Category Archives: How We Spend Our Days

How We Spend Our Days: Barb Johnson

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Barb Johnson:

Before I started writing seriously, I had spent most of my adult life as a self-employed carpenter. One habit from that life that has carried over into my writing life is that, just before I’m fully conscious in the morning, when I’m half in and out of sleep, I try to orient myself in the world. Today, I tell myself it’s Monday, a teaching day. Then I give some dreamy thought to what I want to work on. I run a little movie of it in my brain. Rather than the carpenteric: “Mill all the facing pieces,” I tell myself: “Find something for Pudge to do that will give Luis a reason to respect him just little.” And then my soupy consciousness starts making connections. This stems the panic that can set in when I’m working on a large project like a novel, as I am doing now.

My day starts at about seven. It takes me a little while to ease out of sleep and into the world, and that transition requires a certain amount of coffee, a quiet breakfast and a little bit of reading. While I’m reading, my language center wakes up. I like to immerse myself in some story that isn’t my own. Good writing inspires me, makes me feel challenged.

I love sitting down to the computer in the morning. Love it. I am rarely unaware that I am not outside lifting heavy objects or working in the heat. In New Orleans, it is still hot in September. Really hot. Steamy. Hurricanes form and dissipate, dumping a lot of water on us as they do. Not having my productivity or comfort contingent upon the weather is the single greatest part of not being a carpenter anymore.

I work only on my creative writing in the morning. That’s when I’m at my best. No email. No Facebook. No talking on the phone. No preparing for classes. I try to write at least a thousand words a day. It’s only a number, but it’s a great way to trick myself into doing what I am routinely afraid I will be unable to do: come up with something new. I love revision. I love to edit. Those things come easily. But making up the new stuff can be scary. The carpenter part of my brain is always trying to find the most efficient way to do everything, but efficiency has no place in generating new material. It takes however long it takes, and the result is often too ugly for me to believe that one day it will be better, good even. So, as a way to keep myself going, I promise myself that I can do anything I want, anything at all, once I hit that thousand-word mark. I can get up and go hang out with friends or finish the book I’m reading or take a nap if I want to. That nap part of the bargaining is hilarious: I never, ever nap. But when I stare at a blank page, it makes me sleepy, so the promise of a nap always feels meaningful.

Some days I hit a thousand words without realizing it. Some days it’s as though I enter the Twilight Zone, where no matter how much I type, the word count stays at 384. Because I am teaching in the evening, I work on my novel until about 1 p.m., and then I have lunch. Coming up out of writing takes a little time. I can’t really carry on a conversation, and I am pretty dangerous and ineffective in the kitchen. In a perfect world, I would open my front door and find a little picnic basket filled with a delicious, nutritious lunch. Alas, all the sandwich-making is up to me.

After lunch, I work on other projects. Today I am writing critiques for my students’ stories, which I marked up last week. I find this relaxing and interesting, and I always learn a lot from doing it. On a day when I don’t have class in the evening, I might take the four-block stroll down to Bayou St. John to clear my head. Sometimes the dots just connect themselves when I do this. When that happens, I often go back and revise something I wrote that morning or set something up for the next day. But today, after I finish writing the critiques, I head out to campus for workshop, which starts at six. I teach fiction writing in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. It’s a great program, close-knit and supportive. Fun.

All the sections of fiction workshop meet on Monday, and when they let out at 9 p.m., everyone heads for Parkview Tavern, a neighborhood bar, which, conveniently, is walking distance from my house. We sit outside at picnic tables. It’s hot as all get out even in September, and there are mosquitoes, but the tradition, which is nearly as old as the program, persists. I graduated from this same writing program a few years ago, and those Parkview evenings rounded out my education as a writer. Once, in a conversation with one of my teachers about how and whether I should submit a short story for publication, she stunned me by saying, “Well, I assume you want to write professionally.” I had no idea that I was a viable candidate for such a life. I mention this to emphasize the importance of writing community. We often can’t see in ourselves what others can. We can’t imagine a thing because we’ve not gotten that far in our own writing lives.

Not every night at Parkview is revelatory like that. Sometimes we talk about foolishness or play midnight bocce ball beneath the palm trees on the neutral ground that divides the street in front of Parkview, but the company of other writers is always fortifying and enlightening as well as being a nice break from the essential loneliness of the writing life. 

