Writing End of Life Stories

categories: Cocktail Hour

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A couple of years ago, I was part of a project called A Healing Touch, which was a beautiful short volume edited by Richard Russo, a collection of true stories about hospice and death to benefit the Hospice Volunteers of the Waterville Area.  Six Maine writers took part, donating their share of royalties: Monica Wood, Wesley McNair, Gerry Boyle, Susan Sterling, Mr. Russo and myself, a matter of interviewing people who’d been helped by hospice and telling their stories.  The project has been successful in many ways (including a pretty generous royalty check or two or three to the HVWA from the book’s publisher, ), but one particular way it was successful was making it clear to readers and ultimately to me that hospice is not only for the dying. Continue reading →

Goodbye to All That

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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While I was teaching I often had to remind myself that I’d set out to be a writer, not a professor.  I really loved the classroom and often the students, and didn’t really mind committee work, even got into it, wrote wicked minutes.  The common enterprise of learning and making and knowing and investigating (also administrating), that’s the best.  It’s great work if you can get it, and I did get it and did appreciate it—summers off, semesters or quarters of research leave, adjustable hours, health insurance, mostly agreeable Continue reading →

Three and a half years later…

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Here’s a little article I published in the Hartford Courant, March  2007, which is only three and a half years ago.  I definitely would have been surprised to see myself expertly updating Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour back then, in like the middle ages.  After that, I’ll post an item from an interview I did in March of 2002 with the wonderful Dan Wickett, who has run the website Emerging Writers Network for ten years or so.  Note my contempt in both pieces for the man I have become: a blogger.  Oh, well, three and half years is a long time–almost enough time to get a college degree.

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My Chlog (March, 2007)

I have a confession:  I don’t really know what a blog is.  I mean, I know it’s short for Web Log and really admire whoever figured out how to save that extra syllable, and I know there are profound issues of press freedom and freedom of speech Continue reading →

Convocation! (With Ospreys…not seahawks)

categories: Cocktail Hour

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This year the trusting people at my school asked me to speak to a couple thousand incoming freshmen.  My mother will be happy to know there was no swearing or mention of drugs in my speech.   And I didn’t tear my clothes off either.

Here’s a little movie of the event:  MOVIE!

And for those who still cling to that relic, the written word, here’s the text:

I am a creative writing professor and one of the clichés of my profession is to tell people to avoid clichés.  A cliché, you may remember from high school, is something people tend to say a lot in certain circumstances.  Something people say a lot in this certain circumstance–convocation–is “follow your passion.”

Another thing people sometimes do when they are standing up here, perhaps to the point of cliché, is to quote a particular line in a particular poem by a particular New England poet named Robert Frost.  In “Two Tramps in Mud Time” Frost writes: “My object in living is to unite/ my avocation and my vocation.”  He means uniting your hobby with your job, your love with your profession, your heart with your wallet.  People listened to this advice a lot during the sixties, long before you were born, though people listen less often now, understandably given the tough times.  But I would like to pause here and say a word for this yoking of love and work, passion and paycheck.  That is I would like to take the old cliché and shake it out and beat it with a broom, knocking the dust off. Continue reading →

Two Hungry Davids

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Not long ago I sent an essay to a magazine where the cool kids hang out.  To be fair, the cool kids were very nice when they rejected me, but they did say something that confused me a little.  “Too much like David Shields,” they said.   Hmmm, I wondered, who is this Shields of whom they speak?  The ideas in my essay—Against a Literature of Fact—were ones I had chewed over for a couple decades, ideas that had obsessed me as a writer, teacher and human being.  But apparently I was behind the curve.  So, I figured, if I sound like David Shields, I had better read him.

I read the book, Reality Hunger, in two short bursts.  In between those bursts I met Shields very briefly at AWP (see if you can pick him out in this picture from Talking to ghosts 2) and he seemed like a nice enough guy.  Now I’ve finished and while I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it later, for the moment I’m just going to jot down ten random reactions.  Shields claims that his main desire is to provoke, and he has certainly done that.  As for the “manifesto” aspect I’m not so sure. Continue reading →

Summer Reading: A Confession

categories: Cocktail Hour

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I have to confess, I didn’t get much reading done this season—or at least not the kind of of reading I associate with long, languorous summer days… Maybe I’ve found other inspirations–I’m not exactly sure what gives. Certainly I’ve seen (and played) a lot more music than in recent summers. Also, reading at night these days I tend to fall asleep. Travelling?  I sleep.  I can’t remember the last time a hot plot kept me up till three in the morning, or all the way to Dallas. If I’m up till two it’s because I’m working. Which means typing. Which keeps me awake.  Sometimes.

