Missy and Me

The strange thing was that by the time I finally got around to watching Marley and Me, we had already committed to getting the yellow lab from the kennel. My daughter loves dogs and so we let her watch the film along with us (though not the sad end) and we laughed as a family, taking what we were seeing as light comedy, not understanding that for us it was in fact the equivalent of the witches’ prophecies in Macbeth. I, for one, saw the minor atrocities committed by Marley as a fiction born of the imagination of a sports writer with a gift for comedy and then doubly exaggerated by a Hollywood machine that insists on always over-doing it.

Understanding dawned much too late. When exactly did it come? Perhaps it was the day I looked into the back seat of our car and saw that Missy, our new yellow lab, had chewed right through the backseat seat belts, the belts themselves severed and the now-beheaded buckles lying useless on the seats. Perhaps it was the time when she took my black leather journal, the one in which I kept all the notes for my book about the Gulf oil spill, and tore around the back yard, excited about the prospect of an hour’s worth of keep-away. Or perhaps it was earlier when, as a cute little puppy, she ate the siding off our house.

Continue reading →

Where’s Bildo?

categories: Cocktail Hour

4 comments

I’m on a top-secret mission for Orion Magazine. Any guesses where?

Continue reading →

Bad Advice Wednesday: Spend a Week with Bill and Dave

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

8 comments

So today’s bad advice is really bad advice:

Come spend some time in the mountains writing and drinking with Bill and Dave.

(Quick disclaimer: the following may sound like an advertisement but I’m hoping you’ll see it as more invitation than ad.)

The invitation is to spend a week with us, with Bill and Dave, in the mountains of Western North Carolina. We have recently been invited to co-teach a master class from June 17th to June 23rd at Doe Branch Ink, a mountain retreat 30 miles north of Asheville in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I taught there last year and it was great. Great food, great people, great hikes, great (brutal) bikes rides up nearby mountains, great talk about writing, great spaces to write in woods (and at desks). These sorts of weeks are usually about building a small community, something we have tried to do in a virtual way at this site, and often it is the time away from class that proves most valuable. And there are other benefits too. For instance you’ll be able to see Bill try to out-prance the local clog dancers.

Don’t let the fact that we call it a “master class” scare you too much either. The idea is to get a bunch of people together who really care about writing and are committed to the writing life. Here is the copy that Bill wrote for the Doe Branch website: Continue reading →

Happy New Year from Bill and Dave’s

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

6 comments

Rough skating in 2012?

.

Happy New Year! Elysia and I were out till all hours dancing with twenty or thirty kids who are all suddenly huge and take up a lot more room on the dance floor than in years past. There were parents involved, too (Elysia says, Uh, Dad, there were parents going nuts on the dance floor!), and great costumes. We slept this morning till all hours, too! Juliet is in NYC to look after her dad and see the Dark Star New Year’s Eve show. 2012 sounds like the future to me, who wrote 1998 on a check a few weeks ago. After a breakfast of chocolate-chip pancakes, Elysia and I ventured out wrapped for cold weather, but found it mild. The stream was frozen last week, but a Continue reading →

Back on the Cape: An Elemental Interlude

categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside

1 comment

My Favorite Tree (from a bit earlier in the year)

Back on Cape Cod. A happy four words, especially this time of year. You feel like you’ve stepped into the pages of a story by Hawthorne. The leafless pines and oaks, strain upward (though never too proudly), like gnarled hands against a sky bulked up with clouds. Occasional shafts of light shoot down through the clouds like light I have never seen anywhere else. (The closest I got was at a stopover once in Iceland—the same strange light spraying down on a purple landscape.) The cranberry bog a purple all its own. The frozen whitecaps of the Bay letting you know it’s not summer anymore and that you wouldn’t last a minute out there.

#

I am taking my first true break in a year and a half and I have to say I am loving it. Eating a lot, walking the dogs through the deserted summer camp near Slough Pond, sleeping a good nine hours, not checking the internet (much), reading Hadley the adventure book I wrote and gave her for Christmas. And, while it may not go with the rest, drinking beer while staring up Continue reading →

10 Bad New Year’s Resolutions for Writers (Bad Advice Wednesday: The Holiday Edition)

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

5 comments

1. Stop writing this year. Just quit. You can do it. Writing’s an addiction.

2. Stop reading. No media. Nothing. Listen to the rain.

3. Quit your job and roam the planet going broke. Continue reading →