Skimmers!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We just put up a beautiful photo of some black skimmers in our creative writing hallway. The phot0 is by MFA graduate, Eric Vithalani, who is a fantastic nature photographer.
I have framed the short essay below and asked permission to hang it below Eric’s photo. This piece appeared in Orion a while back. I might have posted the text here before, but I like the way the original looked in the mag so here it is again:
Guest contributor: John Clayton
Serial Sunday: “Hoosac Tunnel,” a story by John J. Clayton
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Hoosuc Tunnel
Because it matters so much whether the train comes through the tunnel when the children are still inside, in another sense it doesn’t matter at all: either way, nobody’s life will be the same. Continue reading →
Wicked Pissah, or, Not So Dirty Water
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Photo by John Tlumacki
Here is part of the latest post for my Wilf Life blog at OnEarth.org:
“Contact!” was Thoreau’s famous cry upon encountering raw nature. More than 150 years later, it still has a nice ring to it. But how to directly experience nature in an increasingly crowded, cluttered, and technological world?
One way, I’d argue, is by swimming in it.
My family and I are now vacationing in Massachusetts, and at each stop on our trip we have made it a point to dive into the local waters. Two days ago that meant wading into the ocean off osprey-thick South Dartmouth; yesterday it meant diving off a boat in Buzzards Bay; and today it means swimming in Cape Cod Bay. And while we may not make it back to Boston on this trip, if we do, I know just where we’re heading. The latest news—thrilling news, I think, maybe even historic news—is that the Charles River is open for swimming. Earlier this summer, on July 13th, the Charles River Swimming Club hosted a group of 144 swimmers who took the plunge, jumping off a dock in the Esplanade, and splashing around for 30 minutes or so. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Derek Alger
Table for Two: Derek Alger Interviews Alan Cheuse
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Alan Cheuse
Derek Alger: Your most recent novel, Song Of Slaves In The Desert, is a complex one dealing with an especially turbulent time in history.
Alan Cheuse: Slavery is America’s curse, as Faulkner called it. Biology is just a long line of people trudging through time. History is what they did as they trudged, both good and bad, and despite the “family values” document that those political ignoramuses Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum recently signed about the good in slavery that held black families together, there was nothing good in that so-called “peculiar institution”. Slavery wasn’t peculiar among the Greeks and the Romans, but when it became tied to racial theory, as it did in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, its radical cruelty became more apparent. But why should a writer from Jersey become interested in it in a deeply personal way? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Get on Your Bike!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Today’s bad advice is simple: bike more, write better!
I now have a daily loop at school, through the woods, out on the road, back through the woods. Nothing particularly strenuous, but by adding another ten minutes I’ve pushed the total time up over an hour. And I find this makes the rest of my day, and my writing, both easier and, I think, better.
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “I’m Losing You,” by Bruce Wagner
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Winston Lives!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I cried at the end. Really.
Not just for Winston who, at 95, had led a relatively full life as human lives go. But for myself and the end of what was a three decade-long reading odyssey.
When I finished I couldn’t immediately peg the year that I read the first volume of William Manchester’s The Last Lion (did they really use that same title for a biography of Teddy Roosevelt? Jesus.), but I knew my father was alive, remembered reading it in his living room and shouting funny quotes over to him. It was a bonding thing for us, me and my Dad, right up there with watching Doug Flutie throw his Hail Mary. I was in my twenties, I know that, dogged by my own black dog of depression, and I tried to put some of the lessons of Churchill’s life to use in my own. (I couldn’t go more than a week without saying “A change is as good as a rest.”) Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Kristen Keckler
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Ex Factor
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Randy and me
I have this ex who demanded a mutual photo-destroying ritual. He was marrying me, and thought that in starting this new chapter we should purge ourselves of all photographic evidence of our exes (this, of course, before digital cameras, iPads, and Facebook.) I balked, reasoned, begged, and he pouted, whined, and bullied, and so I did what any self-respecting writer might do: I lied. Hid the evidence in my parents’ garage, two thousand miles away. I treated this red flag like a napkin I neatly folded into a swan. I wasn’t about to destroy my photos of a four-month-long, cross-country camping trip and National Park extravaganza just because some of them featured my sweet, shy college boyfriend. WTF? Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Vasilios Asimakos
Five Crappy Things an Emerging Actor Goes Through Way Too Often
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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5. Sweating in front of your mirror.
