Sacred Water
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am feeling ragged, water-logged, and sunburned. I have a new love for pillows, beds, and showers.
I spent the last week living on the water by day and sleeping in a tent by night, floating down the San Juan River in Southeast Utah, courtesy of a wonderful outfit called Wild Rivers. One of the best things about the trip was the fact that many of my fellow rafters were Navahos, members of a group named Rethink Dine Power, who were reacquainting themselves with a river that their people once believed was sacred. Another of the best things were the side canyons, rock staircases of sandstone, limestone and stunning beauty, that led up and out of the cliffs that we were paddling between.
As magnificent as the cathedral-like side canyons were, I didn’t really see them as they are meant to be seen until the last night of the trip. That night, at around Seven O’clock, our dinner was interrupted by the loudest crack of thunder I’ve ever heard, a sound that echoed around the amphitheater of the canyon. Suddenly rain was pouring. And just as suddenly spontaneous waterfalls were flowing from five hundred feet above us and we were all running around, yelling and pointing and ducking our heads under the flowing water, wildly happy to see the red rock come to wet life. The next morning, when I should have been packing my tent, I walked far up the side canyon. It was not like my earlier walks. As beautiful as they had been, something had been missing. Until then seeing the canyons had been like seeing a body without blood. Now the blood was back. A rich red blood with a tint of tabasco sauce orange. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Hog Island
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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A Hog Island lagoon
I had the good fortune this past week to be part of the first ever Damariscotta Lake Writers Conference, which is a conference for educators who write. I had the august title of Hog Island Lecturer. The conference took place at the Kennedy Learning Center at Camp Kieve, which is a gorgeous boys’ camp and adventure center (my words–they take those kids on amazing trips all around the state and out to sea). Hog Island is off of Damariscotta, and was once owned by Mabel Loomis Todd, the executor and editor of Emily Dickinson’s poems, also the illicit (as they would have said in those days) lover of Emily’s brother. The cabin that Mabel worked in is still there. Her daughter, Millicent Todd, continued the tradition. Later, the Audubon Society took over the property, 300 pristine acres of spruce-fir forest and rocky coast. They run programs there to this day, and have an osprey nest cam set up. We watched two new birds as they made tentative approaches to the edge of the nest and squawked when their mother flew in with snacks. A third had already fledged. See them live and in person here. Then we enjoyed a talk by Steve Kress, founder of Project Puffin, which has been working to restore puffin and other alcid populations on islands all along the Maine coast, including Hog. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Nina de Gramont
Bad Advice Wednesday: Just Say No
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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“Just Write” by the Haystack nonfiction workshop, 2011. [Photo Lisa Cirando]
“What is the best advice you ever received about writing?”
“Just write.”
The above is from an interview with Madeline L’Engle that I found in the back of my daughter’s copy of A Wind in the Door. L’Engle certainly earned the right to dispense advice, however terse, having written more than forty books for which she won numerous honors, including a Newberry Medal and a National Humanities Medal. Continue reading →
The Video Essay: A New Way to Say (with John Bresland)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies / Table For Two: Interviews
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John Bresland
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John Bresland found me on Facebook a few months ago to ask if I’d want to take part in a video project for TriQuarterly Online. Yes, of course. Now he’s completed it, it’s up and running, and you can find it here. But before you do that, let’s ask John a few questions: Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Once More to the Lake
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Once More to the Lake
Where’s Bildo?
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Bill Among the Booksellers
While Dave’s braving the San Juan River in search of his next book I’m in teeming Boston, enjoying the other end of the process, pre-publication. Algonquin, publisher of my next book, Life Among Giants (have I ever mentioned this to you?), put on a dinner for Boston area booksellers and invited me and another of their Boston area writers, Barbara (B.A) Shapiro, in to speak. Barbara, who’s actually from Boston, followed instructions and spoke briefly. Her book, forthcoming in October, is called The Art Forger, and gives a novelist’s take on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, good stuff! I, after a 3.5 hour drive that ended in a wrong turn and a maze of bridge ramps and tunnels and finally a bus yard and despair, talked for three hours and fifteen minutes about my economic theories, which follow those of Secretary of War Dearborn during the zzzzzzzzzz. After, we all ate a fine meal, Barbara and I shifting tables at intervals and talking to everyone at least a little, really fun. I’m looking forward to visiting the 15 stores represented, sooner or later, as customer or event, mostly to continue the conversations. These are really interesting and funny folks! Plus, they sell books. Kudos to Craig Popelars, Algonquin director of marketing, who puts on a good show and is hilarious.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Day Off, Really Off
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Loafing Zone
Carl Jung would take two weeks off from everything and take vacations in order to dream. Because he knew as we all do that dreams come most vivid when we’re relaxed and receptive, also that they come when we’re asleep. Even the memory of dreams takes lassitude–you can’t get that thread back once you’re fully awake, the ice skates that helped you fly to see your farm (the farm you don’t have). Continue reading →
The Book Guys
categories: Cocktail Hour
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NOT BILL AND DAVE
I am about to head out for a week on the San Juan River. To paraphrase Abbey, “Saving the world is a good hobby. But I’m going down the river.”
Yesterday, a marathon drive from Hurricane, Utah to Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of the high points was when the Car Guys came on the radio. Which reminded me that I had an old, unused post hidden back somewhere in the Bill and Dave files. Which reminded me I could be lazy and post it here:
Many of you are no doubt fascinated by the origin story of Bill and Dave’s. Not the origins of our cartoon superhero alter egos, but our humble selves.
It started at Holy Cross, where Bill was teaching and had me in to speak. We did a Q and A in front of his class, and I think we were a little funny, maybe even pretty funny. Anyway, we were pleased with ourselves. We had a good rapport and afterward one of us said: “We should do a radio show together. Like the Car Guys.’
“Ya,” said the other. “Except we’d be the Book Guys.”
We quickly sketched it out. People would call in with their book problems—the carbeurator was clogged on their novella or the in-valve for their sonnet wasn’t working. And like the famous goofballs from MIT we would kick around a few possible solutions and have a few laughs. The trouble was that no one was offering us a radio show at the time. So later that evening—over drinks, appropriately—it occurred to us that we might be able to start up a website. About which we knew absolutely nothing. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A Dog Day Photographic Crown of Sonnets
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Cheerful Rosy!
