Getting Outside Saturday: The Unmanly Retreat of a Lighthouse
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here’s a little teaser from my current article in Outside:
We drive south to the famous Hatteras Lighthouse, which Orrin and others fought to have moved back 2,900 feet from the eroding shore in the late 1990s, despite the fact that many North Carolinians found the retreat unmanly. “There was one powerful local woman who was virulently opposed to moving it,” Orrin tells us as we approach. “She said, ‘Someone is going to get hurt if they move it.’ A fellow scientist misunderstood and tried to reassure her. ‘No, Mrs. Dillon, we can move it perfectly safely.’ I had to explain that that was not what she meant.”
We pull in at the lighthouse and walk from where it was first built in 1870 to where it was moved in 1999. It rises above us like a giant barber pole.
“Mrs. Dillon always claimed that moving the lighthouse killed her husband,” Orrin says. “The stress, you know.”
I ask if Mrs. Dillon has also passed away.
“She’s still alive. Unfortunately.”
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Alice Munro, perhaps alone among English-speaking writers, can be said to measure up to the artistic genius of Chekhov. Over a career spanning fifteen remarkable collections, Munro has plumbed the mysteries of the human heart, almost exclusively the female heart, in short stories that rival any novel for their depth and breadth and startling view of the capriciousness of lives we pretend to be defined by their stability. And now Munro has been recognized for her life’s work by being awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Continue reading →
Dave, Lost and Wandering, Part III
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This is part 3 of a series. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.
Guest contributor: Thierry Kauffmann
Bad Advice Wednesday: Get Parkinson’s Disease
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Anxious Bode
-Good morning! Welcome to the writers show. Today we welcome Anxious Bode, writer, distinguished professor of panic at Frost University. Anxious is the founder of the magazine Milk Shake. Professor Bode we’re happy to have you with us.
-Call me Anxious. Continue reading →
Meet Me at the River
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am proud and delighted to announce that today marks the release of my wife Nina de Gramont’s new book, Meet Me at the River. It is being published by Atheneum Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster for young adult readers.
I have spent the last few days in the world of Tress and Luke, the not-really-quite siblings who fall in love, a love so deep, that as the jacket copy says, “not even Luke’s death can keep them apart.” The book is told in the alternating first person voices of the two characters, and begins with Luke paying ghostly visits to Tressa’s bedroom, where the two can see but not touch each other, and where they can talk freely except about anything that has happened since Luke’s death. They can also skate and ski, and do so down by the river where Luke drowned. One of the deep pleasures of the book is the gradual unraveling of the couple’s past and murky future. The language is lyric but energized, the portrait of young love alive (despite, you know), the sadness laced throughout. (If I were a young girl I’d be heading over to Amazon right now. It’s true that this is Bill and Dave’s and young girls are probably not our demographic, but I’m guessing a few of us have daughters (and sons) who read.) Continue reading →
Literary Death Match Portland, ME, 2013 (a primer in photos)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My secret weapon
Bill is King!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Against all odds, Bouncin’ Bill Roorbach wins the Literary Death Match in Portland.
Hurricane Watch
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Photo by Coke Whitworth
Some of you may remember that last March I took a trip up the coast from North Carolina to New York with Duke coastal Orrin Pilkey, who has long warned against overbuilding on the shore. The idea was to follow the path of Sandy and see the results of the storm, while doing some thinking, and talking, about the future of our coasts. The story of that trip is available in this November’s Outside magazine (on the newsstands now) in a piece called “Down by the Seashore with Doctor Doom.”
One fact that somehow didn’t make it into the final article was that traveling along with us in our car were giant cartoons of Bill and Dave. Or, as I wrote in the first draft:
We push off and head into Durham to pick up Jeremy Lange, the photographer for the magazine that is funding our trip. Jeremy seems a nice guy, young and clearly accomplished: both Orrin and I saw his recent spread of pictures in the New York Times sports pages on the former Duke player, Jason Williams, who almost died in a motorcycle crash.
Jeremy tries to jam his equipment into the back of my rental car.
“What are those things?” he asks Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge,” by Peter Orner
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Peter Orner
Bad Advice Wednesday: Steal from the Great
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Balzac, After cup # 36
As I’ve mentioned here before, I am teaching a class called “The Writing Life,” and before each class we have gotten in the habit of reciting a little benediction. Specifically, I read a couple passages from Mason Currey’s new book, Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration And Get To Work. It’s a terrific book, full of short passages that describe the routines of some of history’s greatest writers, artists, and scientists. You can learn about Balzac gulping down his fifty cups of coffee, or Margaret Mead getting up at 5, or, conversely, Jackson Pollock starting each day bright and fresh at 1 pm. Read a few of these and you will discover they are contagious. they all convey the excitement–the thrill really–of doing creative work.
Oliver Burkeman, in a review in the Guardian, admits that there is great variety among the lives and habits of the great, but then aptly boils the book down to “six lessons from history’s most creative minds.”
1. Be a Morning Person (With exceptions)
2. Don’t Give up the Day Job (You know that free time you’ve been longing for? It might kill you. Or at least drive you crazy.) Continue reading →
