The Making of a Book: the Author Questionaire
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Making books is not a speedy process, or at least has not been in my experience. I am now about a year out from the publication of Properly Wild: Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and the American West. I thought that over the next year I would chronicle some of the steps along the way to publication. Due today, for instance, is my author questionnaire, which, among a couple dozen questions, includes the two below (complete with my answers):
AUTHOR QUESTIONNAIRE
About Your Book
1. Describe your book in no more than 250 words. We will refer to this description as the basis for your catalog and jacket copy, so please write accordingly.
Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey are literary giants of the American West, and both men left their large footprints all over the western landscape. After steeping himself in their work and lives, David Gessner spent the summer of 2012 exploring the land that made Abbey and Stegner who they were. As Gessner explores oil boomtowns, camps in the desert, walks the charred ridgelines after historic fires, rides rivers, and talks to people who knew the two men, a braided biography emerges. We learn the story of Stegner’s vagabond childhood throughout the West, and of Abbey first seeing the region he would call home after an epic teenage hitchhiking trip. A fascinating portrait develops of two men who, while polar opposites in some ways—Abbey the wildman anarchist, Stegner the mature realist—share much common ground.
But this is not merely a biography. 2012 was a summer of fires and fracking, of oppressive drought, and the West that Gessner found was a West in crisis.Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey, as well known for their environmental activism as for their writing, had warned of much of what has come to pass and they remain remarkably relevant, providing a lens through which readers can see the past, present and the future of the West. Gessner finds that while the two writers still have much to offer him as a writer, father, teacher and environmentalist, they have even more to offer, on a larger scale, the region, the country, and the world.
(248 words)
2. Describe your book in 15–20 words or fewer. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island” by Crash Barry, Episode 19
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last summer, Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour began serializing Crash Barry’s gritty memoir Tough Island. Then, in August, Crash took a break from Bill and Dave’s in order to turn his novel Sex, Drugs and Blueberries into a feature film. Now, he’s back and ready to finish telling the rest of his true stories from his time living and working on Maine’s most remote island. Click here for episodes 1 to 18.
Chapter 19
I returned to Matinicus on March 10th. Captain Edwin met me at his shop and gave me a work list. I was to paint buoys and splice rope. He showed me my room upstairs. Then he headed to the mainland, to continue his vacation. He planned to be back by the end of the month to start setting gear.
This was my easiest time on the island. The work was undemanding and I set my own schedule. I was boozing a lot, because the bootlegger had kindly decided to extend me credit on whiskey and cigs until I started making money with Edwin. My first couple nights back on the island were spent drinking alone, listening to the radio. I needed space, because I was in shock, but I occasionally headed over to my old neighborhood to party with Benny, Paul and Ray. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Shotgun Lovesongs” by Nickolas Butler
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Sometimes it’s hard to discern why a piece of literature resonates so deeply. In the case of Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler I’m still unsure… is it the way that Butler so perfectly and evocatively depicts the culture of small-town Wisconsin, where I was born and raised and spent the first three decades of my life? Might it be the clear narrative connection with the musician known as Bon Iver, whose music has been haunting me since I first heard it? Or maybe it’s simply the breathtaking storytelling talent of first time novelist Butler? Continue reading →
Great Advice Thursday: Don’t be a Dummy. Get Health Insurance Now.
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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March 31 Deadline to sign up for this year. If your application is in progress by that date, you will be included!
Self-employed folks, adjunct profs, artists, musicians, under-insured, catastrophic coverage drones, uninsured friends: take notice: I just jettisoned my catastrophic coverage ($15,000 deductible PER PERSON per year at $684 a month, 3 people, criminal), in favor of a far more generous policy ($4000 deductible for all 3!), with out-of-pockets caps, etc.). I was under the impression from quick looks at the Health.gov site earlier and invidious rumors that I’d be paying more, but with the under-heralded automatic tax credit for families making under, like, 94K, the new amount here is $419 a month. I could have gone $10,000 deductible for $129 a month!). Thank you Obamacare. And fuck you Fox News and half our governors and every Republican in Congress for all the disinformation. It’s still not single-payer, but it’s something! The health insurance marketplace works, it’s far cheaper for all of us (lies aside), and it’s going to save my ass. No doubt surprises loom, but after five years of paying a great deal for NOTHING (but denials of service), I’m pretty happy, and can’t believe I waited even this long. Deadline for this year is March 31, get on it.
Here’s the link for the Health Insurance Marketplace. I’d suggest using the site, which any 12 year old should be able to understand, as brokers just add expense. You’ll find bronze policies, which are cheap and basic, silver, gold, and maybe platinum. Remember that health insurance is not the same as healthcare, and you get nowhere comparing your healthcare expenses for a year with projected premiums. What you are getting is production against financial disaster if you fall sick, get in an accident, etc. But most of all, don’t fall for the bullshit.
