Reading Under the Influence: A Look Back at Antonya Nelson’s Expendables
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Some years ago, in 2000, to be precise, I won a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. I rented a fancy tux and headed Milledgeville and a grand award ceremony. But the real prize was seeing my collection, Big Bend, beautifully published. This yaer marks the 30th anniversary of the prize, and the editors asked us winners if we’d write brief posts about one another’s books for their blog. They are also offering a pair of e-anthologies of work from all the winners, coming soon. And before long, an e-book of Big Bend will finally be available, hoorah! Below, I’ll offer my post for the “30 Days of the Flannery O’Connor award,” this one about Antonya Nelson’s winning collection from 1990, The Expendables. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: It’s a Brave Old World
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Just what I pictured: Public House
A couple of months back, at a reading by Kate Miles at Devanney, Doak, and Garrett Booksellers here in Farmington, Maine, I found myself seated across from the Dover Editions rack. These are decent paperback editions of classics, or at least just work in the public domain, priced to reach the masses. While I listened to Kate beautifully read from her new book of the sea, All Standing, my eye kept returning to that rack. And after the reading among the milling crowd I made my way to it, the old bibliomania surfacing. I bought Kate’s book (which she signed to someone else, long story) and grabbed J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, one of those books I’ve meant to read lo these many years, first entering my consciousness in college (I thought it might be the Hugh Hefner story then, but was disappointed), and growing there over the years (various Irish kicks), blooming when A. Walton Litz mentioned it in a great Yeats and Joyce seminar I joined in graduate school. Something about the repression and stifling and conformity of Irish society, back in the day. I didn’t read it then, but I did read Ulysses, finally, A. Walton Litz having loaned me a complete set of cassette tapes: the Irish National Theatre doing a complete reading on Bloomsday, 25 hours. Finally I heard the Joyce’s voices, glorious; finally I could read and understand the book, the secret being to listen. Continue reading →
Our Sweet Sixteen: Help Us Determine the Best Writin’ School in the Land
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Once again it is time to scientifically determine the best writing school in the country. This year’s seeding is based on last year’s results. Can Vermont defend its title? Stay tuned.
We ask that you leave your vote on the comments page of this post. Only one vote per person per school this round please. But if you like you can vote for two schools, yours and another. This next round of voting will determine the final 2! Because how long can we really keep this up?
Getting Outside Saturday: Last Ski of the Season?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The snow is going fast
Bad Advice Wednesday: Move Around!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I talk a lot about momentum in these posts. Getting yourself into movement, keeping yourself in movement. I talk about it because I believe that’s how books get started and how books get written and how books get finished. Making a book isn’t an easy thing to do. It takes drive sure, but what it really takes, in my experience, is an initial push. Elsewhere I have described how Rafeal Nadal might be a good role model for the writer in the midst of making a book. What I didn’t mention is that Nadal’s own rallying cry—“Vamos!”—isn’t a bad self-exhortation for any writer facing the morning’s work.
But enough about that. Today I want to talk about another, less metaphorical type of movement. I want to talk about the virtues of working in different places. If you are the sort of writer who can sit down in a library carol and crank out ten pages a day of the novel every day, then read no further. But if you are like me, and require variety and stimulation, then consider the value of working in different places at different times. The most beautiful evocation, and example, of this sort of work that I know of is Donald Hall’s description, in his book ,
The Amish, Cattails, and Dinty: A Trip to Ohio in iPhone Photos
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Getting Outside Saturday: Virginia Festival of the Book
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The nickel view, as our guide called it: Monticello
I find myself in Charlottesville for the Virginia Festival of the Book. My panel on Friday morning was called Forbidden Attraction, and I got to read a little from Life Among Giants, the scene in which Lizard first meets Sylphide, the world-class ballerina who lives across the way from him in high school and who becomes his life-long obsession. Continue reading →
Help “Ultimate Glory” Turn 25 (And More Greatest Hits from Bill and Dave’s)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Hostages vs. Rude Boys in its Purest Form (See Essay)
In this crazy modern world I can click a few buttons and get to a place (Google Analytics) that tells me all kinds of things about Bill and Dave’s. It tell me, for instance, that .57% of the visitors to this site are from France (I thought we were bigger there, like Jerry Lewis) and 1.90% are from England.
It also tells me that as of this morning, 24,496 people have visited “Ultimate Glory,” our post about the early days of Ultimate Frisbee. Which means that UG, as we like to call it around here, only needs 504 visitors to turn 25,000. So spread the word and pass the link. Thanks.
What are some of our other more popular posts? Well, unless Google is fucking with me (always a possibility), number two is Bill’s Bad Advice Wednesday called “Steady as She Goes/Moby Dick Two,” in which he discusses the ups and downs of hope (and despair.)
Number three is a timely one. Last Year we had our own March Madness here and picked the top writing schools in the country: “The Sweet Sixteen.”
Number four is the recently featured “What Kind of Annoying Writer Are You?”
Number five is Bill’s pain in the neck: “Ergonomics.” Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Finding Time to Write
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Number one question at every panel I speak on and every workshop I teach, and in the many emails seeking solace, and etc: How do you find time to write in such a busy life? And how can I?
It’s true, my life is crazy busy and getting busier all the time. And yet there are plenty of blocks of time in the day to get things written, some of them big, many of them small. And some of the small things get written in big blocks of time, some of the big things in the small. Five minutes isn’t nothing, and ten is even more, and so I bring my laptop to the dentist’s office, and my writing mind (and note pad) on drives and to dinner parties and the shower. Because the truth is, you’re not ever going to find time to write, not in that pure way we dream of, or only very seldom. So it’s crucial to learn to write when time presents itself, and to know when you should be writing and thinking, and when you can rest. Yes, rest, because you can’t go around feeling bad because you’re opting for a night out with time-sucking friends or caring for your infant. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Thierry Kauffmann
Telling Stories with Music
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Thierry Kauffmann
