Guest contributor: Chris Cokinos
Held As Earth
categories: Cocktail Hour
3 comments
Cache Valley, Utah, on a day when air pollution can look pretty, as long as you don’t breathe.
Remember that line from Cracker’s “Teen Angst”? Sure you do and you can belt it out with me: “What the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a hole in my head.”
Insert “nature poet” for “folk singer,” and you have my attitude on bad days. But, truth to tell, I’m a nature poet too, and in reading some recent criticism on “the pastoral” I was reminded that nature poets have been complaining about urbanization for a long time, like, since antiquity. The pastoral took off (if we can say that of Theocritus and Virgil) when the ancients really started to sprawl, plopping their temples onto vineyards and olive orchards.
It’s an old story, but one we need to keep telling…this story of loss. But, also, and this is important these days, loss met with an eye toward beauty and some kind of persistence.
I’ve also been reading Ray Kurzweil and Donna Haraway on the Singularity and cyborgs…in fact, I was re-reading Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” last month on the Logan River, in northern Utah, where I used to live. And, as though I were in a Timeless National Geographic Moment, four minks came chattering down river, their little black heads sleek and just above water. The first made a bee-line toward my pale leg, and I thought, “I will not be bitten by a beautiful mink,” lifted my leg, sending the water-slick slinky to a quick course correction that its minions followed. They were racing from whatever threat they were racing from and into a bundle of branches latticed over the river bank. They disappeared among branches and roots of paper birches. I eventually went back to reading, smiling all the while. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Life Among Giants,” by Bill Roorbach (Paperback Pub Day!)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Paperback Pub Day August 20, 2013–great new package!
On the occasion of the paperback publication of Life Among Giants:
Given the profusion of extraordinary writers that live amongst us in Portland and in Maine, there can be a tendency to overlook or take for granted some of the literary treasures penned by our friends and neighbors. Keeping one’s literary ear to the ground always yields hidden treasures and for some time I had been hearing accolades about the work of Bill Roorbach, creator of an impressive oeuvre that encompasses memoir (Summers With Juliet), short stories (Big Bend) and essays (Temple Stream and Writing Life Stories). And now this versatile writer has graced us with his big book, his masterpiece, Life Among Giants, which just been released in paperback. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Richard Gilbert
From Blogger to Author: Learning the Blogging Genre & Blogging a Book
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
10 comments
Summer 2012 at the Guinness Brewery, Dublin, Ireland
Five years ago, in July 2008, my blog was born with its first post. Those first uploads for Draft No. 4, then named Narrative, gave me fits. How I slaved over them. Obsessively I rewrote them and made my wife read them, or listen to me read them. What I was learning—am learning still—was that blogging is its own genre.
When I began, I was writing the second version of my memoir. I was full of insights about writing I wanted to share. But my persona perplexed me. Who was speaking? And to whom? Was my stance full of pride of accomplishment, or humbled by the work, or somewhere in between? Unlike the essays I was quarrying from my chapters and sending out to editors, at least I was publishing my posts. Blogging offers such gratification that way. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Katherine Fritz
Bad Advice Wednesday: A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words (That I Didn’t Feel Like Writing)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
5 comments
Writer’s block is a bitch.
So instead of publishing any of the crap that I’ve been trying and failing to make funny for the past week or so, here’s a bunch of pictures of myself. Now you know what I look like when I write!* My dear friend Kate over at P L A T E 3 Photography happened to be following me around with her camera all day when I was trying desperately to write some funny shit for your amusement. It didn’t happen. Instead, I ate some pizza and got drunk in the bathroom about it.**
I shouldn’t be allowed to have the internet. Or, you know. Friends. Continue reading →
Sleeping with Wolves
categories: Cocktail Hour
15 comments
Here is my daughter Hadley’s take on our night at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York:
I was walking away, I heard a howl, and that made me think I had REALLY JUST SLEPT WITH WOLVES.
My love of wolves started out, of course, with a love of dogs. Dogs, dogs, dogs, everything was about dogs. At the beginning of my dog love, I didn’t have a dog of my own. I begged my parents for one, and finally they gave in, and for my birthday – when I was turning six – I got a yellow lab puppy. And now every night I sleep with a dog. But of course the love of dogs soon led to my love of wolves. I started working with Defenders of Wildlife to try to protect them from being hunted. And I did school projects about them. In second grade, we had to pick one arctic animal and do a big project about it for the whole school to see. My animal? The arctic wolf.
But then my love of wolves grew to not just wanting to know the animal and learn about it. I wanted to see a wolf in person. Then, we figured out about The Wolf Conservation Center, and for my tenth birthday, my parents told me that we could go to South Salem, New York, and see wolves. I was so excited. But even more excited when I figured out that there was a program we were going to go to called “Sleeping with Wolves,” where you got to camp out just outside the enclosure of two wolves. First, I wanted to go in May. But then the decision was on to go in June. After that we decided to go in July, and finally it ended up in August. The wait was almost endless. But finally, it was time to go. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “My Education,” by Susan Choi
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
1 comment
Over the years I have developed a great fondness for the work of Susan Choi. She writes the most exquisitely graceful sentences (Michael Cunningham says “… she has written lines that could be framed and displayed at a sentence festival”), and she seems always to tackle subject matter that is captivating. An American Woman (finalist for the Pulitzer) was a fictional account of the Patty Hearst extravaganza that focused on the victim/heroine/revolutionary’s life on the lam. Choi followed with A Person of Interest (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner) about an academic who becomes a suspect after his colleague is blown to pieces by a Unabomber-like character. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Thierry Kauffmann
A Sunday Drive with Death in Cameroon
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
4 comments
Claire and I made a tree with banana leaves. It stood in the middle of our hot living room. We could have asked for air conditioning– French speaking teachers were in demand, and we could have asked anything. Except snow. Although it was Christmas Eve, it wasn’t even raining outside our adobe house, lost in the jungle of Southern Cameroon. Ubiquitous, impenetrable, the jungle was like an ocean. It covered half the country. We heard it ended two hundred miles north. The next morning, we loaded the car and headed toward Douala, a major city on the Atlantic coast. Continue reading →
