Writing Exercises

Nutcracker Buck Sings Yahtzee

March 3, 2009
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Check out the latest in the land of Nutcracker Buck–”You and me and these five random cubes/Laughing off our asses while our lives go down the tubes.” Wade has this to say about the song: “The song is kind of a white trash love song and a prayer to the Yahtzee gods that a marriage be saved. And it has a komodo dragon in it.” Oh, it has me in it too. That’s right…I got a cameo! What, you might ask, inspired Nutcracker Buck to write a song about Yahtzee? The musician himself puts it thus: Yahtzee, though, is...

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Falling for Steve Forbert…again

August 23, 2008
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Falling for Steve Forbert…again

Kevin and I went to see Steve Forbert last night at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley to celebrate Kevin’s birthday. The first time Kevin gave me a Steve Forbert song on a mixed tape–Fayetteville, Arkanasas, circa 1994, “Romeo’s Tune”–I was in my early twenties, fresh out of Alabama by way of Knoxville, and I couldn’t quite figure out this guy from San Francisco with such great taste in music. When I moved to New York City with Kevin a couple of years later, he took me to a Steve Forbert show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, and over the next...

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mayhem and fun

July 4, 2008
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mayhem and fun

The No One You Know launch last night at Books Inc. Opera Plaza was fabulous fun. We went through 20 bottles of wine in about half an hour, which is always a good sign. Ben Fong-Torres put together this video clip. (If you’re wondering what Ben Fong-Torres has to do with No One You Know, see his TV Land blog post here). Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com More about the launch tomorrow, along with pics, but for the moment, a couple of items: 1) Sean Finney is looking for the woman in the brown corduroy suit. He wants...

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The Gift Jab

December 12, 2007
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Reba McMellon exposes the not-so-subtle practice of “gift jabbing” in this article for The Mississippi Press. The exercise: Have you ever been gift jabbed? Have you ever done it yourself? Write about a gift you received that came with its own undercurrent of ill-will. While you’re in the Christmas mood, check out this catchy video from one of my former CCA MFA students, Katy Koerber.

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lists

August 17, 2007
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Today I came across a poem by an old friend, JoLee Passerini, in the Crab Orchard Review. Back when I knew her, almost twenty years ago at the University of Alabama, she was JoLee Gibbons. We worked on the Marrs Field Journal together. That was when we all were getting our first tastes of literary possibility; it’s always nice to open a literary journal and come across the name of one of my friends from the undergraduate years in Tuscaloosa. Here’s the first stanza from her poem, “Eating Locusts”: Grommet, socket, sprocket, marriage– lugnuts, lugwrench, stopwatch, truckstop, egret, lake...

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