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Mac Bates, a writer and also my brother-in-law, suggested in these columns The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, which I enjoyed a great deal, even read in uncharacteristic fits Continue reading →

Day 12: Limping Homeward

categories: Cocktail Hour

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I meant to get to Texas, I really did.  And I would have made it were it not for the little blinking red light on the dashboard winking up at me like a creepy one-eyed man.  Not only would I have made it but I might have kept going and going and right now the Rav IV might be floating in the Sea of Cortez.  As it was I was so enjoying driving through the Louisiana lowlands of shaggy trees and egrets and herons that I ignored the light as best I could, putting my faith in Ali, the smiley chain-smoking mechanic who had replaced the coil on the cheap the day before in the Araby section of Challmete    But the anxiety I was already feeling ,which had been free-floating, now became less so, clumping into a knot in my chest that wouldn’t go away no matter how I squeezed my blue EPA stress ball. Continue reading →

Ktaadn

categories: Cocktail Hour

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I’ve lived in Maine almost twenty years and had yet to climb Katahdin.  True for my friend Drew Barton, too, and for our friend Mark Pires.  John Field had been up there before, but not since about 1990.  So Drew made the mandatory reservations and the four of us climbed into Mark’s family minivan and paddled and portaged our way east and north three hours from the Park and Ride in Farmington (occasional views toward the end of our goal through power-line openings in the thick trees and over lakes dotted with inns) till we reached a gatehouse wherein Pomola’s agents ruled: our paperwork, thanks to Drew, was in order.  (Pomola, as every Abenaki knows, is a bird spirit, also a spirit of the night, the spirit that causes cold weather, and lives atop Kahtahdin, where no man may go, not without a permit, not without a fee, certainly not without proper hiking boots.)   From the gatehouse we portaged the absurdly heavy bateau to a roaring brook.  Roaring Brook Campground, that is, where at the next picnic table six young people prayed before their Continue reading →

Day 11: Atlantis

categories: Cocktail Hour

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“War is over,” sang John Lennon in different times.

“Oil is over,” sang the New York Times a week ago Wednesday, heralding those two terrifically reliable sources, NOAA and BP, and letting us know that all was hunky dory down in the Gulf.  “It was too late to get the reactions of environmentalists,” the paper added nonchalantly, which meant they basically passed along the government report as fact, propagating the new myth of the not-so-bad oil spill.  Only 25 % of the oil remains!  Um, but isn’t that 25% ten times more oil than spilled during the Valdez?  Yes, but this is different, this is oil you can’t see!  This oil only seems to be clinging to crab larvae and other out-of-sight stuff at the bottom of the ocean.  And anyway why are you still writing about this: don’t you realize that the news cycle is officially over?

            In fact everyone outside of the Gulf states is so upbeat that even hurricane season no longer seems the oily nightmare it was once envisioned to be.  Bring it on, we say, since we don’t live here.  If there’s really no oil out there then it won’t be any worse than a normal hurricane season.

            Oh yeah, we remember now.  Those normal hurricane seasons can be kind of bad…. Continue reading →

That’s Entertainment!

categories: Cocktail Hour

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The Huffington Post has picked up a list of the 15 most overrated writers by a writer in no danger of being overrated, at least not quite yet, one Anis Shivani of Houston and Harvard, or so he identifies himself.  You know it’s going to be no fun, but there’s the item and it’s about books and so second or third time through Huffington at cocktail hour I clicked on it, hoping for I don’t know what, entertainment, I guess, since that’s what reading is, right?  Even reading the news?  I might even have hoped for a smart conversation (which is also entertainment, come to think of it), but.

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Mr. Shivani rails in an introduction about conglomerate publishing and the stranglehold of, um, MFA programs, also the gutlessness of critics, also the clubby world of literary prizes, Continue reading →