Photo: schmilblick

Field Notes:

and so it begins. I drop off a sack of clothes at the Animal Shelter second-hand store. The worker closes the door. A moonstone lies in the crack between the door and driveway. I head back to my car. There is a word in my bones, then another and another.

moonstone
go
back

I walk to the door, crouch and pick up the glowing lozenge. It is a glass pebble. Perhaps a woman poured a bag of them into a glass container. She threaded the stems of three perfect iris through the pebbles. When she poured in water, the pebbles shone bluepinkyellow. Iridescent bubbles gathered on the iris stems. She heard a tap on the back door.

to be continued

This is how it works.

On Writing and the creative process:

I’ve taught writing for seventeen years. I teach in the same way I write. There is an open space. There are impulses and longings. The way opens ahead of us. The writing takes hold of us and makes itself. Much breaks up.

Making. Nothing exotic. Making stories, making art, making bread, making shelves, making the broken whole, making the filled empty and the empty full, making love—all making is making love. A new student waits till the end of the writing class I teach to ask his question: “How do you write a novel? How do you know what to do?” A veteran student grins. She knows what I’ll say. We have just finished writing about houses and mountains and the razor’s edge.

“You write a novel the same way you just wrote. You put the tip of the pen on the paper, or your hands on the keys and you start. Every day, every other day, once a month, you keep going.”

The new student tucks his notebook in his pack and laughs. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

[This was an excerpt from a recent article at The Source Weekly.]

Community Connection

For more of Mary Sojourner’s writing, please visit her blog, Wordsmithing.

Photo Wonderlane

It was a pleasure to burn.

-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

-Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

-George Orwell,1984

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

-Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

-J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

-William Gibson, Neuromancer

All this happened, more or less.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

-C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

-Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

You better not never tell nobody but God.

-Alice Walker, The Color Purple

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

-Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

-Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Community Connection

These are some of my picks.Ttime for you to weigh in: what is your favorite opening line from a novel? What makes a great opening line?

Photo by the Author

I enter the Old City after dawn. Quietly, like I want to steal it. I pass through the Zion Gate and head along the sand-colored walls to the Jewish Quarter. The shops selling sweets and holy books are closed.

Beneath them are Roman columns that rise up from another Jerusalem. I want to say to each column, “Are you talking today? Do I get even one secret? One little Roman secret? Lonely Romans must have talked a blue streak around you.”

Long Jewish shadows flit by me on their way to the Wailing Wall. I find I have less to say to them than to the columns. The shadows I know. The shadows I grew up with.

Down the street, the eternally dark alleys of the Muslim Quarter belly towards distant patches of light. Nothing is really distant in the Old City. But the light, pushed away by the darkness, gives the impression of serious separation.

The shops are shuttered. Soon the tourists will come pouring into Arab Jerusalem through its many gates, and the shutters will lift, and even the Christians hauling their crosses to Calvary will be pressured to buy luggage, floor mats, Arab gowns a block long.

I will not awake the walled-in city from its sleep to remind it it is a contested city, the object of the wet dreams of three religions. I like it the way it is right now, sailing in its sleep beneath all the claims made on its behalf.

Community Connection

Please submit Notes from the Road to david [at] matadornetwork.com for consideration.

Photo Mr. Theklan

I don’t know why I came to Montagnana. Yes I do. It has a hostel. It has a hostel in one of the best preserved medieval walls in all of Europe. In the plains between Venice and Verona, Montagnana is a lush lawn lapping against a rise of brick.

As the restaurant begins to fill and yell and simmer over with bay leaves, mozzarella and garlic, I’m lost in self-pleased, melancholy reverie, sinking back into the wicker chair waiting for the waitress. Why did I come to Montagnana again? Oh, yeah, the wall.

Brown from a lifetime of Montagnana afternoons, she is tall, dark. She moves like a slender tree. The smile that breaks across her face and never fully retreats breaks my heart.

I love you

I want to marry her before she can take my order.

I eat a whole pizza, drink two beers and as the restaurant begins to fold in and clean itself I slowly nurse a third.

Why did I come to Montagnana again?

Oh, yeah, her.

The stars are sharp and low and loud. Her. I imagine her riding out of town with me on a ‘63 Desert Triumph. I see my life in a modest villa with Waitress Girl. I don’t want to leave the restaurant. Should I order another pizza? My beer is going warm.

I pay and force one foot and then another. I want to say something to her, just something to let some of this feeling out into the world.

Do you have a boyfriend, because I think I love you.

She flits in and out of view, carrying plates, pocketing change, looking tired. My foot sneaks forward an inch or two. I grind the gravel with my toes in little circles. She disappears with a load of dirty plates.
I walk away, like I hoped I wouldn’t but knew I would.

Community Connection

Have you been smitten while on the road? Did you have the courage to say something, or did you keep it bottled up? Either way, do you regret your choice?

It was impossible picking a winner for this. There were over a hundred entries, almost all of which were from folks who would be great prospective students at MatadorU.

In the end I took the 10 most promising entries, wrote down the names on slips of paper, and then my daughter Layla helped me choose at random. Here’s a video:

Susan wins a free tuition to MatadorU . Here was her entry from the original contest announcement:

@elasticfate

I’ve got gypsy in my blood.

My parents immigrated to America before I was born & took me on my first flight overseas to visit my family when I was 4. Since then I have not been able to shake this travel bug (Though honestly, I’ve never tried. Why would anyone want it to stop?) so I’ve been working on trying making my life as nomadic as possible so I can follow my soul’s desire to experience cultures all over the world.

