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Bob Shacochis is one of America’s most acclaimed storytellers. He’s a novelist, a short story writer and a literary journalist who “lives inside the story” in the tradition of the New Journalism popularized by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson.
A contributing editor at Outside, Shacochis played an influential role in transforming the publication from a rather pedestrian outdoor magazine into a breathtaking literary periodical. Shacochis, Jon Krakauer, Tim Cahill, Mark Bryant and Hampton Sides were part of the early vanguard of young writers and editors at Outside who became giants in the world of outdoor adventure writing. But Shacochis, like other New Journalists before him, has an insatiable curiosity about the people, places and peculiar events he encounters in everyday life.
A longtime culinary aficionado, Shacochis served as a cooking columnist for Gentleman's Quarterly magazine, writing the “Dining In” column. The column included food recipes ranging from grilled stuffed turkey for dysfunctional family holidays to lobster-asparagus sushi rolls. But the subplot of each column was always about his continuing love affair with his wife. The “Dining In” columns are collected in Domesticity, an innovative cookbook/essay collection.
Shacochis is also a renowned war correspondent. He was sent by Harper’s magazine to tell the story of the uprising against Jean-Bertrand-Aristide and Operation Uphold Democracy, the United States government's official name for its 1994 occupation of the tiny Caribbean Island of Haiti. Shacochis traveled for nearly a year covering the invasion, living with a Special Forces team. The experience resulted in The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis’ first full-length book of nonfiction. One reviewer proclaimed that The Immaculate Invasion “achieves an unsettling triumph of combat journalism that will earn . . . comparisons to other modern classics, such as Michael Herr's Dispatches.”
Shacochis is currently working on a sequel to Swimming in the Volcano, another novel in a planned trilogy.
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Eighteen hundred miles east from where I sit, shivering at my cluttered plywood desk, and eight thousand feet below down the long continental slope, I believe I have a home, though I have not set foot in it for 11 months. And I am fairly certain I have a wife, residing in that home, who goes about her business without me, at least until the Florida legislative session ends in June,when she will head my wayagain. It will of course be lovelyto see her, thoughnot so wonderful to watch her eye-brows rase as she asks, Well?–meaning, Is the book I've been working on since 2002 finished?– and sort through my menu of responses–Leave me alone. Quit nagging. What do you want from me? Can't you see I'm losing my mind? How are your fixed for cash?–until I sigh and answer simply, No. |
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Above: Bob's writing cabin in northern New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains.
Right: Neither sleep nor stimulants have any effect on the speed at which he writesthese days, which is glacial.
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The iconography on the walls of my one-room writing cabin here in the still snowbound Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico reflects the richness of a once-and-future lifestyle woefully out of sync with the poverty of my present-day habits. There are the mementos and residue of images from various magazine assignments: a Kosovo Liberation Army battle flag; a group portrait taken in Haiti of me with a Special Forces A-team; the opening layout for a profile I wrote of Kathmandu, the Himalaya towering over the skyline of the city; a glossy photograph of an exploding volcano in Kamchatka, where I was investigating the Russian mafia’s theft of entire salmon-packed rivers on the Siberian peninsula. A working author’s miscellany also competes for space: artwork prototypes and proofs of book covers, a Patagonian fishing license, a tango poster I purchased on the streets of Buenos Aires, where the middle book in the trilogy I’ve been working on since 1989 will be set. And piled everywhere, mockingly, is the gear I have no time for at this endless present moment: dusty, cobwebbed and unattended fly rods, spinning rods, backpacks, tents, downhill skis, snowshoes, kayak paddles, an outboard motor and a 150-million-year-old saligram (an ammonite fossil) I plucked out of the Kali Gandaki Gorge on an expedition to the ancient kingdom of Mustang on the Tibetan Plateau. I use it now to keep the door of the cabin cracked open to allow my dogs in and out, their free passage synonymous with my sanity (and ice-cold feet from the draft). |
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