Marc Beaudin

Oh, by the way …

Posted on January 12, 2014 by marcbeaudin

… I just finished the first draft of a new book. Ha! You didn’t even know I was writing one, did you? It’s something of a travel memoir of my old hitchhiking days, mixing prose with poetry in the tradition of Basho’s haibun books. It’s called Dosojin & Tonic or Thanks for the Ride, Clyde or The Rise and Fall of Miscellaneous Jones & the Vagabond Angels: Neo-Haibun from the Travel-worn Satchel of a Weather-exposed Skeleton with the 12 Bars Blues.

I wrote the whole thing on the newest typing horse in my stable, a mid-morning-sky-blue Royal Mariner that came from a local antique shop. It gallops smoother than my Remington Streamliner and faster than my Underwood. Like other great machines, it also kills fascists. I live in a town that has not one, but two stores that stock typewriter ribbon.

I’ve made several false starts with this book, each sputtering out after a few pages. The problem was using the wrong tool for the job. I just can’t write on a computer. It’s too easy to open the file of a different project every time the one I’m working on seems to not be flowing. Pretty soon, I’ve got windows open for several poems, a play, an essay and the book. Focus is lost and I’m no longer writing anything. So I check e-mail and Facebook, play chess and think about posting something to my website.

With a manual typewriter, there’s no escaping the page in front of you. It will wait, patiently and silently, forever. I stare back for awhile, and then begin typing again.

This morning, I wrote the final words. Now it’s time for breakfast, another cup of coffee, and then, to begin the first of many revisions.

Just thought you might like to know.

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Short Poem on Religion

Posted on December 9, 2013 by marcbeaudin

As a child he knelt down to pray
Then, later
drunk
He knelt down to puke

The results were roughly the same

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Peacock’s Sabertooth

Posted on July 4, 2013 by marcbeaudin

There’s a feeling you get in Grizzly country when you’re passing too close to what looks like a perfect location for a bear’s day bed. Maybe a thicket of huckleberries, maybe an island grove of cottonwood with plenty of downed limbs and new undergrowth. But whatever it is, you stop in your tracks. Silent alarms are triggered, your hackles rise to attention, you forget to breathe.

That’s how it feels to come to the end of Doug Peacock’s latest book, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: A Renegade Naturalist Considers Global Warming, the First Americans and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene. The challenge he presents, vividly and unapologetically, of just how to respond to the effects of our long and brutal war against our own climate commands our focus and demands a decision.

Peacock’s writings, in one way or another, always elicit such a response. The difference is, in his earlier books, Grizzly Years and Walking It Off, the alarm is vicarious. One reacts to his harrowing experiences in Vietnam and close-calls with charging bears, or to his memories of walking the fine line between life and death in a southwestern desert or Himalayan snowfield. In this new book, the danger is not in his past, rather it’s in our collective future. And it’s a future so looming and imminent, that if we are to survive at all, we had better accept the idea that it is our present.

In the Shadow of the Sabertooth lays out the story of the great adventure of the first Americans in a visceral way that only a true American adventurer could. But more than that, it gives us the profound and desperately needed hope that we, today, can learn from our ancestors. That we can choose to preserve the one thing that can possibly sustain us through this current upheaval: wilderness, that primordial memory of our evolutionary success that Thoreau rightly addressed when he wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” And finally, that we can heed the threat of the sabertooth lurking in the shadows, and once again rise to the challenge.