Bad Advice Wednesday: Dive Like an Osprey!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This is a pretty good time of year if you live on an academic schedule. Actually, come to think of it, it’s a pretty good time of year if you live on a human (or animal) schedule: plants blooming, birds nesting, green breaking through.
But back to academics. The point I want to make is that when I teach, during spring and fall terms, I get used to doing a hundred things at once. I also, naturally enough, start to long for a simpler schedule. For instance, this spring, while rushing from thing to thing, I started imagining my life once school ended: I would stop shaving and showering and hole up in some writing cave and never come out again. Specifically, I would get to spend a couple of weeks on my Cape Cod novel—nothing else—and I would focus all the creative energy that, for most of year, shoots off in some many directions.
And now that time is here. Sure, it isn’t ever quite as perfect as in imagination. Sure, there are still irritants and bills and things that get in the way. But for the most part it is good. I am back to doing what I like most—writing—and what I think I do best. There’s a healthy obsessiveness on focusing on one thing in a culture that insists you do a thousand. Fuck ’em. Every now and then you need to blow everything else off—to let the room get messy and the recommendations go unwritten—and get back to the business of what you were put on this earth to do. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill and Dave
The Best Writing Program in the Country!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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No more questions. No more methodologies. No more knife fights in the back stacks of the great libraries. Science has spoken. The greatest writing program in the country is… VERMONT COLLEGE! Continue reading →
THE REAL AVENGERS
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
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Sure, Thor, Iron Man and the Hulk are getting a lot of press.
But what about these guys?
Getting Outside Saturday: Clappers
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Do you guys know about the journal Ecotone? I’m hoping that if you visit Bill and Dave’s you do. It prints great work, occasionally by a guy named Bill. And it was started by a guy named Dave. I still write an essay for each issue in a feature called “Out of Place.” Here’s this issue’s essay:
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Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill and Dave
Bill and Dave’s Greatest Hits
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Sometimes Dave and Bill just get nostalgic. Plus, we know some of you have missed our best stuff! Here are the links everyone’s clamoring over. Spread the word….
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Dave’s cartoon essay “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Truth in Nonfiction But Were Afraid to Ask”
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Bill on The Author Photo
Guest contributor: Bill and Dave
The Sweet Sixteen! Here They are…the Best Writin’ Schools in the Country
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here it is, folks. You voted and your vote counts. And now we ask you to vote again 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?
Observant fans will note that some of the results make no sense. Teams won that were never in the bracket, teams lost and then reappeared elsewhere, etc… Well, what can we say? In the spirit of Seth Abramson, we have decided to follow a logic all our own. (And we wanted to make sure that the top 16 vote getters made it in.)
For more about the match-ups and to vote, keep going:
Bad Advice Wednesday: Make Like Shakespeare, or at Least Spalding Gray
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Alas, poor Dave! I knew him, Horatio.
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Write a monologue.
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Yes, that’s it. Today’s bad advice is to write a monologue. This is not just for writers, but for everyone. Though if you’re a writer, it’s a magical exercise. A monologue is one character (or even just a regular person) speaking directly to an audience. It’s different from a soliloquy, which is a character speaking to himself, audience be damned, though they’re listening in. It’s how playwrights used to get a character’s thoughts out to the world (filmmakers use flashbacks). A dramatic monologue? That’s a character speaking to someone else who’s usually sitting or standing uncomfortably nearby onstage. An apostrophe is a kind of dramatic monologue, but Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Spring Goodies
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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It's spring in Maine, and here come the ramps.
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Favorite things. A sunny spring morning, a walk in the woods, a few things to eat (nothing the settlers wouldn’t have had, and much that the Abenaki before them would have had, too). I bring a trowel, tease a handful of ramps from the rich soil near a basswood tree –these wild leeks smell sweetly of mild garlic, milder onion, leeks, sure, something of a shallot. Home, you chop them–the bulbs minced fine-ish, the leaves more course. A little butter in the crepe pan–no a lot butter, and throw the bulb bits in–quickly, they caramelize. The leaves go in next, light and full. Very quickly in the heat and butter they go limp, cooking down the way, say, spinach does–a handful shrinks to a big bite. You could eat Continue reading →
The MFA Tournament: Help Crown the Best Writing School in the Country (Vote Early and Often)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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THE VOTING IS NOW CLOSED! WE WILL POST THE SWEET SIXTEEN THIS THURSDAY MAY 3RD.
STAY TUNED! (CAN ‘BAMA BE STOPPED?)
IN THE MEANTIME CHECK OUT TODAY’S CARTOON ESSAY ON HOW WE HAVE BECOME SLAVES TO OUR COMPUTERS AND TOMORROW’S BAD ADVICE ON WRITING.
What’s the best way to decide the top MFA creative writing program in the country? A tournament of course! Vote on our comments page!
By almost all accounts the current system of ranking MFA programs in creative writing is a crappy one. For starters the rankings of the schools are determined by applicants who have never seen the schools and never had the teachers. That’s right (believe it or not), the rankings depend on the choices of people who are applying to schools, and basing their choices on a variety of criteria, including the ranking system from the year before. Let me say that again so it is crystal clear: the folks who created the rankings didn’t make any attempt to survey those who have actually experienced the program. To which we say: Yikes!
“It’s analogous to asking people who are standing outside a restaurant studying the menu how they liked the food,” says novelist Leslie Epstein, who runs the Boston University Writing Program.
Poets &Writers, the magazine that publishes the rankings, replied:
“Why didn’t we survey MFA faculty and students about the quality of MFA programs? To continue the analogy Leslie Epstein used to describe our approach in the press release, that would be like asking diners who only frequent their favorite restaurant to assess the quality of all restaurants.”
Okay, love both restaurant analogies, but can’t help but believe that the first is a little better, that is that talking to people who have tasted the food should factor in. Right?
So are rankings useless? Hardly! They’re fun! But we here at Bill and Dave’s believe that if you are going to employ a Continue reading →
