Parts of Speaking Publishing

This is borrowed from The Rabbit Room newsletter. I truly recommend The Habit podcast.   I n an exchange that didn’t make it into the final episode, one of my recent podcast guests—Tish Harrison Warren? Alan Noble?—got on the subject of training montages in sports movies. Everybody knows that athletes have to train. We admire grit and hard work. Training can even be picturesque (especially Rocky training in Russia’s wintry countryside while Drago gets fine-tuned in a Soviet robotics lab). A training sequence is good for any story about overcoming hardship. But the long, grueling, possible boring aspects of physical training—the aspects of training that actually transform the mind and body of the athlete—don’t make for great cinema. The training montage telescopes all that slow grinding down to something that is visually pleasing, fast-paced, and enlivened by jaunty music. Thomas Aquinas talks about the bonum arduum , the difficult or steep good. The training montage gives u...

  “ If you’re tired of narratives that paint Appalachians as helpless, backward caricatures. . . “, This phrase, from an anonymous Amazon review of bell hooks’ poetry collection, Appalachian Elegy , captures part of the reason I write about Appalachia. Thank you for reading The Foark River Salon and Bait Shop . It may not strike you as an Appalachian novel because it does not come anywhere near some of the standard themes and tropes that Appalachian novels are traditionally expected to use. That is exactly why I want it to be considered Appalachian; not only is it set smack dab, as we say, in the middle of Southern Appalachia (south of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee) but it purposefully does avoid stereotypical themes. Or does it? One standard trope is the outsider coming in to “save” the benighted mountain people. Another is that the characters are benighted: poor, ignorant, uneducated, barefoot, addicted, outlaw, religiously fanatically, sexually or morally devian...

  “Barbara, I found it!” My brother Donald called out to me from across the lush, overgrown grass and mostly obscured grave markers of Fort Lincoln Cemetery. For the past twenty minutes he and I had been on a hunt in this long-established resting place in Colmar Manor, Maryland, right outside the District of Columbia. Rush hour traffic sped by on the other side of the iron fence, mostly moving east into Maryland’s Prince George’s County suburbs or on to Anne Arundel or Calvert Counties. I looked up from the marker where I stood, about 100 feet from my brother. I had been scraping cuttings of dried grass from its face, mostly with the tip of my New Balance shoe, trying to decipher the name. So far I had cleaned off dozens of markers, all of which were level with the ground. I had used my foot and sometimes by hands, quietly disappointed by each. A few swipes across each marker showed either letters that did not fit the name of my query or dates of birth and death that did...

 I have neglected this blog for three weeks or so. My life took on a busy turn and more than usual amounts of time have been devoted to selling books, researching books, publishing books, reading books, and to change parallelism, working on my podcast, Dialogues with Creators , which has reached its 100th episode and is coming up on 80 guests. Also retirement parties, writers groups, family time, and gardening.  I submitted the first chapter of my memoir to my writers group and to the Rabbit Room mini-class I was taking for three weeks. I will post it this morning (May 16), and I got feedback on edits, valid ones. Writing a memoir is painful and makes me ask, Why do we have this need to publish our explanation of ourselves? I will be interviewing a person on my podcast whose memoir I just read (book provided; I would not have bought it) and I am ambivalent about it. It is well written, but some of it seems,. . . .well, fictionalized. And sensationalized. So I will focus on the...

 Unfortunately, he committed suicide, so even this wisdom was not enough.  If anybody feels like perspiring, I'd invite you to go ahead because I'm sure going to. In fact, I'm going to get a hickey right here. Greetings, thanks, and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parabolish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre. But if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise older fish explaining what water is to you, younger fish, please don't be. I am not th...