Guest contributor: Erika Robuck

Don’t Worry, I’m Not Going to Tear My Shirt off and Punch a Critic in the Face, But.

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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I’ve just returned from a multi-city book tour. There were happy meetings and reunions, great Q&A sessions, bookstores converted to speakeasies, and at the last stop, a basket of champagne and strawberries from my publisher. I enjoy posting photos from readings and cities I visit to support those who support me–the towns, the bookstores, the reviewers, and the people–but I always hesitate before hitting “upload” because there are quite a few writers out there still trying to find an agent, facing rejection, and unable to get a publisher. This is the exact arrested state of publishing misery in which I resided for nearly a decade, and while I was happy for others and their success, on bad days, seeing it felt like lemon juice in a paper cut. Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Crash Barry

Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus” (Episode 11)

categories: Cocktail Hour

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“We’d be in big trouble.”

*

“Dudes!” Paul shouted. “The skiff!”

It was the end of September and the three of us were standing in the middle of Ten Pound Island. Drinking Lord Calvert, but not drunk. High, but not obliterated. Even though it was less than a mile from our shacks, none of us had been on Ten Pound before. I was enamored with the island because of a particularly memorable foggy day, early in the summer, while hauling traps between Matinicus and Ragged Ass. The salt air and mist smelled sweet and fruity because Ten Pound was overrun with wild strawberries. Continue reading →

Getting Outside Saturday: Secret Sharers (a Photo Haiku)

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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Woodchuck. Waddled out of the lettuce, across the lawn, and into this little tree. I let him go to chomp another day.

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Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren

Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “City of Bohane,” by Kevin Barry

categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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Kevin Barry

Just published in paperback (Graywolf) and recipient of one of the world’s most prestigious prizes, The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, City of Bohane by Kevin Barry is a mesmerizing magic passport to another world, a futuristic Ireland conjured up by the author’s relentless re-imagining of the use of language. Just as the subversion and re-working of language created Joyce’s Dublin or the future in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Barry has conceived a city sometime in the future of the Emerald Isle, an Irish metropolis ruled by ritual and violence and described in an idiom all its own. Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Penny Guisinger

Be a part of the Debut of Iota: The Conference of Short Prose

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

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Campobello, site of Iota

I believe short forms are worthy of a long weekend.

That’s why I set out to create Iota: the conference of short prose. We’ve got a unique little focus: short writing. Iota celebrates and inspires an economy of words in a largesse of place. We’ve recruited Sven Birkerts (essays), Arielle Greenberg (poetry and hybrid forms), and Lewis Robinson (fiction) to spend four days working with participants on how to say more with fewer words. You can write in the morning, then attend workshops and cross-genre discussions in the afternoon. Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Katherine Fritz

Bad Advice Wednesday: Twelve Habits of People Who Don’t Give A Shit About Your Inner Peace

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

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Katherine Fritz

Every damn time someone in my facebook feed posts something like this, I click it. Every damn time.

We all have this facebook friend, right? People you genuinely love and admire. People you like hanging out with. People you invite to your birthday parties. You know. Actual friends. Until you’ve clicked links exactly like this again and again and again. For YEARS. And all of a sudden, you start to wonder if this is some elaborate hoax, if you’ve actually just been reading the same article over and over.

It’s not like I have anything against happiness, or success, or meditation, or yoga, or being nice, or smiling more, or eating healthy, or losing weight, or being your best you, or embracing the day with a positive attitude. Those all sound great. Honestly, they do. And there are some really smart, simple truths to be found in all of those articles. There truly are. Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Matt Jones and Jessica Masterton

Southern Fried Scribes: Success

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Walking around town with some of the kids from the program

Our first two weeks of Southern Fried Scribes have come to a close. We’re a quarter of the way through and we can honestly say that we haven’t made a single mistake. Sure, there have been a few hitches, a couple of hiccups, maybe one literal squeak of a fart that slipped by in the early morning. There have been hordes of little flies that buzz around the classroom before setting down in someone’s hair to poop and throwup in the most microscopic of manners. There has been a hornet or two that fancies our lessons on Southern Mysticism. I even managed to break our HDMI cord on the day that I had been hyping up as “Movie Day.” Still, even with our glitches and hitches and hiccups, we have experienced some truly wonderful things. Continue reading →

Guest contributor: Meg Pokrass

My Passive-Aggressive Serenity Prayer

categories: Cocktail Hour

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God, I am sorry to be calling so

late, but please grant me the

serenity to passively-

aggressively confront the

things I cannot comfortably

change for example the way I

never ask for things, and then

get things because I never

asked for them until I have a

melt down, and to find within

tiny adorably modest me the

passive courage to change the

things I can with my

aggression which is really just

assertiveness, sort of, not

really,

And wisdom to know the

difference but i do not want to

bother you.

Continue reading →