The Return of Mr. Hopeless
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Okay, so when we last spoke to each other I had posted a piece about the nature writer Derrick Jensen, adapted from my book, My Green Manifesto, which just came out. (I wasn’t crass enough to link to the book the first time and to try to get you to buy it, but apparently I’ve become bolder in the course of a week.) Soon after the post was posted, our world crashed here at Bill and Dave’s. I didn’t manage to save a copy of the post but I’ll try and re-create it here:
(You might want to listen to the Standell’s “Dirty Water” while reading.)
A few years ago I was on a nature writing panel with a writer named Derrick Jensen. A couple of weeks before the panel I sent out a friendly e-mail to the other panelists, suggesting we bounce some ideas off each other. Here is the gist of the e-mail I got in response from him:
“You ask me what I think about so-called nature writing? I think the same about it that I think about any beautiful writing. There is no time for it. There is time for only one thing: saving the earth. The world is being slaughtered and we need to stop it. At this point writing is beside the point: Continue reading →
Crash and Burn: Bill and Dave come Back From the Brink
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Yes, it's a re-run...but these are desperate times....
Well, dear reader, we crashed.
I will in no way blame this on poor Derrick Jenson and his eco minions, and will insist that the fact that we lost our site, and most of the posts from June (including my Bad Advice Wednesday where I lovingly scanned in my sloppy journal pages) just as the hits had started to roll in for my Jensen piece, Mr. Hopeless (I would link to it but, alas, there is nothing but ether to link too.) So feel for us readers. We have tried to bring you, free of charge (though not of ego) the humble gift of our prose, but this week we two old hippies learned a lesson about the modern world. Always back things up.
Over the next couple of days I’ll try to gather things together and get stuff back up, including Mr. Hopeless.
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: Getting Started (Fiction Edition)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Sonia Rykiel Pearl Sunglasses
I often have great, clear ideas for fiction, glorious stories blooming whole in my head, but when I sit down to write, something happens. Or more accurately, nothing. Or at least nothing like the vision that came middle of the night or driving to Portland, or (frequently) watching a good movie. Maybe this is because the crisp, beautiful idea I’ve envisioned is really only a series of events detached from person and place, or alternately an image attached to a problem–something like a dream, compelling and vivid but impossible to grasp in real time. Where to Continue reading →
Mr. Hopeless
categories: Cocktail Hour
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While I don’t mind rumbling a bit in my writing, I am not a fan of personal attacks. What follows, I would insist, is not one, but rather an attack on a writer’s ideas, ideas that I have over the years found to be not just wrongheaded, but pernicious. The writer Derrick Jensen presents the world in primary colors, oversimplified, and seems to have had little contact with or knowledge of his fellow human beings, or at least human beings as I know them.
A few years ago I was supposed to be on an academic panel with Jensen, and a couple of weeks before the panel I sent out a friendly e-mail to the other panelists, suggesting we bounce some ideas off each other. Here is part of the actual e-mail I got in response from him:
The Incremental Method
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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David showing me some technique
I have these secret projects. Maybe you do, too. One lately has absorbed me on my daily walks through the woods here. About a half-mile in on one of my circuits there’s a stretch of deep mud you can’t quite skirt–a spring rises there when the weather is wet. So a few years ago I started placing stones in the mud. There are plenty of stones around, just not many flat ones, and most way too heavy. But over time, at the rate of a stone or two a month, I’ve managed a pathway. Continue reading →
My Father’s Voice
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Note Nametag
This piece was recently published in WM On-Line, the lit magazine for Wabash College. I thought I’d link to it for Fathers’ Day.
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Bad Advice Wednesday: Tough Guys Keep Journals (And You Should Too)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Every year I bring in a big pile of black journals into my classes and plop them on the desk and go on and on about how important they are to my writing life.
And every year my students nod politely and say “uh-huh” but you can tell what they really want to do is roll their eyes and get this bit about diaries over with so we can move on to more important writing stuff, like how do you get an agent. Journals, admittedly, aren’t sexy. They conjure up thoughts of “Dear Diary” and tears over lost high school boyfriends or girlfriends, and they require that least fashionable of writing tools—a pen.
Incubator
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My friend Drew called the other day to say that something, probably a fox, had gotten to his chickens and he had only one left alive. I love that moment when you know a request is coming but you don’t know what it’s going to be. Did he want a couple of chickens? Nothing lonelier than a chicken without its flock. He said, “I wonder if you would take her.” Her name was Buffy after her color. Drew brought her over the next day. Elysia announced that the hen was a Buff Orpington, same breed as the late Maggie, our winter casualty. We put Drew’s hen in the dog yard, which is now the back yard of the chicken coop. And nothing particular happened. There was some pecking-order business–our various breeds trotting over to chase Buffy or nip at her, the rooster ducking and sweeping flirtatiously. But no mob scene, nothing dangerous. We thought Buffy would probably spend a few nights outside or on the floor of the chicken coop, might get beat up pretty bad, but that it would all work out in the end, a replacement bird for Maggie.
I Love You: Three Thoughts on Love
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am writing this from the Doe Branch Ink Writing Retreat in the mountains of N.C. I’m stunned by how beautiful it is here. Yesterday my daughter and I took two beach chairs and spent a good hour hanging out on a rock ledge in the middle of a creek.
Which leads to today’s topic, which is love.
1. I once said “I love you” to a convenience store cashier outside of Vail, Colorado. I didn’t love her, in fact, barely knew her, and I wasn’t having an illicit affair. I had just bought some snacks, granola bar or Twinkies and an ice tea I’m pretty sure, for my summer road trip into Utah. We were going through the usual rote dance of convenience store politeness–“Thanks so much,” “Have a nice day”–and had gotten to the part where I usually say a friendly “See ya” or a final “thanks” as I walk away, when something else slipped out instead. “I love you,” I said as I pushed the door open, and then, realizing my mistake, fled.
It’s Thank Your Editor Day at Bill and Dave’s!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I realize I’ve gone missing. It’s because I’ve been working feverishly on The High Side, my new novel. And moments ago, I finished. Finished for the tenth or eleventh time, four years and counting, but finished. The edits came back a month or so ago, and after several smart and wonderful but very intense conversations with my editor, Kathy Pories at Algonquin, I got to work.
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The thing about working with an editor on late drafts of a work in progress is that with each draft you fully believe you’ve finally done it, finally delivered the perfect manuscript. So when your editor says she loves it, you rejoice. You blush and stammer. And when the other shoe drops, the “but” sentence, you tend to resist. You’re a writer, after all, and you know what you’re doing. Kathy’s letter is very careful and thorough, and after these words: “I loved reading this; I love your sense of joy and fullness and ability to create rich Continue reading →