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • The first book, The Tiger’s Wife was given to me by a friend who knew that I was spending the year reading only novels. I had never heard of Tea Obreht—nor had anyone, I suppose. She’s very young. But she wrote this amazing, wise book. The second was Ann Patchett’s newest novel, State of Wonder. I selected it because I heart Ann Patchett. What a wonderful world she created, and what surprising characters. Women doing important things. Exactly what I was hoping to find..

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • First: Don’t freak out. Seriously. It is just words and paper. Sometimes you need to give yourself the day off and go do something else. But sometimes you don’t need a break, you need to stop being afraid. If you find you’re giving yourself too many back doors, too many days off, consider the following. When I was a carpenter, I often worked on massive projects the zillion details of which would stymie me, a deer-in-the-headlights kind of thing, so that I couldn’t figure out which thing I should do first. I had a notebook for every project, and I taped the same note on each one to jumpstart productivity when I felt stymied: Take a step in any direction. That works for writing, too. Slightly modified, that note now says: Take any step that contributes to your writerly stash. That may mean generating new work or revising work or reading in the genre in which I am working or researching lit mags to submit to. It may mean printing work out and putting it in an envelope for someone to read. It may mean working on some aspect of craft. It most certainly does not mean screwing around on the Internet. The Internet shortens your attention span. Because of its click-and-drag wizardry, it will leave you feeling impatient with the rather labor-intensive, single-focus nature of writing.  All that clickety-click quickly starves your creativity. Writing requires you to make a car out of cardboard box. The Internet gives you the car, complete with customization options applied by clicking a button. Once you contribute to your writerly stash for the day, then go ahead on, find out what your friends have been up to on Facebook while you’ve been cutting holes in cardboard boxes all day.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • When I’ve been working on something for a while, for long enough that I can’t really tell what it says anymore, I like to save it as a .pdf and then hit “read aloud.” Listening to a robot voice read the material makes me focus on the words, what’s actually on the page, separate from whatever rhythm or meaning I’ve given it when I’ve read it aloud, something I do as I go along. It solves the problem of supplying words that don’t exist. Extraneous or off-topic sentences and the absence of segues are put in stark relief. It is also quite comical to listen to a robot with precise enunciation read dialogue written in nonstandard English and containing curse words.

By Barb Johnson:

How We Spend Our Days: Heidi Durrow

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Heidi Durrow:

I only hope that today will be the first of a string of regular days.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have been on book tour almost non-stop for a year and a half.  My typical daily to-do list during this time has read: pack, unpack, go to airport. Seriously.

It has been a whirlwind tour of more than 50 cities and some 150 events.  I am fudging those numbers because I don’t want to spend any part of this day actually doing the fact-checking.  Today is my first day to write without interruption on the new book.

I start each day as I always do: a cup of coffee that I drink with my bendy straw, NPR playing in the background, and me with my Moleskine in my favorite chair with pen in hand writing three pages long-hand.  No stopping.  Today, I write: “I am sitting here.”  A lot!  Because I feel like I am just learning how to put the words on the page again.

Travel is not conducive to writing for me—so I feel very out of shape as a writer.  I don’t know if I can “tune” myself today, but I will try.

Once I finish the free-write I write a one-sentence affirmation ten times.  I know that writing this wish won’t make it come true, but it gives my brain a chance to say something nice to me.  In those minutes, I am all possibility.

It’s Saturday morning and so it’s time to go to the farmer’s market.  I’m a sucker for ritual and look forward to saying hello to the melon guy, and croissant guy, and the potato guy.  But first it’s time to workout.

I do my cardio and some weightlifting.  It’s tough.  No, it’s killing me. But that’s what I get for neglecting my workout for so long on the road.

When I’m done, I know it’s been worth it. I’ve imagined a new character for the new book. I’ve also come up with an idea for an essay which may distract me from the new novel, but I am so thankful for these new ideas—for suddenly not being stuck.

At the market, I say hello to the melon guy, the croissant guy and the potato guy.  I only buy plums.

The rest of the afternoon is my own again.  We have a dinner party tonight, but I’m not the house chef.  So I climb the stairs to my office, and sit to write.

My task: write 1500 words in a row.  Wait, let me be clear: write 1500 terrible words in a row.  I have to set the bar low.  I am deathly afraid of the page again.  And I’m not entirely sure of the story of the story.  I know the characters yes, but the story.  I keep writing to see what the characters do then I will know.

I write until it’s time to take my Saturday afternoon nap.  When I wake, I write a little more.  Soon, it’s time to get ready for dinner. The guests will arrive in just half an hour.

