Not especially funny or witty myself, perhaps that’s why I admire those who are: I must have opened my blog a half dozen times today to read a first sentence by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. Then tonight I read it—again—to my wife and laughed, again. It’s one of the wittiest sentences I’ve ever read. Lane’s follow-up quip is pure gravy. “It got a rise out of Dinty, too,” I told Kathy. “He left a comment today on that …
I eavesdrop on two groups, one male and one female, as they talk. Middle-aged men, two to four in the group, one talking loudly at a time: “You need to read more books!” “How are we going to solve the health care problem if . . .” “What gets me is these Republicans who say—” “This isn’t partisan—the Democrats . . . Obama . . . ” “We go to Wal-Mart and we buy this crap, and we don’t care …
Sam Pickering, on the English faculty at the University of Connecticut, was the model for Robin Williams’s character in the sentimental hit movie Dead Poets Society and is the author of eighteen books, fifteen of them lighthearted essay collections describing his “doings.” Sometimes he alternates with humorous stories about fictionalized characters from his Tennessee hometown. He publishes mostly with university presses—everyone gets a turn: when I was at Ohio University Press we published Deprived of Unhappiness, his tenth volume of …
If I care to look, WordPress reveals the Google searches people use to find this blog. Their phrases can be surprising or funny. Like: “does an essay have to be nonfiction.” Well, yes—whomever you are. By definition, in fact. Sometimes people’s searches suggest posts I wish I’d write—or accomplish myself in other writing: “taking creative nonfiction beyond the mundane.” I’ll drink to that. So would the editor who called a story of mine “plodding.” Ouch. (It’s easy to say no; …
I’m pleased to crow that my narrative essay “A Dry Year” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The essay appeared in 2009 in Chautauqua, an annual literary journal published by the Chautauqua Institution. The essay is about rebuilding a pond during a summer of biblical plagues—drought, heat, locusts, a cataclysmic storm, a flood—with a legendary Appalachian excavator. The man, in his mid-seventies at the time, was rumored to have killed a young woman in a drunken-driving accident some fifty years …
Charles Allen Smart (1904–1967), author of eleven books of fiction, memoir, philosophy, and biography, was best known for RFD, his 1938 bestseller about returning to the land on his family’s ancestral farm. After his service in WW II, depicted in his memoir The Long Watch, he became writer in residence at Ohio University, the press of which returned RFD to print in 1998 under its Swallow imprint and with a new Foreword by Gene Logsdon. Smart’s thoughts, below, on the …
David Bailey—magazine journalist, restaurant critic and worker, foodie and barista, knockabout North Carolina writer, and my friend—has posted a delightful concise essay, “Daddy Needs a New Pair of Shoes,” on his blog, My Pie Hole. It’s a ramble, with visuals, voice, and flow. A taste: “I’ll admit that the kitchen dress code was easy to comply with: t-shirts, white sox, black pants and black shoes. The shoes were a trifle irksome, though. One pair admittedly looked a little worse for …