Bad Advice Wednesday: Become an Expert
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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One-piece steel hammer
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A great way to approach an essay and eventually a book is to become an expert at something. You might start with the idea of writing about your summer fishing in the Adirondacks, or about your history as a dancer, or your years working construction, all good–great stories, and fascinating. But as you begin your draft, also study up. You’ve already done your research in that you’ve done the fishing or dancing or building, also in that you’ve read extensively in dance history, or fly-tying books, or building code manuals. But there are many experts in these wildly diverse fields. I’m talking about going micro. So, for the fisherman, Stone flies. For the dancer, say, pointe shoes. For the builder, not tools, but the hammer. Continue reading →
Scars on a Dry Land
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It was a small moment during this hottest of summers. I had already driven through the crisped cornfields of the Midwest and witnessed a smoke cloud that seemed to cover the whole state of New Mexico. Meanwhile, back home in North Carolina, my wife described the weeklong string of 100-degree days with 99 percent humidity as being “like living in someone’s mouth.” So I had already grown used to heat, and to scenes of heat’s destruction.
But this was the moment that got me thinking: I was flying in a small plane over the dry cracked wilderness of northeastern Utah, courtesy of Bruce Gordon, a pilot and owner of EcoFlight (see “The Plane Truth”). With us were a documentary filmmaker and two representatives of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which works to preserve Utah’s remaining wild desert lands. We had just flown over a sight of stunning beauty: a brown river named the Green snaking through canyons of purpled gray. We banked down over Nine Mile Canyon toward great towers of rock. They looked like giant red sand doodle castles, and atop these castles the Ute Indians had built dwellings that stood high above the desert floor. If ever I had a sense of the land as remote, sacred, vast, and removed from the unrelenting assault of our own hectic time, this was it. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Alise Hamilton
A Book Spine Poem
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Just the titles, not the authors…
Alise Hamilton is a bookseller at Andover Books in Andover, Massachusetts, and is the events and marketing coordinator for HugoBookstores. In addition, she’s an MFA student at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working on a collection of linked stories. In honest fashion, she says: “The book spine poetry I created, but the idea to do it is stolen: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/16/book-spine-poetry-future/ ” This is her first guest post at Bill and Dave’s. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Birthday Edition
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Ah, but the kids keep you young!
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They say it’s my birthday, nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! A year of no importance: 59. Next year, major party (“A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.” ~ Arnold Bennett ). This year, meh. I feel a lot like I’ve made it up the hill like the little train that could, crested the hill proudly, lingered a moment at the top, and now find myself plummeting down the other side at speeds unheard of, and no brakes! It’s all in the mind, my sister-in-law said this afternoon (she’s visiting with her lovely kids from Los Angeles). No, I replied, It’s all in the body! And I’ve got some new bumper stickers to counter all the pabulum about aging I’ve been hearing: Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Thierry Kauffmann
The Piano Lesson
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Thierry Kauffman at the piano
[Today Bill and Dave’s International welcomes guest poster Thierry Kauffman. Drumroll, please!]
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I am a writer, musician, painter with Parkinson. I live in France with my parents. I spent seventeen years in the Midwest, first as a graduate student in science. Then I taught for a few years before finding a job as financial analyst. After I was diagnosed, I lost everything except my family and my sense of humor. I start my day at the absolute bottom, unable to walk, so I sit, take my pill, turn facebook on. I connect with a world of amazing friends, such as Bill Roorbach. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Road Trip
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Hadley and Me in Saskatchewan
Over the last week I have been traveling the country with my daughter. Since my Kickstarter campaign fell through, I have supported us mostly by selling bibles to recently deceased widows and other scams. Wait, no, that’s a movie. Let me start again. Over the last two months I have been roaming the country, hopping trains and hitching rides, and staying up late snapping my fingers and smoking grass and having visions with my beatnik friends in Denver and San Fran. Or was my travelling companion a poodle named Eddie?
As you can see, I’m tired and confused. But also, really, quite happy. I’m pretty sure that this whole on the road thing is good for my Art, but I know it is good for my Life. A few years ago I wrote a book called Soaring with Fidel, about following the osprey migration from Cape Cod to Cuba and beyond. It was the beginning of a phase where my nonfiction, which until then had usually focused on one place or subject, took its show on the road. I found I enjoyed living the story in this way, throwing myself into an adventure and talking to whomever I bumped into. The story revealed itself as I went and I, armed with journal and tape recorder, took dictation. My various journeys have had the effect of taking me out of both myself and my comfort zone. And if you simply talk to people–something my nonfiction students are sometimes loath to do–they often give you all you need. Finally, a journey gives a project shape, a natural beginning and end, though often the shape is not the one you imagine when you start. Continue reading →
Table For Two: An Interview with John Lane
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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John Lane
Recently, Dave introduced me to the work of John Lane, a guy who likes to get out on the water as much as we do. John teaches English and environmental studies at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he also directs the Goodall Center for Environmental Studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, among them Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems, which was the named the SIBA Book of the Year in Poetry in 2011. His latest nonfiction is My Paddle to the Sea, published last year by the University of Georgia Press, which has just released it in paperback. He’s got a new essay collection, too, Begin with Rock, End with Water, just published by Mercer University Press, too late for this interview. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Kristen Keckler
Getting Outside Saturday: Garlic Girl
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Garlic Girl
It’s the night before my “work” visit to Stoneledge Farm in Leeds, New York, and I’m in bed, wide awake, thinking about vampires. I’m going to spend the next day picking garlic, tons of it, and garlic makes me think of salsa, pesto, and, inevitably, a natural repellant for blood suckers. Instead of winding down, I’m wired, feel as if I’ve been popping chocolate-covered espresso beans. I feel like I did when I was a little kid—my body abuzz with anticipation—the night before a school trip. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Have an Idea
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
6 comments
Juno just last week, in restoration at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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Ideas are abstract by nature. Unbidden, ideas (like memories) arrive in our brains in pieces: a bit of evidence, a blast of emotion, a sentence of logic, a shot of paranoia, a visceral reaction to film on the news, a vision clear as wind and descended as if from heaven. The pieces float around, coalescing in various and partial shapes, wrapped and then rewrapped in layers of preconceptions, blankets of family custom (or pathology), clear sheets of wisdom, sturdy pockets of knowledge. The problem is getting what seems whole and vital in our brains onto the page whole and vital. Seldom as we sit with pencil in hand will the idea come at once (though many experienced writers are skilled at doing earliest drafts in their heads). Most often, an idea will reveal itself fully—move from amorphous blob to elegant artifact—only in the writing. Honest first drafts often look like the mind as described above: aswirl with conflicting notions, half-baked insight, generous impulse, hackneyed platitude, opinionated surety, brilliant strings of words, silence. Continue reading →
Stay Awake for the End is Near: Literature Meets Slumber Party at a Moby-Dick Marathon
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Under the bones at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
Call me Willy. My father does.
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I traveled down from the forests of Maine through Boston and further yet to the sea like a young man in another century looking for his ship. My paler but still daunting adventure was simply this: attendance at the sixteenth annual marathon reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Twenty-five hours, 160 readers, “light whaleship fare” the only sustenance promised. Continue reading →