I put this call to action in a public post on Facebook last week, and what follows is the passionate and sometimes hilarious public dicussion that ensued. Feel free to join in here or there. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: A Yurt of One’s Own
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am thrilled to announce the publication of The Map of Enough: One Woman’s Search (Counterpoint Press, March 2014) by Molly Caro May.I was lucky enough to read an early copy and this was my response: “To read The Map of Enough is to go on a joyful adventure of retreat. It doesn’t hurt that our guide on that adventure is the exuberant, complex, thoughtful, funny and boisterous Molly Caro May, a placeless woman trying to find her place. It turns out that that place is a yurt in Montana, which, by story’s end, seems as archetypal as Thoreau’s cabin. In sentences that are beautiful and lyric, but also as resilient and tough as the woman writing them, May makes us think about our own lives and how we choose to pass our days on earth. By book’s end most readers will wish their own lives were simpler and more elemental, and, with the author’s encouragement, may just set out to make them that way.”
Since you can’t live in Molly’s Yurt, today’s bad advice is “find a yurt of your own.” (It may be a metaphoric yurt.) Here’s an excerpt from the book. (Background info: Chris is Molly’s husband, Diane her neighbor, Bru her Great Dane mix dog.)
Winter was on its way. In mid-October, the grass outside our yurt sparkled blue with frost, but no snow like the first snow last year that slowed our yurt process. I grabbed Chris’s hand and we stepped further into a blue-gray world.
Lie down with me, I said when we reached the sponge grass.
I did not want to charge the moment by turning to love on him, or have him love on me, no. He hadn’t rested here for longer than a minute and I thought he should know about it.
This is more comfortable than our futon, he said, arms flung out widely.
We are growing up, I said.
Mmmm.
Guest contributor: David Abrams
Late Encounters with Flannery O’Connor
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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The zenith of my literary fanboy life surely came in those minutes I sat on Flannery O’Connor’s toilet.
Blame it on the Chinese food. For weeks, I’d looked forward to this moment: the day I would first set foot inside Flannery’s childhood home. I’d Googled, I’d Mapquested, I’d made dry runs on the route through southern Georgia, I’d Wise Blood-ed myself to death. But now something stood in the way of Complete Flannery Fulfillment: the Chinese food.
Two hours before our arrival in downtown Savannah, my wife and I stopped for a quick meal of meat, vegetables and MSG. The food was good and quickly settled into our stomachs. In my case, it also traveled farther south at an alarming pace. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Erika Robuck
Absinthe
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” — Oscar Wilde
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Absinthe. Wormwood. The Green Fairy. Rumors of hallucination and poisoning have surrounded this emerald drink since Oscar Wilde said it made him see flowers growing in cafes, but in truth, it is simply very strong alcohol—over one hundred proof—and has been legal in the United States since 2007. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island” by Crash Barry: Episode 18
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last summer, Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour began serializing Crash Barry’s gritty memoir Tough Island. Then, in August, Crash took a break from Bill and Dave’s in order to turn his novel Sex, Drugs and Blueberries into a feature film. Now, he’s back and ready to finish telling the rest of his true stories from his time living and working on Maine’s most remote island. Click here for episodes 1 to 17.
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The morning after Donald fired me, I emptied my room and stowed all my gear at Benny and Paul’s, then flew off the island and hitchhiked to southern Maine. I knew I’d return to Matinicus because I had no place else. When I arrived at Alice’s, I called Captain Edwin Mitchell. Word on the island was he was looking for help. I didn’t know Edwin, other than to wave, but he was Paul’s uncle and Paul had a phone number for him down south where he was having a vacation. Edwin was well-known as a lone wolf who stayed out of island politics and didn’t belong to any of the lobster mafia families. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Wipe Out!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This is from my essay, “Learning to Surf” which appeared in Orion magazine in 2006 and won the John Burroughs award for best nature essay:
Of course the year didn’t conclude triumphantly with me astride the board, trumpets blaring, as I road that great wave to shore. I kept surfing into late fall, actually getting up a few times. But then one day I abruptly quit. On that day “it” was big, much too big for a beginner like me. I should have understood this when I had trouble paddling out, the waves looming up above me before throwing my board and self backward. And I should have understood this as I waited for the waves, the watery world lifting me higher than ever before. But despite the quiet voice that told me to go home, I gave it a try, and before I knew it I was racing forward, triumphant and exhilarated, at least until the tip of my board dipped under and the wave bullied into me from behind, and I was thrown, rag-doll style, and held under by the wave. Then I was tossed forward again and the board, held to my foot by a safety strap, recoiled and slammed into my head. I did not black out: I emerged and staggered to the shore and touched my hand to the blood and sand on my face. The next night I taught my History of the Essay class with a black eye.