I’m a photographer & blogger have been traveling across the US since February conducting what’s been the most incredible experience of my life so far:

http://rawtransformations.blogspot.com/2009/02/raw-vagabonding-community-building.html

and though I used to write a lot in the past, it’s only recently that I’ve become nomadic & began writing about my travels. The response from people has been really encouraging & since I already take photographs, I’d like to learn how to blend the two together better. It’s also been a really long time since I wrote for anyone but myself, so I feel I could really benefit from the input of professionals who know the ins & outs and could help me craft my pieces in a more cohesive manner. I’d also like to learn how (and where) to market them.

I’m already living an untraditional lifestyle, but would really like to make it more financially sustainable & pursue my passion for sharing my experiences with others.

Congratulations again Susan!

Community Connection

For those interested in learning more about the U, please visit the school here, or listen to this podcast, which really gets into the background of the school itself, the vision behind it, and who the teachers are.

Photo Tiago Rïbeiro

It’s time to write. I wait for an image, a phrase, some remembered thing to jerk my hands against the keys but nothing comes. My palms itch, I try to sip from an empty coffee cup and curse at the lawnmower across the street that growls like a dog munching on my gray matter. I suddenly know I will never eke out anything worth skimming over, let alone reading again.

I suck.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
- John Steinbeck

Do you ever ask yourself ‘am I good enough? Do I have anything worthwhile to say? Will people like my writing? Will people read my writing?’

The great Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, in the first quatrain of his sonnet “Intensidad y altura” wrote:

I want to write, but it comes out foam,

I want to say a great deal, but I get stuck;

There’s no spoken cipher that’s not a sum,

No written pyramid without a core.

Every writer grapples with graphophobia. You are attempting creativity and honesty in one careful motion. It’s like marching into a jungle with a half full canteen and no compass. You don’t know where you are going or what you will meet.

This is the solace: we come to this place, as writers, together. We name the fear, we pin it down with pens and move on, further into that dark jungle, happy for the fear and danger. The fear tells us we are moving closer to the place we want to be.

Writing is easy, you just stare at a blank screen until your eyes bleed.
-Douglas Adams

Across the street the lawn mower hits a rock but grinds forward.

Community Connection

Do you struggle with graphophobia and writers block? What does it feel like? What exercises do you use to overcome these struggles? Share your experiences in the comments.

Photo: gbaku

Time is short and so are our communications; emails are often non-grammatical bursts of information. Status updates are ephemeral and often trite. Blogs can help you express and communicate, but usually aren’t written for a specific person.

Nothing electronic is as intimate as a letter for personal communication. There’s the tactile sensation of the paper. The swirl of the script. Nothing will ever replace it.

Follow These few simple rules and write a letter anyone would be touched to receive.

a.drian

1. Take your time.

Writing a good letter takes time. Your recipient will value the thought and time you spend with your letter so allow as much time as you need.

2. Craft good salutations.

Be creative with your salutation, it sets the tone of what’s to come. Let your salutation describe the person to which you are writing i.e “My Dearest Mother.”

Accordingly, at the end of your letter describe yourself and your feelings toward the person you are writing ~ “Your Loving Son” or “Your Faithful Lover Who Waits with Passion Burning.”

3. Make it personal.

Your letter should come from the heart. Dig deep. Try to express your emotions and thoughtfully describe your thoughts and the journey you are on.

No one wants to get a letter that sounds like it could be to anyone, so go ahead, get personal.

4. Don’t make it all about you.

Ask your recipient how they are doing. Inquire about their circumstances as you last heard…how is the new baby? Did that nasty rash ever clear up? Make your letter a two way street, ask questions that beg a response. Don’t just have a monologue, begin a conversation.

5 Write it by hand.

Do not type your letter. Subpoenas are typed, not letters. And don’t email it! Then it is an email and not a letter! Write your letter by hand in the most legible, pleasant script you can muster. Find a good pen, one that writes smoothly and evenly. Don’t use a pencil. Pencils smudge and should your letter be the stuff of legends you don’t want it to fade over the years.

Community Connection

When was the last time you received a handwritten letter? Who are you going to write you letter to? What’s the best letter you ever received or sent? Let us know in the comments.

Photo: Ed Karjala

The first day of Fall and as Sarah says it brings on the ‘onslaught of cliches’ like woodsmoke and falling leaves but like anything else it all depends on where you are.

Here on the Gulf Coast of Florida there aren’t really seasons except for rainy and dry. Here it’s a game of burying any sign of things changing or growing older, much less falling or dying, as evinced by the plastic surgery places on Highway 41 and the inordinate number of old ladies on the beaches with non wobbly mega-tits.

It’s like this on so many levels. Looking out the window there’s a dude from chem-lawn hosing down the yard across the street with some foul-looking liquid.

Earlier today Layla and I went to the park where there is a section of old flatwoods and trails shaded by the oak and long-needle pine. Usually there’s nobody here and we end up exploring these trails, Layla asking for “food” when we pass the stalks of fennel, a wild edible I showed her when we first got here and which, like everything else, she hasn’t forgotten since.

Today there were some other nenas though, four little happy girls worming up the slides, and Layla wanted only to be with them even though she was shy at first only looking at them and smiling, saying “baby nena.”

Later they had to go. When you’re a parent you learn you never can just leave a place, it always takes stopping several times along the way. Layla saw them stop at the last section of playground, and said “otro parque,” which meant she wanted to go over there with them to the ‘other park.’

It made me think about Sarah’s blog the other night about the parks in Mexico, the “llanos,” and how life is lived out there in the open, a kind of transparency that I could never imagine existing here but have always wanted just the same.

Layla went over to play with the kids a few minutes more without worrying about symbolism or where we were. Another kind of transparency.

I think I’ve always loved autumn because back in Georgia where I grew up it was cooler but still warm, and usually the driest time of the year, the best for walking down to the Chattahoochee river and watching everything fall which is still another kind of transparency. Go back there with the right kind of eyes and ears and you can practice being invisible.

All photos by author.

