Bill and Dave’s on the Road
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It’s great to be here in Western North Carolina, just north of Asheville, at Doe Branch Ink writers retreat with David and five talented participants, all of them working on books. We meet mornings and share work, talk writing, offer advice, heap praise. And we laugh a lot. Today’s the second day, and it’s amazing how fast a group bonds and gets to know one another. By the end of week like this nothing you assumed about anyone starting out proves to be true at all. Or if at all, only a little. Do you hear my southern accent emerging? Odd, since I don’t have one! After lunch there’s time to write. We reconvene for cocktail hour and then dinner, and the conversation has been great. Among us are former stand-up comedians, weather girls, executives, international nurses, and more. David and I don’t fight that much, but it’s tag-team teaching, a new game. Continue reading →
Thanks to some of our Recent Guests
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Monica Wood
Getting Outside Saturday: Fern Walk and Turtle Sign
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Sensitive Fern
Bad Advice Wednesday: Goodbye to the University, Goodbye
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Just Visiting
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Today’s advice (apropos Dave’s post yesterday), is for writers who teach in the university, and it is very simple: You don’t necessarily have to. I’ve quit several times, and have lived to tell the tale. Simple, I said. But not easy. While I was teaching–two decades worth–I often had to remind myself that I’d set out to be a writer, not a professor. I really loved the classroom and often the students, and didn’t really mind committee work, even got into it, wrote wicked minutes. The common enterprise of learning and making and knowing and investigating (also administrating), that’s the best. It’s great work if you can get it, and I did get it and did appreciate it—summers off, semesters or quarters of research leave, adjustable hours, health insurance, a paycheck, mostly agreeable
colleagues, the constant plumbing of the self, and so on. But was that writing? Continue reading →
Those Who Write, Teach
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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In 2008, Scott Malcomson of the New York Times Magazine approached me and asked me to write an essay about the fact that almost all of this generation of writers are also teachers. He wanted me to consider how this might detract from our work. Since I worked at a University he worried about my biting the hand.
“I know this may seem like career suicide,” he said. “But somehow after seeing your Youtube video I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”
The video he was referring to was “Transformation,” which features me tearing off my clothes and jumping up on a desk off in the middle of a lecture, and he was right, I didn’t mind.
Here is the piece I wrote for him, which did get me in some trouble, though mostly with other writers who claimed I “hated teaching.” I don’t. I love teaching. I just hate when it gets in the way of my writing.
In Captivity
Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a tranquilizer gun, tagged and shipped off to a university. I underwent this conversion more or less of my own free will, drawn by the Continue reading →
Book Expo America and Me
categories: Cocktail Hour
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That's a big book!
The Jacob Javits center over the old train yards in New York City is enormous, vast. And BEA barely fits in there, huge booths from hundreds of publishers and distributors and other giants, also little hopeful booths of all kinds, some staffed by a single writer in front of her single title, maybe a little sad. BEA is Book Expo America, put on, I believe, by the American Booksellers Association, and it’s overwhelming, puzzling, and really lot of fun. I have been there this week as the guest of Algonquin Books and it’s been nuts. My only job was to sign books for an hour and a half, like speed dating, quick, really wonderful conversations with I don’t know how many people, though I know Algonquin was aiming to give away five hundred bound galleys of the new book. Bound galleys are advanced reading copies (ARCs), and a lot of people come to the expo just to get them. And tote bags galore. But tote bags aren’t enough. In fact, there’s a corral downstairs where people check their roller suitcases. I saw more than one filled entirely with books. And nice to know mine are in there. Life Among Giants will be published in November–but BEA offers a chance to preview things. Plus we made the Publisher’s Lunch BEA Buzz Books list, and they offer a teaser here. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Nina de Gramont
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Be a Snob!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Dave is on a trip this week and I promised him that while he was gone I would read Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, Angle of Repose. Instead I’ve been reading Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen. There are several reasons I could feel guilty about this, the most obvious being a broken promise, or at least a delayed one. The others involve a kind of intellectual guilt – the nagging, unfinished-homework voice inside your head that believes every moment should involve edification, enlightenment, and improving the mind through High Art. “Nina,” my voice has a way of asking. “Is this really how you want to spend your time?” Continue reading →
