of us, including container loads of Elysia’s cousins, have climbed Mt. Cardigan, eaten large amounts of everything, swum, fished, sailed, sung, rope-swung, toasted marshmallows, thrown horseshoes, and etc. And I, I haven’t written a word. I am taking a break.
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But that’s just one of the kinds of break I’m talking about here. Another is the opposite—the writing break. In which you carve out a week and take yourself somewhere (preferably boring, preferably alone), and perform an ambitious task: finish that book, start that play, learn Russian. Continue reading →
The Spock Twins: The Death of the Death of Environmentalism
categories: Cocktail Hour
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In my new book, My Green Manifesto, I take on another book, Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are two lifelong environmental-advocates best known for creating an attention-grabbing paper called The Death of Environmentalism. That paper, which sparked lively debate on websites and editorial pages, advocated breaking environmentalism out of its granola ghetto and tackling global warming head on, which, according to the authors and contrary to most conservatives, could actually create jobs and ultimately help the economy. I picked up the book because I thought it might fit my present surly enviro mood, and I’d heard that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like me, have grown tired of both musty mysticism and hysterical apocalypisim, favoring a more practical, hard-headed brand of environmentalism.
