Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Reading Under the Influence: Lundgren’s Book Lounge
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
4 comments
Maria Semple
[This week we introduce you to Bill Lundgren, who has a thing or two to say about current books, and blogs books at LongfellowBooks.com. He’ll be back!]
Where’d You Go Bernadette, a novel by Maria Semple
While waiting on a mother and daughter at the bookstore recently I asked if they would like to join the customer program. When they responded that they were from Seattle I had to ask whether they’d read Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. “Everybody in Seattle has read that book,” the mother responded, “and it’s all true,” the 14 or 15 year old daughter added with the emphatic disdain that only an adolescent can produce. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Rock the Boat
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
3 comments
You know those moments when you sit silent in the face of the knuckleheadedness of your boss? When you are in the room and the question–you know the answer!–hovers in the silence? When the contractor tells you he’s not going to finish but wants to be paid anyway and you stand heavy on the manhole cover of your mind to keep the boiling in check and say “Okay”? When you freeze on your butt in the bus while the psychopath screams? When if only you could fly around the world at supersonic speed and cause time to reverse and go to Boston and pick out that whoever it is placing his black backpacks? And that secondary moment when the right riposte comes to you late (l’espirit d’escalier: a useful phrase from the useful French). Or you wake in the next day’s night with the exact plan? Or you over beers inhabit the braver person you might have been, the guy that confronts the villain, the gal who rushes toward danger, the exhausted runner who leaps the fence, attends to the injured and dying? Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine, by Crash Barry
categories: Cocktail Hour
5 comments
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Episode 1
March 1991
I’d just finished a stint as a sailor in the Coast Guard, fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Haitian Refugees. No money. No job. No leads. A rudderless 23-year-old couch-surfer crossing back and forth over the state line between Portsmouth and Kittery.
Then the message came from a Coastie pal’s wife. Her dad, a lobsterman on Matinicus, Maine’s most remote inhabited island, needed a helper immediately. A sternman. A hired hand. A modern indentured servant paid with 15 percent of the catch, plus free housing, on an island 20 miles out to sea. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: The Swan in Our Backyard
categories: Cocktail Hour
3 comments
For two months now she has been sitting, sitting, sitting. Through rain and storms, through cold and heat. Sometimes the water covers all the grass, everything but her nest.
And the Winner Is:
categories: Cocktail Hour
7 comments
The votes are in, and a dynasty is emerging: Vermont College once again takes the 2013 Bill and Dave’s Best Writin’ Program in the Land Tourney. But close behind are two other fine low-res programs, Fairfield University (these folks meet for their residencies on an island, okay?), and Goddard. Fairfield arrived this year from nowhere as a write-in campaign, whoa! Ashland, too, a great performance, and it rocks and rules over all other traditional MFA programs, with McNeese State, UNCW, Ohio State, Alabama, and Stony Brook all scoring in the double digits, and deserving of congratulations for fine school spirit. Bath Street Elementary, with one vote, takes first place in its surprise category, who knew! Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Nina de Gramont
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Do Anything
categories: Cocktail Hour
10 comments
Don’t do anything you don’t have to do. Write instead. It’s not easy. For one thing, you need to come up with a different version of “have to” than non-writers. As in, you don’t have to do those dishes piled up in the sink. Even if your most fastidious sister is on her way over. Instead, write. The only other thing I’ll let you do is text your sister and tell her it’s not a good time. You don’t have to have visitors, even family! You just have to write.
Life makes this difficult. I thought that Alice Munro said “Laundry will wait very patiently,” but a Google search corrected me. It was Nora Roberts, which is fine, because I’m slightly more comfortable disagreeing with her. Laundry does not wait patiently. It grows and glowers and rises like an angry beast, threatening to take over your closet and sometimes your bedroom. Ignore it anyway! You have to write.
The friend you haven’t seen in weeks wants to go out to lunch? I’m very sorry to tell you, but you can’t go. You have to write. Your neighbor points out that your front lawn is looking more Jungle Book than Suburbia? You have to endure the dig, because there’s no time for mowers. You have to write. A former student e-mails, asking you to read her newest short story? That’s a little tougher. You need to be generous, as people have been to you. You shouldn’t have checked your email. But you did, so go ahead and say yes, but warn that it may take a while, and then read it during time allotted for other things. Not writing. During writing time, you have to write. You can’t use that time for housework or socializing or reading or catching up on ANYTHING. You just have to write.
Guest contributor: Matt Jones and Jessica Masterton
Southern Fried Scribes
categories: Cocktail Hour
2 comments
Jennifer and Matt by Jennifer and Matt
We came from different places, she from the Midwest, all over really, most recently Minnesota, but New York, Pennsylvania, and even Louisiana before that. I moved to Tuscaloosa from Austin, Texas, and it was there, here really, Alabama, that Field Tiger Press came into being. Continue reading →
Diary of a Comeback: Part I
categories: Cocktail Hour
5 comments
Facing the usual quadruple team…
I’ve become soft, pampered and isolated, living up in this big house that all my Frisbee money bought me. I’m tired of it all—the money, the fame, the servants. I need to get back to my roots. Need to train like I did when I first came up, just a Frisbee-throwing street urchin from Worcester, MA.
Day 2.
Decided drastic action was required. Told Fox Searchlight to can the movie about my life as an Ultimate player. Instead of heading to L.A., I ordered my pilot to fly Hammer 1 down to Tampa. It took all afternoon searching downtown but I finally found Gus in a seedy, rat-infested hotel. He was drooling, could barely speak, clearly strung out. But still I knew that he was the man who held the secret to my comeback. Only someone who had stared into the fires of hell could help me go through what I had to if I was to once again become who I was. My first job is cleaning him up. Then the training begins.
Day 3.
On Gus’s counsel, I ate the brain of a sharp-shinned hawk for breakfast. He tells me it will help me acquire raptor-like skills.
I told him that I’m made of money and am looking into buying a bionic right arm. He said no. He insists this has to be all natural, like Rocky training in Siberia. No steroids for me, not this time around. Need to throw rocks into a rock haulers chute and chop trees and climb mountains.
I started today with a half-mile jog, Gus biking alongside, screaming at me through a megaphone. Now packed in ice. Continue reading →
The Bill and Dave’s Even Sweeter Sixteen: Voting Extended to April 11, 2013
categories: Cocktail Hour
220 comments
The Patented Bill and Dave’s Sweet Sixteen Algorithmic Computational Matrix
Our 100% guaranteed fully scientific ratings system is working better than ever (explanation below). Voting continues till Thursday, April 11, 2013 when all hell will break loose, guaranteed. Vote by naming your school in the comments pane below. We’re looking for 1000 total votes, but if we don’t get there, we’ll apportion the missing number to low-turnout schools where we have friends, such as Wyoming and Ohio University. Also Ashland, why not? We predict a surge by Western Quebec U in the final moments (Quebec is part of Vermont, so counts as part of “The Land” in the phrase “Best Writin’ Program in the Land.” Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Coyote!
categories: Cocktail Hour
6 comments
