Guest contributor: Monica Wood
Writing from Inside: “Nail,” by Danielle R.
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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This piece from Danielle is an exercise in empathy, in which she finds a subtle connection between herself and an inanimate object–in this case, a nail that showed up (another story) in a little pink bag. –MW
NAIL by Danielle R
I started off shiny and new, freshly crafted, sitting high above the hayloft in the Smiths’ barn. That is where my home was. For decades, I stayed sturdy and strong, while the wood around me slowly decayed. Finally, I fell from my post and landed on the barn floor. I lay there collecting dust and being kicked about by the farmers and cowhands, until one day my point penetrated the sole of a pair of work boots. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island”: Episode Nine
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Their job was saving lives, not personal property”
Aside from the tryst with the cougar, there was no romance for me until the end of the summer, when I met Alice, a 32-year-old school teacher from southern Maine. Her grandparents had moved off Matinicus to find work, decades ago, but had kept the family homestead as a camp. A pal introduced us, and we hit it off immediately, enjoying a dinner at the island’s version of a restaurant: Someone’s illegal, backyard picnic-table café. After dinner, she took me home to her grandparents’ sparsely furnished house where we really got to know each other. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Death of a Bridge
categories: Cocktail Hour
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These are the woods where Missy and I walk most every day.
And this is the bridge that tried to kill me last winter, now dead itself.
Justice!
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: Eduardo Galleano’s “Children of the Days”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Throughout his writing life Eduardo Galeano has given voice to the silenced. Hopscotching the globe to elude the death squads of right-wing military dictatorships, he has offered up a steady succession of works of brilliance, mostly chronicling the history of the Americas. He has described himself as “… a writer obsessed with remembering the past of America… intimate land condemned to amnesia.” His newest work, Children of the Days, continues to expand notions of literary genre. Is he a journalist? An essayist, a historian or novelist? Certainly a poet… Children of the Days follows the days of the calendar to offer up vignettes from the forgotten annals of history. While it is impossible to adequately characterize the cumulative power of the writing, here is a small sampling: Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Monica Wood
Meet the Authors
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The gents have chivalrously agreed to post some writing from a group of women inmates whom I work with in a program called “Meet the Authors.” (The women don’t have internet access, but your comments will get back to them, through me, after being vetted through the chain of command.)
The program runs in 12-week rounds, two hours per week, with a different group of students for each round, always with a few repeaters. We read the work of Maine women writers, who come to discuss their work and offer a writing exercise in their respective genres. The women then write short pieces, using prompts from me or the guest writers, and revise them according to feedback from the group. The guest authors’ books, I should add, are purchased by a generous couple from Portland, who have been steadfast supporters of this concept. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Meg Pokrass
An Interview with Caroline Leavitt
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Meg Pokrass: So tell us about your new book.
Caroline Leavitt: Is this Tomorrow is the first novel I ever wrote set in the past, the 1950s. It’s set in a time when everything was supposed to be perfect and everyone was supposed to be the same, and it centers around Ava Lark, a Jewish divorcee with a son, at a time when being divorced was a scandal and being Jewish was suspect. None of the neighbors like or trust her, and her boyfriends make them suspicious. But when her son’s best friend vanishes one day, the cops and the neighbors use it as an opportunity to ostracize her further. The novel flashes forward to when Ava’s son Lewis, and the missing boy’s sister Rose are adults who never got over the disappearance. And then the case seems solved–but is it really? Continue reading →
James Dickey’s Fan Letters to Wallace Stegner
categories: Cocktail Hour
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To feel like you haven’t gotten a fair shake, haven’t gotten your due, is pretty much a constant for 99 % of all writers writing at any time, aside from the luck-soaked few. But within the writing community itself we kind of know who can write, really write. For those not blinded by fame (at last count about six people on planet earth), it isn’t hard to figure out: It takes a few sentences, a page, a book or two, but you can tell if someone can write. It must be a little like being a great carpenter and watching someone sink a nail. You know.
When I set out to write a book about Wallace Stegner and Ed Abbey, I didn’t expect to find that this whole recognition thing was an issue that bothered these great writers, too, but then again I shouldn’t have been surprised. They were just like the rest of us poor suckers.
Luckily, there are other ways of knowing you are good than having the world celebrate you as so. One way is this: A great writer can tell you that you are a great writer.
Last summer around this time I spent a few days with Wallace Stegner’s papers at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I came across a lot of great stuff but one of the real pleasant surprises was to discover the letters that James Dickey wrote to Stegner. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island”: Episode Eight
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Then he spotted the VW Bus parked 10 feet in front of his wharf, the rising sea lapping at the driver’s side-view mirror.”
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The tide was halfway to high when I drove The Dotted Eye toward the dock and nearly crashed into a Volkswagen bus. I threw her in reverse and backed down hard. Donald, who’d been astern and was almost thrown to the deck, came running forward. “WHAT THE HELL?” he hollered. Then he spotted the VW parked 10 feet in front of his wharf, the rising sea lapping at the driver’s side-view mirror. “What the frig?” Continue reading →
