Rodes Fishburne, Author of Going to See the Elephant

Click here to buy the new paperback of Going to See the Elephant or on the cover image below.

Craziest New Year’s Resolution?

Everybody’s got a New Year’s Resolution; mine was to try something completely different this year, preferably something that looked a little crazy at first.

Well, scratch that one off the list!

Last week I tried my friend Billy Smith’s invention, the Sporting Sail. To understand the Sporting Sail think about drag racing. Remember at the end of the run when the parachute would pop out from the drag racer to slow it down? That’s essentially the idea behind Sporting Sails, and it works if you’re on skis, skateboard, snowboard, paddleboard, etc. It’s just another way of controlling the speed of your descent.

SPORTING-SAILS - Downhill Longboarding, Skateboarding, Skiing, Snowboarding Sail

From the very first moment I used the Sporting Sail snowboarding in Lake Tahoe, I loved it. You can bomb down a hill, then slow down a bit by raising your arms, then speed up again. It’s like having air brakes. And people really respond to this thing. Particularly people who like to try new things. As I was passing one guy on the slopes, with my red-and-white Sporting Sail fully deployed, he yelled out, “Go Canada!”

Anyway, I’m thrilled to be an unofficial team rider for Sporting Sails, (look for my X Games debut) AND GO TRY SOMETHING NEW IN 2011.

This is my Crazy New Year’s Resolution, what’s yours?

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Where: Sporting Sails Website

The very best

Reynolds Price died a couple of days ago. He was 77 years old. In my house growing up his name always elicited a special tone when uttered, one of joy reserved for the kind of person who possessed the very best kind of literary brain. I knew him, a little. He wrote a wonderful essay for me when I was a magazine editor (here) and I got the chance to talk to him on the phone as well as receive a long letter clearly detailing his feeling about the use and abuse of semi-colons. Later, I visited him in his house in Durham, North Carolina. I learned three things about Reynolds that day that I came to relish, truly savor. First, included among the many wonderful things he had written were the lyrics to James Taylor’s song “Copperline”. I thought that was just about the coolest thing I’d ever heard. As a writer, his creativity flowed out of him like a very disciplined fountain. The second thing I learned was that he once wrote a book review of a novelist that had not been positive, and later the author had written him a letter to say that because of that review he was no longer continuing as a writer. Reynolds was thunderstruck to have unwittingly exerted that kind of asymmetric power. He never wrote another book review. And the third thing I learned that far away fall day, is that while life isn’t fair–if it were he wouldn’t have been in a wheel chair for the last 26 years of his life–you could feel Reynolds Prices’ soul extending about six feet beyond that wheelchair, exuding a magnetic hum only present in deeply spiritual creatures.

Essay, “Dear Harper”