September 2003. We cross the border into Poland from Slovakia. Our party bus is pulled aside and a control officer hops on. He glides down the aisle, sucking air and grabbing passports. He must love his job.

He reaches me and pauses, peering down and pinning me to the leather seat with a glassy blue stare. I slip that worn out forest green passport into his long, lean hand. He flips through green tinted pages and studies the unfamiliar document.

“It’s a passport!” my inner voice yells back. It had already screamed twice that day.

Grabbing the foreign item from me, he slides it beneath the stack of blue and red already in hand. For easier access, I tell my seatmate. He grabs her blue passport and places it atop the pile.

He hops off the bus and summons his colleague. Draws his attention to that forest green book. Ten noses press against glass windows like school kids, observing their interaction below.

“Ooh ooh! Lola is in trouble again!” they chant. I smile. They pull me back into the fold but the officers win the tug of war. He signals up to me to get off. This means arriving into Krakow later than anticipated. I need to explain that green book in person.

Krakow is quite sexy beneath the veil of night. I wasn’t expecting her to be. She senses my dejection and steers us underground to Fusion with its labyrinth of lounges carved from rock, its magenta, cyan, and yellow strobe lights.

Hip hop night. I check out the dancing Poles. I feel out their vibe. I proceed to a corner to dance…and dance and dance until he approaches me, covered in black.

Tall. Head shaven. Eyes similar to those that had pinned me to my seat earlier that evening, demanding I explain what I wanted in his country…from his country.

We dance silently for fifteen minutes.

“Mikael,” he finally introduces. I nod weakly. I want nothing to do with him. We dance some more. He studies my face. I turn away.

“Where are you from?” he asks. I tell him about my green passport.

Blue eyes now dyed red from the strobes light up in recognition. He grabs my hand and pulls me forcefully. He drags me through underground caves. We sail through masses of sweaty people.

He plants me squarely in front of a group leaning against a wall.

I study their faces. My countrymen. “These are my friends!” he introduces. I turn to Mikael. The words never come but he hears them anyway.

He grabs my hand and gives it a kiss.

What is your first memory of the internet? Holler at me if you thought computers were only for “Oregon Trail”!

The author looking at old publications / notes with young assistant. Photo: Laura Bernhein

1. Damn. I just built more shelves at my parents’ garage. (There are no basements in Florida.) I don’t want to leave anything here but I’m not sure what to do with my boxes of old notebooks, newspapers, journals, magazines. My first publications. What do other writers do with this stuff?

2. I collected my first crate of this stuff in college. Early journals of creative writing, assignments from Coleman Barks’ class. Later I looked at it and thought ‘I hope nobody ever finds this.’ One day my parents asked if I could take a bunch of stuff to the landfill and I threw those early notebooks in there too. Thinking back now I should’ve burned them.

3. The family and I are heading to Patagonia in a couple months. We have a little piece of land in El Bolsón. We’re totally limited as to what we can bring down there, and for me the gear has to get packed first: tools, snowboard, wetsuits, boots, snowshoes, goggles. Maybe a few books.

4. It’s weird flipping back through some of these old notes and publications though. Some of them have aged better than I would’ve guessed. Others I can’t read. Things like this seem more about remembering where you were and what you were doing around the time you were writing them. How hard you thought it was then. And how much harder it seems now.

5. I don’t think I’d like to burn this batch of writing. Maybe something like shred it, then use as insulation for the cabin.

6. When I was first trying to get published it was like learning how to paddle. I wanted to publish so bad, and then after I finally got my first publication (It was in the Mountain Gazette), I thought, damn–you build it all up in your mind just like a rapid.

Oceana, Tallulah Gorge. Photo: Alex Harvey.

And then finally you just step up and fire that shit and once it’s over, all you want to do is run another one.

7. There was this one rapid, Oceana, on the Tallulah River. The thing dropped like 80 feet. I scouted it and couldn’t see exactly where to go, but I could definitely see where I didn’t want to go. I felt like an ant down there in the bottom of the gorge. People were watching from observation platforms hundreds of feet up the canyon walls.

8. A bro up at the Chattooga had told me “it’s good to go, just lean back when you hit the bottom.” The thing was ugly and beautiful and massive and it was time to run. A few paddle strokes then all white-out, then impact, then I rolled up.

9. You can take a picture or write a story and put it in a box, put the box up on a shelf, then take it back down (or someone else takes it back down) later. It seems anti-flow though. In the end you can’t take anything but the ride itself.

Community Connection

What do you do with all your old notes and contributors copies? Let us know in the comments.

Photo: Markus Rödder

Every reader, certainly every writer, has their book. Your book is not simply your favorite story, but your source of literary inspiration, your measure of what can be achieved by a writer. Reading it for the first time is something as remembered as when you lost your travel virginity.

My Book is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This novel influenced the course of world literature and my life. Reading it moved something within me that no other book has. It knuckled me up for a fight and got my fingers flying. It gave me a context for the great literary tradition of social action, and it planted the seed within me to try to flesh out a few words of my own.

When unsure about my writing, my life, I go back to my book. What is your book? Where were you when you read it? What happened? Please tell us about it in the comments below. What is it about your book that keeps it numero uno?

Community Connection

Find more reads at BNT’s 50 Greatest Travel Books Of All Time.

Dudes. Hillary Harrison Photo.

At some point I’d decided I should go to the Lebowski Fest. Actually go and see what it was like, rather than just imagine it and then later look at pictures online and wish I’d gone—and then pretty soon forget about it entirely.

I was in those days balancing my time between writing, thinking about writing, thinking about other things, and trying to kill squirrels with a pellet gun. My wife had suggested on several occasions that maybe I ought to get a job. A real job. Like where you commute back and forth to an office and get a paycheck every two weeks and eventually work your way up to parking and benefits.

