William Dietrich Home

 

Pausing To Observe

by bdietrich on February 17, 2012

One requirement of good writing is paying attention.

Whether one is journalist, novelist, or poet, the requirement to closely observe the subject at hand – be it human relationships, a political campaign, or the splendor of nature – is what makes reading worthwhile.

I admire people with the gift of paying close attention, and recently enjoyed the wisdom of an observer par excellence, Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group in Bow, Washington.

Bud is a neighbor who each winter offers a five-night class on the eagles, hawks, and falcons that patrol northwest Washington, where I live.

From my bedroom office window I spy bald eagles pretty regularly; one flew by just now. Some are year-around residents and others are “snowbirds” fleeing from Alaska’s winter. They dine on Skagit River salmon and migrating waterfowl in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.

Bud has turned passion into a career. He’s not a scientist on a professional academic track, but his skill in watching raptors has won him grants to travel around the world to band, radio-tag, and observe. He’s added significant understanding to our fledgling knowledge of aerial predators that migrate hundreds of miles in a single day.

He also traps over-abundant hawks at Seattle-Tacoma International […]

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For Better and Worse

by bdietrich on November 27, 2011

The dysfunction of Congress was a reminder this Thanksgiving of how some things seem to be getting worse.

Political ads. Air travel. Traffic. Road repair. The weather. (Climate change scientists are predicting more extremes.) The stock market. (More volatile.)  Musicals. (Rodgers & Hammerstein, come back!) The Academy Awards. Hiking trails. (In disrepair.) Manners.

As usual, America is falling behind. In earlier times it was to the Russians. Then the Japanese. Then the Europeans. Now it’s the Chinese. And don’t expect a reprieve. We have a chattering class of professional worriers who are well paid to keep our anxiety levels high.

For most of my life our schools have also been failing (Sputnik, etc.), our bodies flabby (JFK worried about this), our Christmases too commercial, our greed unchecked, our national debt rampant (we had to debate this in high school in the 1960s), our minds a muddle (from Gilligan’s Island to the Kardashians), our lives a sweatshop, our psyches angst-ridden, and our tastes barbaric.

Maybe it’s true. Intellectuals have been forecasting our fall at least since Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” in 1918.

But history cuts both ways. In Ethan Gage’s day at the beginning of the 19th Century, the invention of mass conscription made […]

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Physics and Literature

Besides providing pleasure, storytelling justifies itself by occasionally providing truth, or at least insight. But what if we don’t know what’s real?

The thought occurred while reading physicist Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. It’s one of many popular cosmology books about the origin and nature of the universe I’ve read over the years by scientists such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Frank Tipler, Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, and so on.

I read numerous titles not because I understand this stuff but because I don’t. Each scientist brings their own set of analogies to help visualize peculiarities hard to verbalize outside the language of mathematics.

Greene is better than most at doing this, but the reality described sometimes sounds as fanciful as medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We take these guys seriously because oddball ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics, proposed in leaps of genius, have subsequently been confirmed by experiment. So new bizarre ideas might eventually be confirmed too.

Consider a few of the impossible things before breakfast these physicists and astronomers ask us to believe:

-       That we can’t detect up to 96 percent of the matter and energy in our […]

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Plotting Tips

The Seattle 7, an energetic “service club” of Seattle-area authors who raise money for literacy, recently raised $10,000 through a day-long instructional program. I was one of several authors giving brief tips, mine on plotting. For what it’s worth, here’s some things aspiring writers might find useful:

A sympathetic hero/heroine with a Quest. Frodo must destroy the ring, Clint Eastwood must exact revenge, Jane Austen characters must find a husband, Hemingway dudes must find masculinity, Luke must fight the evil Empire.
High stakes. The fate of the world, clearing the character of a crime, saving the children, finding the serial killer, discovering the treasure, winning the prize, getting the girl or guy, achieving inner happiness. Mysteries are a puzzle, thrillers a vise.
A character arc in which your hero grows. Gains courage, competence, love, wisdom, acceptance, independence, etc. By the end of the plot, they have changed, usually for the better. End your story with resolution, don’t just stop it.
An interesting villain; i.e. an intriguing, believable one. Understandable motives. Everyday ticks and flaws. Surprising powers. Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Evil was interesting because he was out of date.
A wise mentor. Yoda, Gandalf, Obi-Wan, Merlin, Hannibal (again), Jim on Huck’s raft, the wise-cracking girlfriend, the […]

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On Turning Sixty

I turned sixty a few days ago (same September 29 birthday as Admiral Horatio Nelson) and found myself neither as wise nor as wizened as I would have predicted when I was thirty.

To my surprise, the Big 6-0 is no big deal. Sure, physically I’ve slowed, though I actually have felt better the past few months than in years due to improvement in my rheumatoid arthritis and the drugs for it. Mentally, my consciousness feels little different than it did when I was in my 20s; once you hit adulthood your sense of self doesn’t change much.

Age is a state of mind. Sixty is the new fifty, partly because we live longer and partly because Social Security and Medicare are receding like rainbows as a result. When I quit teaching in June people congratulated me on my “retirement,” and I thought, ‘Are you kidding? I hope/fear to be in harness at my keyboard at 80, still trying to peck out a living.’

I regard myself as a fortunate hard worker, a blue-collar kid with modest expectations blessed with a surprisingly interesting life – with the best and worst developments in it often disturbingly contingent on good and bad luck. I think […]

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Environmental hero

On Saturday, September 17, I was flattered to be one of five individuals and one organization honored as a 2011 “environmental hero” by Resources for Sustainable Communities in Bellingham, WA.

