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Classic Bill: “Into Woods”
Dave and Poppy, October 12, 2011 Gardening one day in the spring of 1992, first year in Maine, I looked at my dirty and freshly blistered hands, and thought of my days in construction. Idea for an...
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Learning to Surf
We are in the process of converting and re-stocking are other categories, including ”Our Best American Essays,” which this is a part of. To read this essay in its original form as it appeared in Orion...
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Winter Solstice
From my book Temple Stream [then as now, though the dogs are gone, and a new one in their place, pretty Baila, Elysia not only born since (her birth part of the narrative) but eleven years old!]: #...
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Ultimate Glory
Those who enjoyed this essay, might like this one too: KID OF THE YEAR. Which gets at the roots of my somewhat overdeveloped competitive instincts. As for the essay below, I’ve been thrilled by the...
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Getting Outside Saturday: Field Notes on My Daughter
We moved from Cape Cod to Carolina about eight and a half years ago. I wrote this soon after our first school year in the South ended, when we returned to the Cape in June. It turned out we weren’t...
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Our Best American Essays: Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine by Bill Roorbach . . . “Hard work,” says Dicky Butts, and we haven’t even started yet. . “Get wet today,” says Truman Lock. He pulls his...
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A Letter to a Neighbor
You will be moving into your new home soon and, as ours is a small community, the neighborly thing for me to do would be to bring by a tin of cookies or fudge. Instead I send this letter....
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SUMMERS WITH JULIET is Twenty
Summers with Juliet, published February, 1992 Summers With Juliet started as an idea for a personal essay, one of my first ever (before that I’d only written formal essays and fiction), nothing more...
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Vernal Equinox
23.4 degrees Here is the equal night again, so different from that of autumn, which comes dressed in summer. In fact, the first day of spring comes to Maine in high winter drag. Often it comes...
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Getting Outside Saturday: “Scioto Blues”
The Scioto and Downtown Columbus [This essay is from my book Into Woods and originally appeared in The Missouri Review. Later, Harper's picked up an excerpt for their "Readings" section. It was...
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Greatest Sportswriter of 2013? David Gessner!
The Greatest Sportswriter . USA Today has picked our own David Gessner’s essay “Ultimate Glory” as one of the greatest pieces of sportswriting for 2013. That puts him in great company, of course,...
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Autumnal Equinox
In late August, more emphatically in September, the garden begins to die. First frost in our valley location is generally within a week or two of Labor Day, and follows the olden wisdom: beware the...
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Sixty by Sixty: A Meditation in Mosaic Upon the Sixtieth Birthday of the...
Elysia at Haystack, 2013 Prologue (in Sixty Words, Too: One to Grow On) This essay is about the power of collaboration. Written in my sixtieth year, it’s a mosaic of sixty juxtaposed sections, each of...
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The Meal of a Lifetime
In August of 2010, Brendan and I lived at a three-week artists’ residency in southern Germany. “You’ll live in a castle,” the organizer who’d invited us had promised. So we arrived at the Schloss...
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