You just don’t seem happy, she said.

Of course I’m happy, I said. Why don’t I seem happy?

You don’t even bother to get out of your bathrobe anymore.

Which on some level I resented. Yes it was a bathrobe, but I had shorts on underneath and a clean T-shirt. I was not barefoot. I was wearing flip-flops, and on my eyes, against the glare of the sidelong winter sun, a pair of fine, expensive, protective eyeglasses. It was cold enough in the house, and cold enough outside too, that I wanted to wear a bathrobe. It was more pleasant that way.

The most I was going to do, as far as going out was concerned, was maybe to mow the lawn out front or do some cleanup in the back. I wasn’t planning on going beyond our property line. I wasn’t, for example, planning on driving to Von’s for a quart of half-and-half. Not in my bathrobe, anyway. I wasn’t, after all, Jeff Lebowski.

It’s a housecoat, I said. Not a bathrobe.

Sometimes, on Wednesday nights, before trash day, out on the sidewalk, I’d meet up with my neighbor, the half-Armenian, half-Georgian, ex-Soviet Air Force pilot who had flown hundreds of passenger-jet sorties into Kabul during that particular Afghan war, in the eighties, bringing fresh troops in and taking dead bodies out.

Nowadays, he was working six days a week, two shifts a day, around the clock, by night a uniformed security guard at a hospital downtown, by day a plainclothes detective at a jewelry store in Beverly Hills. Twenty-five dollars an hour plus benefits.

So where’s The Dude?

I work like donkey, he’d say, grinning, as we wrestled our respective bins, me in my housecoat, he with his badge and gun.

I know, I’d say. You’re a good man for it.

And then he’d say: Any news regarding your job?

What job, I’d think to myself, what’s he talking about?

No, I’d say. No news.

I was interested in the idea of a community of fans, a community founded upon the otherwise solitary experience of watching a movie—which is of course not an uncommon phenomenon, especially in America. But this was not Star Trek or Harry Potter or Remington Steele.

This was The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers’ irreverent update of the Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe/mistaken identity tradition, in which Jeff Bridges plays “The Dude,” aka Jeffrey Lebowski—a hapless and amiable bum of the sort one sees often enough around Los Angeles, wandering the aisles of the local grocery franchise in bathrobe and sandals.

The character’s most obvious appeal, it seemed to me, was the way in which he, like Marlowe before him, redefined cool—Jesus-cool, postmodern-style—cool as the ultimate lack of aspiration.

The Dude was quite possibly, as the movie’s narrator puts it, the laziest man in Los Angeles County, “which put him high in the running for laziest worldwide.” That is, until someone peed on his rug and a certain amount of action had to be taken. And a lazy man forced into action is a surprisingly interesting thing to watch.

I wasn’t convinced that as a movie it was as good as, say, Raising Arizona, which had always ranked in my top ten, or even Altman’s The Long Goodbye, from which the Brothers Coen had here drawn inspiration. But I felt I understood the sense of humor behind the thing. So I figured why not check out the nature of the community it had spawned. See if it had anything to do with me. Or the state of the Union.

The audio files were deleted long ago, alas. But here is some of what I’ve been able to glean from the notebook:

9:45 PM, Friday. 7000-something Hollywood Blvd.

Live from the Westbound Pedestrian Detour in front of the Kodak Theater, two nights before the Oscars. Hollywood is closed from Highland. Gangs of production people adorned with all-access passes, bomb-sniffing dogs, clusters of photographers and newsmen trying to sort out how to approach Sunday Night.

Book by Founding Dudes.

I am standing on a spot that will soon feature prominently on TV.

Next door, at the pre-party for Lebowski Fest West, inside some kind of night club, not much going on: only a few people drinking White Russians; nobody, as far as I can tell, smoking pot. I see a few guys trying to be The Dude. But the thing you realize is it’s nothing to do with the costume.

The original Dude, the inspiration for the character, is supposed to be here tonight. I don’t see him yet.

Once I get it in my head that in fact I may be The Dude, everything starts to pick up.

Chris and Danna have been married three times and divorced three times. To each other, it seems. Chris is wearing a trenchcoat, calf-length Indian moccasins and black sunglasses. He is not the original Dude, he says. “It’s just that they made a movie about a guy who’s life mirrors mine in a way that’s crazy.”

I order another White Russian. The bartender explains to me how in this life the best thing to be good at is being poor. Which I am highly practiced at, but not at all good at.

There is some kind of raffle, involving the original Ralph’s checkout girl, who is there with her twin sister. You can tell which is which because one is dressed in a Ralph’s uniform.

They show the movie on a big screen over the dance floor. It’s better than I remember. Then I wake up in the back of my truck in the parking garage.

8:50 PM, Saturday. Cal Bowl, 2500 E. Carson

There are nihilists. There are Sam Elliot look-alikes with pristine white hats and real handlebar mustaches. There are any number of Maudes in red wigs and bathrobes. Most are considerably fleshier than the wispy Julianne Moore version.

There are three Jesuses, and three bars serving White Russians. There are lines to get drinks. Everyone waits with utmost patience.

There is a reporter covering the event for a Japanese magazine, and a crew from Spanish TV.

One woman has come as the ransom note, another as the coffee can that held Larry’s ashes. There is to be a costume contest. There are several Walters. One is pretty convincing. Another has come as Walter’s dirty underwear.

There is a bowling team called The Bums. They wear their gloves on their heads. They lose. I am disappointed this is not the actual bowling alley from the movie.

There are some admittedly dudely fellows in long cardigan sweaters and real beards. The Original Dude, the inspiration, is named Jeff Dowd. Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. He has no beard. He gets up to make a speech, starts out complaining about how hard it has been to get a drink. Then the mic cuts out on him.

