My Acceptance Speech
categories: Cocktail Hour
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ASLE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
The Tarball Chronicles just won the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) biennial creative writing award. I was not in Kansas to accept the award (and get killed by a tornado). But this is what I asked the great eco-critic and writer, Mike Branch, to read:
First let me say that it is difficult writing this speech without knowing exactly who is going to deliver it. My first choice was John Lane, in part due to our similar facial hair. True, John is a little older than me, but I figured that in a pinch he would do as a stand in. When John said he wouldn’t be there on Thursday night, he suggested Michael Branch. This seemed a good choice (and he may well be reading this to you now) since we also have more or less similar facial hair and, if Google images is accurate, roughly the same amount of gray in our hair and beards. So if this is Michael reading this right now, thanks. I should add that my third option for a reader was Patrick Thomas who has no facial hair at all and who, if he is the one reading this, will soon be in the awkward position of thanking himself
Enough preliminaries. The main purpose of this speech is to thank you, the ASLE folks, for choosing The Tarball Chronicles for your creative writing award. It means a lot for both obvious and less than obvious reasons. The less than obvious have to do with getting this story out there. The book, on the most obvious level, is about the BP oil spill during the summer of 2010. But I like to think it is also about a lot of other things, and one of those is how we, as a country, tell our stories. At the moment we are almost constantly assaulted by such a babel-like cacophony of voices telling so many stories from so many angles that we often feel like plugging our ears. And, after several months of studying the spill, I realized that I was also studying the way we tell our national stories. We do so in a way that Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Thierry Kauffmann
Chess Champ
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Game in Progress
The first time I realized what I had lost to Parkinson, and how much I had lost, was on Yahoo. I was watching a chess game on the internet. These are games played against humans. In live chess, slow games last ten minutes. Fast games range from two down to one minute. That’s for the whole game, not for one move. What they call bullet chess. It’s like blitz, in accelerated motion. Two players, ranked 2000 and over, and me, watching. Stupefied by the speed, I could not comprehend what was happening, except that it was happening without me, beyond the reach of my brain, or mind, and body. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: 15 Great Writers’ Writing Advice Revisited
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Baby’s last snapshot.
1. Ernest Hemingway: “Kill your babies. Then kill your grown children, too.” Continue reading →
My Wife the Superhero–Part II
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Disguised as the mild-mannered Christine Woodward, my wife, Nina de Gramont, has written a page-turner of a love story starring the X-Men heroine, Rogue. This is Rogue, pre-X-Men, as a teenager, and I’ve got to tell you that books about teenage girls are not usually high on my reading list. But I loved this book–gobbled it up and even cried at the end.
But don’t listen to me….the reviews are pouring in for Rogue Touch and they are great:
Kirkus:
Guest contributor: Kerry Headley
After the MFA? Another Great Writing Day
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Kerry Headley
My ceremonial hood and gown were still draped over a chair in the living room when I posted this on Facebook: Oh my God. Reading for pleasure. Post-MFA bliss. And I was in a state of bliss. After three years of reading, writing, and rereading and rewriting, I earned my MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. If I wasn’t reading, writing, revising, or thinking about my own work or the work of my classmates, I was doing all of the above in regard to the students I taught. Grad school flew by faster than I can believe. And now I have time to read all the books I bought and never opened. I also have time to sleep in and free-fall into the Internet rabbit hole to pursue weird true crime links and watch every cute cat video. (Don’t judge me. I just told you I worked my butt off for three years.) Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island”: Episode Seven
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Truthfully, I hadn’t noticed her before.”
Episode Seven
SHE MAY HAVE been tall or short. Zaftig or junkie-rail-thin. A blonde, a brunette, a redhead or raven-haired. Doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna describe her, other than to tell you her skin was soft. And she was another man’s wife. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Wet
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The path’s a brook
Guest contributor: Valerie Sayers
Baseball, Joe Dimaggio, and Pacifism: Colbert, How Can You Resist?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Really? Joe DiMaggio? Another WWII novel?
I know. Like everything I write, this new novel, The Powers, just followed me around and insisted on being written till it wore down my resistance. It started during a conversation my then-draft-age sons were having about the Iraq War and whether they could in good conscience claim C.O. status. That topic led us to WWII, the one war we collectively tend to think of as the “good war,” which led me to think about 1941. Continue reading →
Meet the Keatles!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’m proud to say that my essay on John Lennon and John Keats (and how they became who they are) is out in The Oxford American, which just hit the newstands.
Here’s the first page and the illustration by my new favorite artist, Derrick Dent.
Bad Advice Wednesday: How to Work with an Editor
categories: Cocktail Hour
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A while ago a former student of mine had a book accepted for publication. This was great news of course, the best. Happy times followed. Happy moments at least.
Then the student got the edited version back from his editor. He called me, he wrote me, he cried. He didn’t know what to make of all the marked-up pages and the long letter full of suggestions and re-workings.
What I told him was that this meant he had a good editor, one who thought a lot about the books he took on and one who cared.
Which was true except that I remembered when I got my first edited manuscript back. The howls of rage. “It’s like they cut off my arm,” I yelled to my wife about one deleted passage. (I wish I was exaggerating for comic effect; I am not.)