I don’t even look at the words I’ve written—just the word count.  Job done for today.  I’ll get back to the page tomorrow.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • Pym by Mat Johnson.  I “met” Mat when I interviewed him some time ago and am a big fan of his work.  I was feeling blue and had his book on the TBR pile—who else I thought could make me laugh and really think at the same time. His book did not disappoint. It is brilliant.

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2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • Don’t show your work too early—the feedback may stop you in your tracks.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I only write in Moleskine journals. For me, it’s Moleskine or nothing.  (I have not received any compensation for this endorsement BTW!)

By Heidi Durrow:

How We Spend Our Days: Heather Newton

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Heather Newton:

I leave my husband and twelve-year-old daughter sleeping and drive to my law office in downtown Asheville.  Friday is my designated writing day but because of vacation and crazy work load this summer it’s been four weeks since I claimed an uninterrupted Friday for fiction.  I lock the door, ignore the blinking light on the answering machine, and don’t respond to email, but there is one piece of business I take care of on-line before I get started: ordering tickets to the new Harry Potter movie for the next day.

I write at my law office because I’m conditioned to work in this place.  I’m less successful at home, where the refrigerator and TV call, and my cats climb on my keyboard.  The novel I’m working on features three main women characters. One is emerging beautifully.  The other two, not so much, and in the past week I’ve figured out why–they are too nice to each other.  My task for today is to introduce more conflict between them. 

I wrote my first novel, Under The Mercy Trees, over several years, taking pains with  each paragraph and letting the point-of-view characters emerge in long ribbons that I then wove together. With this new novel I’m doing some things differently. I’m using an outline, by which I mean a very long, detailed document with headings that say, “In this chapter X happens.”  I start with the heading then glide into writing the actual scene.  I’m also giving myself permission to write a fast and bad first draft.  Fingers crossed that I’ll be able to go back and make the novel good with revision.

 Around 11:00 I take a break to enter final grades for the “Such A Character” class I taught this summer for UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program. It was my first experience teaching creative writing, and I loved it.  I email a critique to one of my students then get back to my own work, with one more break in the afternoon to eat lunch, return client phone calls and help my secretary un-jam the copier with a pair of salad tongs from the office kitchen.

 By 3:30 I’ve written all I can. I head home, with a stop at the library to return overdue books (I can never get them in on time). I spend the afternoon helping my daughter get ready for camp.  I do laundry, locate long-lost flashlights, and prepare letters for her to open at mail call every day that contain little plastic objects from various dollar bins–erasers, a tiny bead kit, Silly Bands.  She’ll be gone for two weeks. I’ll miss her terribly, but her absence will mean more writing time.  I’m also scheming to stop taking new clients for the remainder of the summer so I can write two or three days a week instead of one. 

My husband comes in from a day in his garden and we head out to the Chinese buffet and the mall.  At Barnes & Noble I buy a copy of Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home.  I’m doing a Club Read event with her and other writers in October and am curious to read their work before I meet them .  I also buy a pair of $10 earrings at Belk–66% off. 

On the way home we stop at my mother-in-law’s house to change her porch lightbulb and check her medications, then drive the half-mile to our own house. After a week of temperatures in the nineties Asheville has cooled down enough that I need a jacket.  The night sky is a beautiful blotchy blue.  We send my daughter to bed, and I enjoy some time with my husband over a glass of wine.  

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, recommended by a friend. It’s a masterpiece, but writers should be forewarned. There’s something about the way Egan’s brilliant writing combines with the book’s exploration of how we get from A (young, full of hope and promise) to B (what we actually accomplish) that left me in despair because I know that even if I live another fifty years I will never write anything that good myself.  My depression only lasted a day or so. I’m fine now, and grateful to Egan for writing such a perfect book.

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • After you finish a piece, put on your “cliché police” hat and go through the manuscript eradicating any clichéd expressions.  Pounding hearts, icy blue eyes, toothy grins, things that are “hard as a rock” or “work like a charm”–take them all out and find an original way to say what you mean.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I hate to admit this and certainly don’t recommend it to others, but when I’m in the middle of an intense writing project such as a big revision, I like to have a bowl of Crunch-n-Munch to chomp on. It’s a habit left over from my paper-writing days in college.  It makes for a sticky keyboard but somehow helps me delve in to the work.  Candy Corn also works well.