Jeff “The Dude” Dowd. Jerry Duvall Photo.

Melinda and Ed are up from San Diego. Some people get it, they say. Some people don’t. They saw the movie together when it first came out, in San Francisco. They bought the VHS, wore it out, now they have it on DVD. Melissa is worried about her car out in the parking lot—in the hood, as she puts it.

I leave the bowling alley and go next door for some soul food. I try the chitterlings, which I’m told are pig’s intestines (”you have to eat them with hot sauce”), then opt for a pork chop and some mac and cheese.

Back in the action, I spot the original Liam. And Chuck E. Cheese, who is in fact, I learn, a marmot. One of the Jesuses walks out into the lanes to retrieve his ball. One of the Maudes bowls a strike. The Original Dude bowls a spare.

Says one onlooker: “This is the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A Jackie Treehorn recommends I see the Albert Brooks movie Lost in America. He confides that Lebowski Fest Vegas is better than Lebowski Fest LA. Someone else argues for Austin.

Outside the bowling alley, the night winds down ever so slowly with an original Jeff Dowd look-alike (who is not Jeff Bridges) doing an acoustic-guitar workup of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing: hold on to that fee-layee-ya’ang…

And then, soon enough: it goes on and on and on and on…

Community Connection

Also check out Eva Holland on The Meaning of ‘The Big Lebowski,” all these years later.

For more wild and wacky festivals across the globe, check out Matador Nights.

Got your own Lebowski Fest dispatches? Share them below…

Photo: mr. nightshade

Tonight the tents and RVs and camps are empty.

Tonight ice melts in unattended coolers. Filthy lawn chairs hold silent counsel over vacant plots of dust.

Tonight 43,000 burners gather in ever widening, concentric circles. The Man stands with neon and lumber arms stretched toward the sky.

This is what I have been waiting for.

Flicking a cigarette into the desert wind, a veteran burner tells me he could almost skip it. He says it has become a passe spectacle, that the Burning of The Man isn’t the point.

But I wouldn’t miss it.

And from the bursts of fire, a quarter mile distant, comes glimpses of the tens of thousands who wouldn’t miss it either.

Even the jaded old burners, a little bored, a little self important, wait restlessly for the fire.

Photo: william.neuheisel

We stoke the collective need for The Man to Burn with our upturned eyes and raised hands and dancing feet.

Firefighters in haz-mat suits and shiny beetle shell helmets hold a wide perimeter around the Man.

Are the firefighters apart of this?

Are they too feeding the fire, or merely waiting to clock off?

As the call comes through on the walkie talkie does their breath catch? Even a little?

Boooooom!

Ahhhhhhh…*

Red gold green works of fire explode above the Man. Downwind smoldering debris falls.

We scream.

For the joy, the slaked anticipation, for the thing that was built to burn, we scream and scream.

The fireworks conclude in an inferno, a torrent of flame curling in on itself in a roiling plume, breathing heat and light on the upturned (screaming) faces.

For a moment everything is fire.

The Man burns to the ground and we rush in, ignoring the commands of the firefighters to stay back. It’s not time! they shout. They only shout once then look on helplessly, shrugging at each other.

Counterclockwise we circle the fire.The air is warped with heat.

A perfect, naked pixie twirls her lithe frame before the curtain of fire.

Community Connection

Have you had an experience at Burning Man you would like to share? Please hit us up in the comments below.

Get your Burning Man fix all year right here on Matador: The First-Timer’s Guide to Participating at Burning Man, BNT’s Best Of The Week: Burning Man Roundup,13 of the Coolest Art Installations in the History of Burning Man.

Each day at Matador we line out publishing priorities, to-do lists, and stokes to the rest of the team via a central email called ‘the daily.’ Inevitably it goes off on tangents. Yesterday’s was a ‘what are you reading and listening to?’ kind of thing. Here’s what people said:

Adam Roy, contributing editor, Matador Sports. Listening: It’s been months, but I’m still glued to Tobacco’s record, Fucked-Up Friends. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard. Electronica, but warm and organic. Trippy as all hell. Reading: A couple weeks ago, I discovered Olé, the big sports daily in Argentina.

David Miller, Senior Ed. Listening: Juana Molina, Atlas Sound.

Reading: Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin.

Ross Borden, Founding member, CEO: Listening to: 1. Major Lazer (diplo + switch) BBC essential mix. free download here 2. Artist: Paul white album: The Strange Dreams of Paul White — a rec from our very own Paul Sullivan. 3. Artist: Bullion album: Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee Reading The Economist.

Hal Amen, co-editor, Matador Trips. Reading: I’m currently try to get into Blade Runner in Spanish–proving harder than I’d hoped. Was it foolish to take on sci-fi in a foreign language?

Sarah Menkedick, Co-Editor, Matador Abroad. Listening to: Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago.” This is classic drinking-whisky-in-winter-post-breakup music. Reading: Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi.

Lola Akinmade, Editor Matador Goods. ReadingThe New Age of Adventure – an anthology from National Geographic Adventure. Listening: U2’s Magnificent (also danced in to this on the wedding day!), and Razorlight’s Wire to Wire.

Christine Garvin, contributing editor, BNT: Reading: Been trying to get my hands on a cheap copy of Emotional Freedom by Judith Orloff, and revisiting, once again, The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth. Listening: my old peeps at Non-Stop Bhangra, for Jimmy Love’s latest bhangra mixes.

Juliane Huang, Intern of the Century. Listening: N.A.S.A. – Spirit of Apollo.

Reading: Junot Diaz – The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Paul Sullivan. Reading: Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives + The Rest is Noise by Alex RossListening: Fuckpony - Let The Love Flow, David Sylvian – Manafon.