As I pointed out when accepting the award, I take em where I can get em, but I’m not much of a hero. I’ve written about the environment as a journalist and author for decades, but that was writing about real heroes, not me. I’ve contributed to local environmental books, made speeches, and served on boards. But I know hundreds of people who “walk the talk” better than I do.

I drove our Prius to the ceremony, but that’s my wife’s car. I usually pilot our small SUV, a RAV4.

My fellow heroes, who are real ones, are tireless volunteer Marie Hitchman, energy conservation leader John Davies, environmental educator Robyn de Pre, the late activist Gerald Larson, and the Bellingham Food Bank.

Still, it’s an opportunity to comment on an abiding interest. The keynote speaker was Denis Hayes of Seattle’s Bullitt Foundation, the first national coordinator of Earth Day way back in 1970. He made two good points. First, we’re in deep doo-doo – world population is seven times what it was in Napoleon’s […]

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Moving On

On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, my family did our best to celebrate.

It was my mother’s 72nd birthday and she’d just moved near us after the death of my stepfather in Arizona. So we went to a restaurant as planned, and sat there in surreal, gloomy isolation, the only customers in the place.

She’s 82 today. We took her out to dinner again, but you can bet it was on Friday the 9th this year.

That first birthday bash wasn’t the only miscalculation I made. I initially believed Colin Powell’s pitch on weapons of mass destruction and supported the most boneheaded war in American history.

Oops. I forgot that “the first casualty in war is truth.” (See the initial reports on Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc.)

It’s been a rough decade or, I’d guesstimate, a rough 13 years. There was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and impeachment fiasco, the dot.com collapse, the Bush-Gore election imbroglio, 9-11 and its economic aftershock, two wars, the housing bubble and bank collapse, ineffectual tax cuts, disastrous deficit spending, Hurricane Katrina, a blitz of blizzard-tornado-drought-flood this year (accompanied by climate change denial, of course), and completely dysfunctional politics.

There was even an East Coast earthquake, for crying out loud. And a […]

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Bookstore of the Future?

Is Scottsdale’s Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore the bookstore of the future?

Certainly owner Barbara Peters is one of the industry’s most innovative thinkers in our Brave New Scary World of e-books, Internet competitors like Amazon, superstore chains like Barnes & Noble, and speculation about whether the printed book will survive at all.

Poisoned Pen (www.poisonedpen.com) is a smart-looking independent bookstore with wood floors and brick walls in a suburb of Phoenix, and has carved a niche since 1989 by offering an expert selection of thrillers and mysteries. I appeared there recently with another author, Max Collins (“Road to Perdition,” etc.) and his collaborator on mystery “cozies” with an antique theme, his wife Barbara.

Afterward the other Barbara, Ms. Peters, explained how she’s adapting to tumult in the industry.

First is strong Internet promotion with a sophisticated bookstore website (regularly updated) and webcasts of author presentations. http://poisonedfiction.blogspot.com/p/webcasts.html is the webcast page. There’s an electronic newsletter, links to book clubs, online sales, and more.

Second is the regular hosting of author events that have made Poisoned Pen a regular stop for nationally-known mystery and thriller writers. She’s turned out a thousand people for those at the top of the field. Barbara builds on this with […]

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Write By The Water

Teaching writing is wonderfully instructive for the teacher, and few venues are more pleasant than the August residency program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, part of their MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) writing program. I just spent three days there, eating more than I should.

Setting: The funky log-house charm of Captain Whidbey Inn on Whidbey Island, “Proudly out of step for the last 100 years.” Penn Cove on one side, a saltwater lagoon on the other, and trees and flowers between. The ambience inspires students and instructors alike.

Fellowship: A whole passel of people passionate about writers and writing. There’s a special pleasure in sitting at breakfast with 85-year-old poet and novelist David Waggoner and hearing him hold forth on drinking with Dylan Thomas in that poet’s final days.

Fringe benefits: Texas barbecue, watching graduates take a celebratory (?) plunge into the frigid saltwater, or checking out the exquisitely-crafted sailboat of author Larry Cheek who spent three years, he explained, learning not just the art of the Boatwright, but patience.

The Whidbey students, who ranged in age from 24 to 75, heard a real range of publishing experiences, from the Irish pleas for artistry from editor Brian Doyle to the commercial […]

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Into Africa

Safari sounds like an exotic word, but it simply means journey or trip in Swahili.  Yet even in 2011 it is a return to a lost world. Book research was the excuse to visit the Serengeti region of Tanzania, but curiosity about the cradle of mankind was the motivation for a just-completed two-week tent safari. I wasn’t disappointed.

East Africa casts a spell of golden grasses, dramatic skies, rearing volcanoes, a precipitous Great Rift, and the hope that comes from healthy wildlife. In Tanzania’s national parks, the humans are the ones in cages – their bouncing Land Rovers and Land Cruisers – and the animals roam free.

The result is astonishing; the roadside spectacle tops what I’ve seen in places like Yellowstone or Denali. We saw a leopard kill, lions mate, baboons play, giraffes neck-duel, zebras roll in the dust, crocodiles snooze, hippos grunt, warthogs graze, and ostriches flirt with a frustrated male. An aged, near-blind elephant as wrinkled as wet newspaper shuffled a few yards away, snuffing warily. A lioness sunbathed with paws elevated in the air, the breeze caressing the fur of her stomach. A black rhino trotted like a tank, lay down, and then snoozed for three hours […]

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