By Heather Newton:

Under the Mercy Trees

How We Spend Our Days: Robert Boyers

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Robert Boyers:

Do most people have typical days? I suppose that this is the case, though I want very much to resist the idea, to insist that for most of us each day is apt to be at least somewhat singular. If I tell of one particular day in my life, will it plausibly stand for the others? I might say that a teaching day—Tuesdays and Thursdays, seven months each year—has its own peculiar shape, or that when I am away, on “vacation,” I spend the first four waking hours writing. I might say that on days when my wife and I have scheduled an evening dinner party we devote a couple of late afternoon hours to the standard preparations, or that each of us corresponds daily with a recently graduated student we have come to adore. But again, the variations are such as to make each day I can remember seem at least somewhat distinctive.

with Hillary Reder, the long-time SALMAGUNDI student assistant

Just back home from ten June days in Miami Beach, and with no classes to teach or students to see, I confront—with pleasure– a day of many assignments. I must make the time—five hours or so—to write two of the many introductions I will deliver at the New York State Summer Writers Institute in July. I must meet with the Associate Director of the program for a half hour or more to discuss class lists, tutorial assignments and other matters. In the course of the day Peg and I will manage, as we always do, to take a long walk and thus to talk through everything under the sun, from an irritating op-ed article by David Brooks in the NY Times to our grand-daughter’s imminent trip to Alaska. At some point I must speak on the phone with an agent about a memoiristic book on “the fate of ideas” I hope to complete on sabbatical leave in Italy this fall.

Bob and Peg

Somehow, in the course of the day, I will make time to read for a couple of hours in one of several books on liars and lying I have been slowly absorbing over several months. Though we’ll not be entertaining friends at home tonight, we’ll meet my friend Steven Millhauser for lunch at 1, as we often do during the academic year. In the evening, after dinner at home, there will be, no doubt about it, a walk, perhaps through the quiet, leafy Greenridge cemetery, perhaps to visit the horses stabled near one of the nearby town race tracks. By 9 or so there may be a little time for email, or a session in which Peg will read me the draft of a poem she has been wrestling with and I will tell her what I think. By 10, more than likely, we will pull up a couple of chairs and watch a film on our large-screen television. Studying our Netflix options as they fly by on the screen, I will say, that Italian film looks very promising, no?, and Peg will remind me that we saw it, and liked it, not very long ago.

with Carolyn Fourche and Mark Strand

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • The best book I have lately read is The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster. I read it because several friends have told me I had to, because I am to introduce Paul Auster at a public reading in July, and because I’ve long managed to read only the fiction of a writer I very much admire, only to discover that he is the author of the extraordinary early memoir, which has significantly altered the way I think of him.

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • Use your writing—even work written on assignment– to get to the very bottom of what you are thinking and feeling.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I do all of my writing-for-publication by hand in blue examination books, and have done so for more than forty years. Is revision therefore often something of a nightmare? To be sure. Would it not be more efficient to compose on a computer? No doubt. Have I seriously considered making the switch? By no means.

Books by Robert Boyers:

How We Spend Our Days: Robin Oliveira

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Robin Oliveira:

I have let myself sleep in past seven this May Monday morning, the regrettable result of this season’s endlessly gray Seattle spring. Monday is usually the day I find myself propelled by a wild energy that comes from having taken the weekend off. But this Monday, in addition to the drear, I am also awaiting news of a friend’s medical tests to determine the extent of his newly-diagnosed cancer, and so this day is tinged with sadness. But in any case, I am in no hurry to begin writing. 

I am in the process of writing my second book, and I only now feel free after a year of hoopla after the publication of My Name is Mary Sutter, a year in which, after years of writing sans any expectations except my own, I have had to meet article deadlines, fulfill myriad requests from my publicist, editor and agent, travel across the country for appearances on television and radio, give lectures and readings at libraries, bookstores and conferences, and generally become a public person after years of cultivating a very private life.

When I was writing Mary Sutter, no one cared that I was writing it, no one was waiting for it, and no one had anything to say about it. Back then I raced to the computer every morning, eager to set down every word. Now I am stymied by the pull of two projects and their individual demands: the novel I wrote and the novel I want to write. Somehow, this has manifested itself as dragging my heels, which, I worry, means that I have nothing to say in a second book and that failure is certainly right around the corner. (Oh, the myriad ways in which I am capable of scaring myself.)

Why on the second book I suddenly fear failure is a puzzle for a therapist, a professional I don’t have in my stable but who nonetheless would only tell me what I already know, that the fear of failure can keep you from doing anything, even something you love, even something at which you’ve already had some success. I don’t think this second-book anxiety is mine alone. As I criss-crossed the country on my paperback tour, other writers asked me in hushed tones about my experience of writing the second book. It’s about as much fun as chewing broken glass, I say. I’m so glad to hear that, they say. Mine was hard, too. 

