Guest contributor: Richard Gilbert
E.B. White and Me
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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“I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.” —E.B. White, One Man’s Meat
During the years I worked on a memoir of farming, I learned that book folk interested in country matters wanted assurance my literary-agrarian pedigree was pure. Maybe that I had one. Those early draft-readers wondered if I’d read Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. This irked me. Sure, I knew their work. Their writings on agriculture and American society have informed my thinking from my late teens; Berry’s Jayber Crow is one of my all-time favorite novels. Continue reading →
Meet the Keatles
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This essay originally appeared in this summer’s Oxford American:
Bad Advice Wednesday: UCLA Q and A, with Sara-Kate
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Recently writer and professor Shawna Kenney invited me to take part in an online class at the UCLA Extension Writers Program, visiting virtually by way of Blackboard. Students asked questions, I did my best to answer, and discussion ensued. I got permission from a number of students to use their questions, and I got permission from myself to use my answers. First up was T. Locke. This week, it’s virtual classmate Sara-Kate. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Jim Lang
On Failing as a Writer by James Lang
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I can pinpoint very specifically when I decided to become a writer. I was in eighth grade, just discovering real literature by reading some of the books my parents had on our shelves at home, and I pulled down and tore my way through Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
That’s it, I said to myself afterward. I’m going to be a writer.
Thirty years later, it still gives me a jolt of pleasure to reflect upon the fact that I made that dream come true: I’m a writer. Like most writers, of course, I also have a day job. But I don’t mind that. All I ever wanted to do was write, and I’m still writing to this day. Even better, I can now point to a small section on my bookshelf that holds books written by me.
Most everything else I predicted or dreamed of in eighth grade hasn’t come true, and what strikes me now even about my one successful dream was how wrong I had it. I envisioned that I would write a great book and make my literary reputation—I was aware that this might take a few Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Twenty Below (A photo Haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Good morning!
Guest contributor: Meg Pokrass
Flash Tips for Writing Flash Fiction Friday
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Meg Pokrass in full Flash gear
Tips for writing flash fiction:
1. there really are no tips
2. Write fast and furious for the first draft Continue reading →
Greatest Sportswriter of 2013? David Gessner!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays / Reading Under the Influence
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The Greatest Sportswriter
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USA Today has picked our own David Gessner’s essay “Ultimate Glory” as one of the greatest pieces of sportswriting for 2013. That puts him in great company, of course, and puts Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour on the list with ESPN.com and The New Yorker. Here’s the link, and now, here’s the essay: Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill and Dave
Bad Advice Wednesday: New Year’s Resolutions for Writers from Dave and Bill
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Bill and Dave, New Year’s Eve 1914
Dave: 1. Set your self a rigorous schedule and follow it for a week (Sunday included). You may just get a productive week out of it, but–who knows?–the routine might kick in and you’ll end up with a productive year.
Bill: 1. Try working at some radically different time of day. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: The Best of 2013
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Rachel Kushner
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Let’s begin by acknowledging the inherent flaws in any “best of” list, especially when we’re talking about books. There are simply too many extraordinary books published each year for any one person to possibly read them all. So, with apologies to those books and authors I haven’t yet gotten to (Pynchon, McBride, Lahiri, Tart, Bass, Shaccochis, Paterniti, etc., ), below are a dozen of my favorites from 2013. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Joshua Bodwell
Reading Under the Influence: Bodwell’s Baker’s Dozen, Best Books of 2013
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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AMERICAN SALVAGE
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
It’s in my nature to love an underdog. So I love that Bonnie Jo Campbell’s dark but beguiling American Salvage was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction after being released by Wayne State University Press, which publishes a modest thirty-five titles per year. In the landscape of Campbell’s Michigan, things are hard, bleak, booze-soaked, meth-laden, even incest burdened. The air is tainted with the stench of pig manure and the smoke of suspect fires. So how then does Campbell manage to make us both see ourselves in her stories and make us laugh? Her stories feel American, yes, but they are also something far more important: Authentic. Continue reading →
