Health Insurance and the Independent Writer
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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Cobra
When my wonderful five years at Holy Cross were up I was able to take advantage of COBRA health coverage. The acronym stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, but it’s appropriately threatening, deadly snake, right. All the act states is that employers’ insurance plans must continue to cover employees terminating for any reason for eighteen months after termination. This protects many people, but for an example, think of someone battling cancer: can’t work anymore, gets to keep insurance. For a while. If she can pay. My own COBRA amount was about $2200 a Continue reading →
Royal Visitor
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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As the best writers in the world, Dave and I wanted to be sure visitors to Bill and Dave’s could easily find and comment on our work. So our web designer, Randy Skidmore of Subpar Design, has set up the Bill and Dave’s “Our Best American Essays” page, formally static, so that we can post work old and new, and readers can respond. I’m going to launch the new capabilities today with “Royal Visitor,” which I’ve read at a a number of public events and which appeared in Louisville Review #62. I also posted it on my old Down East blog. It’s my answer to the FAQ about the writing of memoir: what if there’s material from your life you really can’t use? The answer in this case is one word: metaphor. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Write in THE FUTURE
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Everyone can imagine a time in the future when circumstances will be better, more ideal, for tackling that big book, that perfect poem, that masterpiece. Right now you are too stressed, too busy, involved in a family squabble, and money’s tight. But in that imagined future life is stress-free, everyone gets along, your bank account’s flush, and of course you have plenty of spare time. No wonder you want to write the book then. If you did it now, with all this other stuff going on, you couldn’t do justice to the work of genius that is in embryo in your brain. If you did it now it would come in fits and starts; you would make mistakes; it wouldn’t be pure. Continue reading →
Marsh Man: The Trailer for My Green Manifesto
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Okay, sure, this trailer for My Green Manifesto is a tad on the homemade side.. But I think you might smile if you click HERE.
Scraps from The Cutting Room Floor
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Gessner arrived for a little R and R in the midst of his burgeoning book tour. My Green Manifesto is getting good attention, and it was Dave’s turn. We hadn’t had anything but a virtual cocktail hour for over a year and it was great to clink glasses. The conversation ranged from deep to silly, from sad to hilarious, and we really didn’t stop talking, usually over one another. Much of what we say is about our work (in fact, we filmed a couple of conversations, one sitting on a log in the stream: stay tuned). His at the moment is the preparation of his next book, Tarball Chronicles while publicizing the current one. Mine Continue reading →
The Myth of Dan (The River Man)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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- Drawing by Gary Hovland
So I am currently running around New England trying to make sure My Green Manifesto doesn’t die a quiet death. So far it seems to be going pretty well, but who the hell knows? I’m at a Starbucks in Watertown, about to drive up to Maine to have the first face to face Bill and Dave meeting since we started Cocktail Hour. (The guy near me just said into his phone: “I’m in a cafe so I can’t hear so well.” A cafe!)
Since I’m rushing around (and, honestly, feeling lazy) today I’m just going to post the first 2 pages of the new book. (If you like it, maybe buy a copy for your uncle.) Here goes:
We are paddling our rock-battered canoe down a particularly stunning section of the river, a twisting stretch of steep granite walls and overhanging trees, as we travel toward the hidden city at river’s end. Over the past hours we have heard coyotes howl and watched deer wade, observed a beautiful Continue reading →
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day at Bill and Daves: The Cutting Principle
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Dave
My friend Richard Gilbert is working on a fascinating book about his years farming, and writes: “Well, I’ve made it through a light edit and effort to trim. Great: I cut 52 pages, the bulk of it including most of one chapter. That still leaves a 467 page ms., Lord. But I think I will pitch at that length. At this stage of completion and polish, isn’t it okay to do that? I don’t want to be an amateur or anything, but I am afraid any more cuts to get it even to 450 (my avowed pitching goal) might cut what an agent-editor-publisher would like. Or am I just being pathetic? Mine must be a common dilemma–a writer knowing his ms. is long but fearful of cutting it himself past a certain point. (And, really, unable to, because he can’t see it fresh or from enough distance. I mean, if I put it in a drawer for ten years this would be Continue reading →
A New Music
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Adapted From My Green Manifesto: My new book is about many things, including the need to fight for a limited wildness, but it is also, to a lesser extent, about language. I’ve always wondered why our words grow soft and mushy when he began to talk about nature. Perhaps I am too persnickety, too preoccupied with the language that we use to describe the natural world, but I am in the minority that believes we should watch our words, that false language both reflects and encourages false thinking, that our lives depend on our sentences. I feel particularly strongly that “being in nature” should not be described as some precious or highfalutin experience. After all, didn’t we as a species evolve, along with our words, while spending a million years or so living in the midst of the natural world? And wasn’t our relationship with that world, among other things, quite practical and direct? “Nature” is where the living roots of our language evolved, which suggests that that language should still be able to circle back and describe the place from whence we came without fencing it behind some quasi-mysterious mumbo-jumbo.
Candling
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Incubation continues. The other day, Elysia and I cut a hole in a piece of cardboard, placed it over a bright lamp, and began inspecting our incubating eggs. According to our various on-line instructors (has the Internet replaced extended family? Local knowledge? (Every generation has its scourge, and they all seem to end up toothless (Comic books when I was a kid, and of course Mad Magazine (And TV)))) you start doing this at eight days, and then as you wish, watching the chicks develop, or trouble. Plenty of comparison photographs to be found, but none exactly like what we Continue reading →
Reviewing The New Yorker’s Summer Reading Issue: Two Thumbs Up, both Mine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Lauren Groff
The New Yorker’s summer reading issue is here, and I thought it might bear a close reading, here in the brave new world post Bill and Dave’s crash, which around here we’re referring to as 6/24. Our innocence lost, can we still read late into the night?
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The lead “Talk of the Town” piece is by Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of a New Yorker piece turned terrific book: Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2006), which I taught in a nature writing course when I was at Holy Cross. Students greeted all the facts and figures and warnings of imminent disaster with a Ho-hum on the one hand, and a What-am-I-supposed-to-do on the other. They were also seriously bummed out with what their world is shaping up to be. And they didn’t like the formulaic way Kolbert introduces a scientist, describes whatever shock of whatever color hair, a crooked smile, some clothing, and then lets him or her talk. I didn’t Continue reading →
