Guest contributor: Jim Roberts
Getting Outside Saturday: When Bill and Dave Came to Doe Branch
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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A meeting of minds at Doe Branch.
Doe Branch Ink is a writers’ retreat in the Blue Ridge mountains north of Asheville, NC. Bill and Dave know the place and have left their mark on the writing lives of participants from around the country. Cocktail hour at Doe Branch is part of the fun, but the fun is serious when it comes to sharing work in progress, getting feedback on a tricky passage, or cuddling up with a hot cup of coffee at first light to get the night’s ideas on paper. Bill and Dave are inimitable, but we’ve seen the magic too of other accomplished writer-teachers working with their small groups, sharing inspiration, confidence and wisdom. And we’ve seen our guests leaving their new friends with Continue reading →
Bill and Dave Just Want to Be Liked
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here at Bill and Dave’s we recently hired a consultant. We were frustrated that we can’t seem to get more people to like us on Facebook, so we dished over big bucks to listen to a pro. The following are some of his suggestions for making our website more attractive. Please add your own (but don’t bill us).
Guest contributor: Kristen Keckler
Bad Advice Wednesday: Reelin’ in the Years
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Answer: the one in the middle.
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Until yesterday, my yearbooks lived in a little-used closet at my parents’ house. Somehow they’d never made it (along with one gorgeous post-college wok) to Texas, where I lived for eleven years. Even after I moved back to New York last winter, a few towns up the Hudson from my folks, I still hadn’t managed to retrieve the yearbooks—the wok being first thing I re-claimed. Along with an electric guitar I don’t really know how to play. And the gnarly snowboard (mid 90s Gnu, electric orange and blue) covered with over a decade’s worth of dust. Continue reading →
How I Came to Write This Book
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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During my college years I took time off to become a rock star. This was going to be a slow process, so in the meantime I had to support myself. Right away I landed a great job, which was to house-sit and maintain and generally prepare for sale a sprawling old mansion in Weston, Connecticut, a house so big that even after living there for months I found rooms I hadn’t seen before. The place boasted a crumbling three-story carriage house over a seven-bay garage (a mansion in itself), a long-defunct double-Olympic swimming pool, several overgrown and ruined Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: No Country for Waxwings
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Illegal to own, but not to photograph.
Yesterday morning I spotted Cedar Waxwings, not unusual, though I thought maybe they’d have left by now. And they seemed too big, too upright and sleek, a flock of ten or so, the cheerful tittering familiar, but one notch louder than you’d think. So I glassed ’em. In the binoculars, I saw they were Bohemian Waxwings, who will brighten our winter. Back early from parts north and hot on the fall berries. Maybe pickings were slim after a dry summer up tundra-wise. Later, a nice view of a broad-winged hawk lazing on the currents of heat rising from the fields, kind of late staying, this year (we haven’t even had close to a frost, which even just 20 years ago came regularly in late August. Not that I’m complaining). On this morning’s walk, evidence of their meeting: a pile of feathers around a log in the woods. It didn’t take long for CSI Farmington to figure it out. The secondary wing feathers here are about actual size, 2.5 to 3 inches in length. The blue-gray, the yellow tips, that’s Bohemian. Not a trace of bird, no feet, no beak, no bones, just feathers, very delicate, very soft to the touch. Illegal to possess, a good law, as the collection of feathers for hats at the turn of the last century nearly wiped out all kinds of species, hats with whole birds, some of them. So an index card, a photograph, and return all feathers to the scene of the crime. Which is no crime from the Broad-Winged Hawk’s point of view, but only a meal.
Guest contributor: Kristen Keckler
Reading Under the Influence: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
The cover of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal proclaims: “I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.” A memoir that doesn’t wallow in personal suffering? Actually, I like to read about major pain and redemption, all the countless ways other people royally fuck up. (Mostly, because it makes me feel better about my own foibles and mistakes.) But I was drawn to this promise of an ordinary life because, well, I too, consider my life to be pretty darn run-of-the-mill. Though I couldn’t help but think: could such a tale engage, sustain, and entertain me? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Learn to Take a Punch
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Writers are sensitive. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be writers.
I mean the good kind of sensitive here, not sensitive/touchy but sensitive/aware of certain currents that most people aren’t. The trouble is that in most people the good kind and bad kind of sensitive are all mixed up. And the reason that is trouble is that most writers, with very few exceptions, will stop writing unless they learn to be tough as well as sensitive. Or as Hawthorne put it:
It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep faith in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed.
Which is a long way of saying that writers need to learn how to take a punch.
What kind of punch? Lots of kinds it turns out. The sleeper punch (years of non-publication), the belly punch (first rejections), the series of rabbit punches (workshop responses), the blow to the head (close to publication but rejection from an editor one has grown close to), the wild hooks (bad review), the battering punches of post-publication (worries about sales, attention, general failure), and the knockout blow (the doors of publication feeling like they have closed shut forever). Continue reading →
