Seth Cagin
Seth Cagin is co-author with Philip Dray of three books. Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs, Politics, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Violence (Harper & Row, 1984); We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and the Civil Rights Battle for Mississippi; (Macmillan, 1988) and Between Earth and Sky: How CFCs Changed Our World and Endangered the Ozone Layer (Pantheon, 1993).
With his wife Marta Tarbell he cofounded The Telluride Watch newspaper in 1997. He and Tarbell sold The Watch at the end of 2014.
Are you a writer if you don't publish?
For any writer, that is no academic question. And it used to be pretty straightforward. A writer wrote and submitted what he wrote to publishers, and they certified the writing’s merit by publishing it. Then reviewers and readers had a whack at it. We all know that publishing isn’t like that anymore. Publishers always had a commercial interest, but now it seems as if that’s all they have. The profession no longer operates as part of a Third Estate, ever mindful of that the profession entails civic and cultural responsibilities. It is more akin to Hollywood, delivering enough quality to participate in the awards game, but mostly producing dreck.
On the other side of the ledger, the barriers to entry for a writer to self-publish — what we used to call vanity publishing — have dropped to near zero. Anyone with a computer and internet access can put their words, images and ideas out for the world to see, if the world cares to take a look. The vetting, the quality question, is no longer monopolized by professional publishers and critics. Just like music went indie and filmed art/entertainment went to live streaming and subscription services and festivals, a lot of writers have moved online.
For a writer who came of age under the old paradigm, this is not an easy transition to make. It’s hard to join the ranks of the “vanity” press. But maybe it’s better to trust to the wisdom of the digital crowd than it is to have faith in the gatekeepers of mainstream publishing. Maybe there’s no choice. In any case, for a lot of writers these days, to be a writer is to be a self publisher.
Ghosts of Telluride is Seth Cagin’s stab at it.
Ghost Restaurants of Telluride
One definition of a “good” restaurant, what makes it worthy of being called good to begin with, is that to at least some degree it is a labor of love. This may be especially true in Telluride, where it’s difficult just to make a living, much less to make a fortune or even to build enough of a nest egg to retire on. In the past 25 years that I’ve lived in Telluride, scores of restaurants have come and gone. A lot of love went into those restaurants. A lot of meals were prepared and served, a lot of wine poured, and a lot of life lived. And now they are gone. Good restaurants are ephemoral by their nature, often the creation of a dedicated couple or a talented chef. The restaurateurs burn out. Life happens to them. They move on. It’s hard to be in a business where you are only as good as the your last performance. Even in a big city, a restaurant that has endured longer than a generation is a novelty; old restaurants are usually not good any more; they are often tourist traps and the food they serve is questionable.
But Telluride has prided itself on its restaurant scene, and it was good and remains good, a remarkable fact considering the size of this community and how remote it is. Our restaurants are part of our culture and our social life; they provide employment and help draw the tourists that support our economy. All of us have friends in the restaurant community.
This project, Ghost Restaurants of Telluride, is one writer’s experiment with web publishing, my little personal labor of love, a project, a hobby. It is a trip down memory lane, a memorialization of ghosts, and, hopefully, if readers find it interesting and interact with it by posting comments, it may become something of a digital community scrapbook. We’ll see how it goes, but maybe after ghost restaurants I will move on to other Telluride ghosts, to memorialize people who have lived here, the dreams they pursued, the businesses they built, in bits and bytes, and for user reminiscences and interaction. Or it could expand to celebrate the chefs and restaurants who are working hard today in Telluride, enriching our community.
I know I am remembering far less about the restaurants in these pages than I’ve forgotten. So please use the comment function to add your memories to these pages to enrich them.
My plan is to improve what I’ve written by editing my introductory comments and referring to your submissions. I’m also planning to page through my bound copies of The Watch and pull stuff from the hundreds of restaurant stories and reviews I wrote over the years. In this way, the writing may not ever be finished. My thought is for it to be constantly updated, for as long as I have the desire to do it.
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