Eileen Smith, Community Outreach Ninja. Reading: La Vuelta a Chile en Bicicleta by Régine Bienvenue and Pierre Devaux, A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe edited by Faith Conlon, Ingrid Emerick and Christina Henry de Tessan and Cadillac Desert, the American West and its Disappearing Water by Mark Reisner. Listening: mainly to Crud, not worth mentioning.

Carlo Alcos, Co-Editor, Matador Trips. Reading: I just finished Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer. Right now I’m two pages into Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk. Listening: currently a lot of Josh Ritter and Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst…and lately old school Public Enemy, De La Soul, Pharcyde, Tribe Called Quest…

Ian MacKenzie, Matador Network Architect. Reading: The End of Your World - Adyashanti.

Listening: Wilco, Michael Franti.

Michelle Shusterman, Contributing Editor, Matador Goods. Reading: Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell.

Listening: Ojos de Brujo

[feature photo: pusgums]

Community Connection

What are y’all listening to? Reading?

Travel writing tends to get pigeonholed. You rarely find anything on it–from literary criticism to reviews of prominent or up and coming writers–outside of the same small group of online publications.

This is due partly to the sense that travel writing is often storytelling or language commodified, writing corrupted by marketing, which unfortunately is an on-point assessment in many cases.

Getting dozens of submission each week filled with salesman-y language makes me wonder what people are reading, but then coming across a New York Times travel section with the same cliches (here are some today: “Handsome beaches, bohemian design and youthful chaos”) answers my question.

One thing we’ve always believed at Matador is that travel writing should be an open and creative, ultimately literary form. Its only real requirement is that it’s based on faithful reporting, that the author doesn’t make anything up. And it should also give the reader a strong sense of place. In other words, the setting itself is almost like another character.

With that definition in mind, I wanted to share some of my favorite sites, magazines, and blogs, all of which publish, analyze, or at least touch on writing that has these elements, writing that goes by different names – “narrative nonfiction,” “creative nonfiction,” “literary nonfiction,” “place-based writing”- but is essentially “travel writing” even if it’s not recognized as such.

Internet Magazines

These are general magazines on literary criticism / writing, but not publishers:

1. HTML GIANT

HTML GIANT’s tagline is “the internet literature blog of the future.” Those who take themselves and their writing very seriously might reject this magazine ‘on its face’ (there are lots of f-bombs and an occasional crotch or breast shot couched as self-effacing promotion or “venturing into art”), but I haven’t found anywhere on the web with more vibrant and hilarious discussions on writing, authors, form, and just about anything.

Last week there was a post on Joyce that had almost 350 comments, many of them spontaneously written mini-essays that could’ve stood alone as posts on literary criticism and writing.

2. Pank Magazine’s Blog

Pank Blog self defines: “PANK inhabits its contradictions.” Some really good discussion, voices, and they also have their own magazine / publication.

3. New Pages

New Pages: “News, information and guides to independent bookstores, independent publishers, literary magazines, alternative periodicals, independent record labels, alternative newsweeklies and more.” Their blog has great posts on authors, new releases, contests, grants, and more.

Literary Journals

These are places that publish–albeit under a different label–travel writing:

4. Memoir

Memoir is pushing all kinds of new forms of writing that have to do with memory.

5. 4th Genre

4th Genre writes: “We invite you to experience Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, a journal devoted to publishing notable, innovative work in nonfiction. The title reflects our intention to give nonfiction its due as a literary genre—to give writers of the fourth genre a showcase for their work and to give our readers a place to find the liveliest and most creative works in the form.”

6. Words Without Borders

Words Without Borders “opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the world’s best writing.” Just getting into this publication–seems really strong.

7. Camas

Camas is the literary magazine based out of University of Montana’s writing program. Former contributors include Matadorians Teresa Ponikvar and Adam French. Camas publishes writing on place, with a special focus on the Rocky Mountain West.

8. River Teeth

River Teeth is a journal dedicated to “nonfiction narrative.” The authors they quote on the homepage (Tim O’Brien), and in the About Us (David James Duncan) are two of my favorites.

9. Virginia Quarterly

Virginia Quarterly just keeps getting better. Matador’s Managing Editor Julie Schwietert notes “their focus is increasingly place-based (and outside US).”

Print Publications

These are the ‘big-time’ markets.

10. The Sun

The Sun gets nationwide distribution at bookstores and places like Whole Foods and seems really fresh and new even though it’s been around for 30 years.

11. Orion

Orion – publishes great writing with regular contributors like Rick Bass and Barry Lopez. Like The Sun it’s ad-free.

Community Connection

These are some of the highlights. There are definitely more out there. What do you like to read?

Photo: dotbenjamin

Just over two weeks ago we announced the launch of Matador’s first educational component–MatadorU, a training course for writers at all levels of their careers.

Since then we’ve had dozens of students sign up and begin the 12-week curriculum. Discussion at the forums, writer/editor communication, and social networking / promotion of students’ writing has become more vibrant and diverse every day.

Plain and simple: it’s been the most exciting development at Matador since we grew from a single community to an integrated media network.

As a way of continuing to spread the word, we’re officially launching a twitter-based contest. Each month, we’ll offer one lucky student free tuition for MatadorU’s Travel Writing Course. The rules and ways to participate are super simple.

VIEW THE CONTEST RULES AND ENTER HERE.

Good luck to everyone, and we look forward to announcing the first winner!

[UPDATE 9/24: We're officially closing entries to this contest at midnight EST on 9/24.]

All photos by Lola Akinmade

If you’re a photographer building your online presence and are now regularly networking with other photographers to get crucial feedback and constructive criticism on various techniques, it’s probably time to begin thinking about contests.

Contests give you an assessment of how your photographs stack up against the competition as well as the visibility that comes with winning one.

A major downside is most competitions come with entry fees. Even well known contests from Photo District News (PDN) for professional photographers come with fees as high as $35 per photograph.

