Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island,” by Crash Barry: Episode 23
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Just Two Suits
The morning of the schoolteacher’s marriage to an island girl was misty, warm and wet. By eight a.m., it was raining hard. Around nine, the wind came up and blew the fog away, but the rain and rough seas lingered. At noon, we were back in the harbor. As I grabbed the mooring, the storm disappeared, the clouds moved off and the sun came shining. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: In the Mountains, On the River
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last week, for school vacation, Hadley and I headed out to our favorite place in the mountains, Vermillion House at Doe Branch. Doe Branch Ink is a writers’ retreat located on 50 acres nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Just 30 miles north of Asheville in lovely Madison County — “The Jewel of the Blue Ridge” — the retreat takes its name from a spring fed stream that flows from high in Pisgah National Forest into the French Broad River, a protected National Scenic Waterway. You can find out more about Doe Branch HERE.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Release Your Hate!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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So I had a big party on my 30th birthday. Eight days before I had been operated on for testicular cancer, and the whole next week I’d waited to find out what flavor the cancer was. I had already planned the party when the good news came that it was a seminoma, the best kind. It was a great celebration.
Not Forgotten, But Gone
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My former student (and current friend), Kate Sweeney, has a new book out: American Afterlife. Here’s an essay about writing the book:
There’s this chestnut that I learned as a college student studying anthropology about “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” (I’ve since learned it’s commonly attributed to the Romantic poet Novalis, but I still like to think of it as an anthropological thing.) This phrase characterizes a great deal of my favorite writing: A seemingly foreign subject is found to contain some kernel that rings true in a startlingly personal way. Or more jarring: something you thought you knew is revealed in some curious new light—shifted, now, into something that can never seem quite comfortable again. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange has a lot to do with my answer when people ask, “Why did you write a book about death?”
Early on, my answer to that question would be this half-truth (more incomplete truth than half-lie): I’m kind of a research geek. And if there’s any subject out there that’s rich in little-known facts you’ve got to do a little digging to uncover, it’s the American funeral trade. Writing this book, I learned all about how coffins became caskets, how home funerals became funeral homes, why burial vaults were invented (grave-robbers!) and why on earth we still have them today (the pursuit of golf-course smooth cemetery grounds and, to some degree, body preservation).
Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island,” Episode 22
categories: Cocktail Hour
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With the Fishes
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My replacement as Donald’s sternman, Hughie, only spoke to me once, just minutes before he killed himself. It was a Sunday afternoon in August and I was chillin’ on my wharf, getting high and enjoying a cup of tea, when Hughie roared down the dirt road on the Hondamatic motorcycle. He braked hard and almost crashed into a five-tall tower of traps piled on the side of the road. In a cloud of dust, he jumped off the bike and ran toward me. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: My Number-One All-Time Favorite Novel
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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I remember the first time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude as though it happened yesterday. I was a young man living in Madison, Wisconsin and after closing the final pages of this perfect circle of a novel I went out into the rainy streets and wandered in a state of wonderment through a mist that persisted till dawn. I understood instinctively that everything was different now, everything was changed, both in my life and in the world of literature. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Mike Land
Captain America Agrees
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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Mike Land
The night before I interviewed the peace activists, I headed to the theater to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I figured this brand of mindless violence would be just what I needed to unwind after another day of interviewing and planning for my three-month cross country research project about the role community service plays in people’s lives. Enough of lofty thoughts and earnest contemplations, of hearing about hospices and the homeless – I wanted to watch Cap America and Commander Fury take care of business in a morally unambiguous universe, laying waste to a bunch of simplified bad guys in the most special-effect-laden way possible. Continue reading →
David and Henry David, Linked Across the Centuries
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Henry David Gessner
Eve Holland, a writer living in Yukon Territories, has it right about our Dave in her article for the environmental website Pacific Standard.
If there’s a clear-cut contemporary descendant of Thoreau, Muir, and Abbey it might be David Gessner. In his 2001 book, Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder, Gessner spent a full six-month nesting season observing the ospreys of Cape Cod. The birds had only recently returned to the Cape after a decades-long hiatus, and their arrival parallels Gessner’s own return to his childhood home, where he’d grown up in the birds’ absence. But while John Muir fought to preserve a threatened wilderness and Abbey raged at the decline of another, Return of the Osprey manages to convey optimism and a sense of hope—for the birds, and for all of us yearning to disappear into the wild. “I understand that it’s a fallacy to see nature as a kind of self-help guide for humans,” he writes of the osprey’s successful return to an increasingly suburban Cape Cod, “but there may be a lesson here. Perhaps we, too, can retain some of our wildness while living in this increasingly cluttered, concrete world.” Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Remake
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Elizabeth Bowen
Not too long ago I was thinking about how I might grow my writing, move into a new phase, switch things up, rise up out of the ashes of the old and into something fresh, different, not to be expected. We’re all stuck with our minds and our set of biases, also with whatever genetic inheritance, a certain approach to language, to structure and structures, and certainly to character. Our pathways through narrative may resemble neural pathways inherent in our brains, and may account for the wide divergence of what’s considered great storytelling. I might dislike Thomas Pynchon while you love him, for example. Continue reading →
Progress of Spring: New Arrivals
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Common Merganser pair
A wave of warm air from the south arrived yesterday, and with it a wave of birds. In the last weeks they’ve come one by one–Bluebird, Red-Winged Blackbird, Grackle, Cowbird, Hooded Merganser, Mallard, Wood Duck. But yesterday a whole crowd came at once: Belted Kingfisher, Common Merganser, White-Throated Sparrow, 1000 Robins, Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, Canada Goose and more. Also, we spotted a fold fleck or two on the wings of a male Goldfinch (likely in celebration of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer). And enjoyed all the birds that stayed the winter, Chickadee chief among them. The sump pump is running, the stream has broken out, the drifts are very slowly melting.
I still need snowshoes for the morning circuit, but today it was all fresh–a hard, cold rain, the stream nearly out of its banks with snowmelt, a beaver swimming the banks against the current, examining the stream-side vegetation, the woods full of birdsong.