These costs usually go towards prize payouts, communication, marketing, and other administrative tasks.

For the hobbyist, this can be downright expensive and usually deters participation.

Other cons include rules that require photographers transfer all rights to the sponsor so always read the fine print as a few competitions may require this.

So we’ve rounded up a few popular contests that don’t require entry fees.

Free

National Geographic’s Your Shot – Readers are invited to upload photos and every day, Photo Editor Susan Welchman picks her daily dozen. Each month, one of the submitted photos is selected for publication in the magazine – a much coveted opportunity.

Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest – Powerhouse Smithsonian runs a high visibility contest that awards winners of each category $500 with the grand prize being an all expenses paid trip.

Energizer Photo Contest – Administered by National Geographic, this is one of their free contests with the grand winner landing spots on NG Expeditions to places like Tanzania and publication in the magazine.

Nikon Photo Contest International – Nikon has been running this free contest since 1969, providing opportunities for amateur photographers to spotlight their work.

Sony Photo Awards – With a prize of $5000 and all expenses trip to Cannes going to the overall winner, this is another contest worth exploring.

Nothing like camera giants Nikon and Sony promoting your photography through live exhibitions and online.

Fresh M.I.L.K – A grand prize of $50,000 and no entry fees makes M.I.L.K one of the best free contests out there. 150 winners are also selected with prizes of $500 each, and all winning entries are published in one of their books with royalties doled out. This contest was launched in November 2008.

Pricey But May Be Worth It

International Photography Awards (IPA) – With a cash prize of $10,000 for the International Photographer of the Year award and $5,000 for the Discovery of the Year, this renown contest provides lots of categories and opportunities to win, but at $25 per photograph, is one of the priciest.

National Geographic Traveler’s World In Focus Contest – With entry fees upwards of $22 per photo after the promotional deadline of $12 per photograph, winners of this contest win exciting all expenses paid trips and some nice professional grade cameras.

Travel Photographer of the Year (TPOTY) – Usually touted as the Oscars or Emmys of Travel Photography, this may be worth considering. Keep in mind that the competition is fierce with established professional photographers usually sweeping all categories.

Winning one of these contests can definitely boost your portfolio and speed track your budding career as a travel photographer.

Community Connection

Know of other free contests worth entering? Please share them below

Blue Sky. Image released by Dept. of Defense

It’s what we notice that hurts afterward. This year I’ll wake up on September 11 and think, as I have for the past seven years: “The sky was just so blue.”

It was the thought that played in my head all day, a ridiculous refrain. As if perfect blue could ward off what was about to happen. Or as if it would dissipate completely afterward, the sinister plumes powerful enough to blot out blue as far as the eye could see.

It was the sky I was thinking about, driving along the East River on my way to work in Queens, tempted to turn back and go home or anywhere else.

Just months into my new job as a psychotherapist working with mentally ill adults, I knew it wasn’t right. There was nothing therapeutic about a basement office with scuffed walls and no windows, an oppressive stale air hanging perpetually in the space. There was little we could achieve by listening to people tell the stories of their lives over and over again because that’s what Medicaid mandated.

I needed air. Open space to think. That blue sky.

Instead, I was in high heels, pressing gas-brake-gas-brake all the way to work until I found a parking place. You don’t notice time when you don’t need to, when nothing significant is going on. You think: “Coffee. Notebook. Pen. Morning staff meeting.” Having given in to the roteness of your days, you’re on automatic. You look back on these moments and think you should have been more attentive. You should, at least, have made a note of the time.

James was the most psychotic of my clients, constantly besieged by invisible torturers who delighted in making him miserable. “Get the knife out of my back!” he said as I shut my office door and put my keys and ID around my neck. It was too early to practice reality testing. “Sit down, James. We’ll talk about the knife later.”

“Not a knife. Not a knife. I’m telling you, get the planes out of those buildings!”

This was a new one.

James pulled the TV out of a therapy room and into the common room, tuning in to the only channel whose signal could penetrate the basement. The planes were stuck in the buildings. “What are you going to do about it?” James asked me, and I couldn’t decide if his tone was like a child earnestly asking a parent or like the part of him that scared me most– the part that challenged me because it touched a place deep inside where I felt entirely inadequate to help.

“I’m not sure yet,” I answered honestly, and shut the staff room door behind me.

We would evacuate the patients, sending them home to parents or caregivers who’d have to deal with the immediate terror of the attacks. We would be sent home ourselves, wanting to go but wanting to stay, too. Not wanting to go home to our small apartments, where we knew we’d be alone with our televisions, curled up on couches and watching the deliberate speed of the crashes over and over again without learning anything new, wanting to do something—anything—different, but not being able to.

U.S. Navy Photo by Jim Watson. (RELEASED)

The thoughts that occurred to me as the 30 minute commute home to the South Bronx stretched to six hours, most of which were spent sitting motionless on the Queensboro Bridge, where I watched smoke billow into the sky: I will never wear high heels again. I will always keep my cell phone charged (the battery was dead). I will always have gas in my car (the tank was empty and I was broke). The sky is still so blue.

In the weeks that followed, I’d sit in class at NYU and smell death in the air. I’d clean ash from the windowsills of my apartment—more than six miles from the Trade Center—every day. I’d look at posters of the presumed missing, one photograph of a fat man in a suit, standing next to an elephant imprinted in my mind.

I’d sit in meetings where we’d talk about emergency plans, contingencies for disasters that pushed the limits of our imaginations. I’d spend eight hours counseling clients at work. I’d be drafted to counsel colleagues in a strange ethical void of what people were starting to call the “new normal.” I’d be dispatched to counsel people in parks.

And finally—months later—I’d be asked to counsel Spanish speaking immigrant women. Either their partners had died or had been picked up by Immigration and carted off to distant prisons in states whose names they couldn’t pronounce, but either way, it was hell.

“I just can’t stop thinking about the stack of letters,” one woman told me, raising her hand above her head to show how high the bills and official notices piled up. “I understand,” I told her, breaking up inside, thinking, again, about that blue sky.

Community Connection

For another Matadorian’s memories of 9/11, please read 8:46 am, 9/11 Manhattan by Tom Gates.

All photos by author. For use by permission only.

The Mexican construction workers were yelling again. They had been yelling for days, mostly tossing jokes about each other’s moms. Normally I enjoyed the backdraft of their conversation, which wove its way up from the floor below, through the clanky heater ducts and into my high-rise office.

This time the yelling was different, though. Urgent. Things about God and curse words and then more things about God.

My assistant was at the office door with a look. A very bad look. Pointing.

My window faced downtown, about fifty blocks from where half of the World Trade Center was smoldering. The fire was in its midsection, like it had just received a swipe from Wolverine. Something was sticking from its chest, dripping fire.

We turned on the TV. The television gave us the answers. The plane. The crash. The quivery tone of the commentators who weren’t yet thinking about how famous this moment might make them.

We piled into a different corner office, this one with an unobstructed view of both The WTC and The Empire State, which stood eight blocks from our window. We watched the television, then the window, then the television. Four of us in this office. Four of us dumfounded.

We watched the second plane hit the second tower. The soundproofed glass saved us from any noise. Someone had hit the mute button yet still the action took place. A plane from the sky hitting a building on the ground.

I had been to a party on the WTC’s top floor two nights before. I remembered how the building swayed in the wind, as it was designed to do. I remembered putting my Red-bulled head against the window, looking down, thinking that a building like this shouldn’t even exist. It was an unearthly feeling, looking down from that high.

People were in there now.

People were in there, dying. Thoughts started to crank through my head that I didn’t want to have. Were the people in the planes alive? Would the people at the top half be able to get down? Would helicopters fly to the roof or was that something that only happened in movies? Why wasn’t there a superhero who could blow cold-freeze breath on the flaming crack?

I had my camera. I took pictures. I felt like I shouldn’t be taking pictures, knowing that I was documenting death. I would later have them developed and would be so disgusted with myself that I would keep them in a box until last December, unearthed only after bravely consuming a bottle of Chianti. You are looking at the pictures now, in this article.

There were many minutes where nothing happened. We weren’t crying. We weren’t hysterical. We weren’t rushing to the phones. We weren’t running for the stairs. We just stood there, immobilized, twenty-four stories in the air, watching two 110 story buildings burn.

The first building fell. It had never occurred to us that this would even happen. We chanted along with the whole world. “Oh my God.”

Behind us the television was running a loop of the plane crashing into Tower Two. In front of us Tower One thwumped. It looked like someone had taken the legs out from underneath it. The dust and ash and building parts flew so far uptown that, for the first time, we started to think about our own safety.

That’s when we became scared. Imagine that? We had been watching all of this and forgotten to be scared. But then the news started talking about a plane in Washington. Fighter jets started roaring into lower Manhattan. The Empire State sat there looking at us, tapping us on the shoulder.

My father called me. I hadn’t spoken to him in ten years. “What’s going on down there?” I thought about the letter. How he had threatened me. About him running me around the house when I was a kid because I was too fat to be a baseball star. About how I made him sick to his stomach and I disgusted him and how I should get out of his sight. And then, about the Mexicans below who were still yelling. If he was here, he would be calling them Spics and telling me that they were stealing my scholarship money and how they were all lazy bottom feeders, almost as bad as the…

“Don’t ever call me again.”

We watched the second building fall with the same shock that we felt when the first one collapsed. The debris seemed to fly further uptown this time. People were watching from dangerously close rooftops now and I wished I could scoop them up and drop them safely on the sidewalk.

There was no more World Trade Center. It was just fucking gone. We said that. “It’s just fucking gone.”

“Can we go?” Somebody in the office was talking to me. I realized that I was in charge. The boss. I felt like a parent must feel after bringing their first baby home. Was this the right move? Of course it was. Yes, we could go.

The streets of New York took on the feeling of a fire drill. Everyone was filing out of their buildings, unsure of where to go. People cursed their cell phones for not working. Everyone seemed to be unable to find something or someone. Marbles were bouncing through everyone’s brains. Mass scale confusion.

We Manhattanites were under lock and key, unable to leave the island or communicate with the outside world. I wanted to call my mom. I wanted to tell her that I was OK but I didn’t want to tell her that I had spoken to the man it had taken her twelve years to divorce.

The planes crashed and crashed again on television. And in my head.

I went outside twice in two days. The first was my typical morning run to the deli. The man who had been serving me coffee for five years greeted me with trembling hands and apologies. He was of Middle Eastern descent. I realized how stupid it was that I hadn’t ever asked him his name.

I was thinking about how to console him, when a cop came in and walked straight up to the counter. “How long you known me for?” he asked in a direct and near-angry manner. The man answered. “Three years?” The cop nodded and handed him a piece of paper. “These are my three numbers. If anyone fucks with you, you call me and I’ll come over and bust in their fuckin’ head.”

That night I went out to find a beer and maybe someone to talk to, even though I didn’t know what to say. I wandered through Chelsea, its streets filled with other zombies hoping to live again. I passed Rawhide, with its blacked out windows and barbed-wire logo. It was a bar for the muscleboy leather scene, a pit-stop for those who might later end up in a mask or a sling. A sign out front announced, “Free Beer Tonight. Come In And Hug Your Daddy.”

Only a guy with daddy issues would think this funny. So I laughed and laughed.

Community Connection

Where were you on 9/11? What do you remember? Please share in the comments below.