So, at eleven in the morning (too late!), after managing to drag my heels by setting appointments, answering non-urgent emails, checking Garance Dore’s Web site to read her colloquial French out loud in order to resuscitate my college-level ability, watering the flower pots, drinking two espressos, and reading the NY Times, especially the Metropolitan Diary, which I love—I am here, at my computer, thinking of writing, and pushing away the haunting concerns for my friend.

But as usual, when I finally give in, I’m lost in the world of my new book, writing and researching and dreaming about my characters. Hours fly by. I had intended to go to the gym in the afternoon, or at least hike up the mountain behind my house when I was finished, but the writing, as always, has eaten up the minutes and hours, and it is dinnertime, and I am ruing the earlier wasted minutes of flower-pot-watering and language instruction. 

As evening dawns, I receive the awaited email that my friend has weathered his battery of tests but must now wait a week for his results. How he will spend his summer—the length of chemotherapy, the possibility of radiation—will be determined by those results. He is a loving father to his sons and devoted husband to my dear friend, already someone who celebrates the minutes and hours of his life, but my bet is that he will never procrastinate again. Not in the smallest things, like heading outside to enjoy the Seattle sun if it should ever arrive this year, nor in the most important, like saying how much he loves the people in his life. 

And I suspect that if he had a book to write, he just would sit down and write it.  

Held in relief against this reminder of mortality, my minutes and hours spent worrying and resisting, are…I don’t want to say shameful because that is too harsh, so instead I’ll use the descriptor instructive. Virginia Woolf, beginning to reach a point where she could no longer stand the unbearable press of time, wrote the words time passed in To the Lighthouse, a novel whose theme is the ineffable nature of life and love. I don’t know why I fail to acknowledge the irrefutable fact of mortality until the great hurdles of life and death knock me upside the head. It’s not as if I don’t have a watch, or that procrastination is the great sin, or even that its unexpected advent in my life is so alarming. The hours tick by right in front of me. Mortality is not a well-kept secret. 

Time passed. Revelation, one could say. Just as the day closes.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Hands down, the best book I’ve read in a long time. I chose it even before it won the Pulitzer because I’d read a chapter in the New Yorker a year or so before, and because I’d heard about five people rave about it. Also, it promised complexity in the title. The Goon Squad? What was that?

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • Write complex sentences. Find the contradictions and complexities in the character and infuse that into the sentence itself, in dialog, description and thought processes. Complex syntax and precise diction make the difference between a boring run-of-the-mill sentence, and one that carries two, three, four meanings at once.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I write in different rooms depending on the draft I am working on. I finished My Name Is Mary Sutter in my dining room, where I camped for four months writing the last draft. Also, when I’m really stuck, I hop in the shower. The running water releases something in me and helps me to solve writing problems.

By Robin Oliveira:

My Name is Mary Sutter

How We Spend Our Days: Kim Wright

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Kim Wright:

Saturday morning. Like a lot of writers, I’m pretty ritualistic. I write in the morning, and one of my quirks is that I like to do the first draft stuff in public places. There’s something about the kind of white-noise buzz of other people coming and going that soothes me and helps me get in the right head space to write. My favorite place is Café Carolina, especially on weekends when they have these airy, yeasty Belgian waffles. 

After putting in a couple of hours at the computer my dog Otis and I go for a walk at a park near my house. I guess my mind continues to ramble while we do because a lot of times any snarls I’ve hit earlier in the morning seem to untangle themselves while we follow our familiar path around the lake. Otis is a rescue dog who was given that name when the local humane group literally found him sitting on a dock, a la Otis Redding, who sang that classic song “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay.” He’s an old soul, nearly Yoda-like in his calm, and I can’t imagine what I ever did without him.

A couple more hours at the desk and then this next part I’m almost ashamed to admit. Every single day of my life – excluding Sundays – I go to my ballroom studio to dance. I took up ballroom dancing two years ago and to call it an obsession is just too anemic of a word. My instructor, Max, is from Siberia and we compete in waltz, tango, foxtrot, and quickstep – you know, all the old dances from the MGM musicals. I’ve always loved those old black and white movies and ballroom is as close as I’m likely to get to recapturing the glamour and romance of that era. Not to mention that it’s pretty hard for a woman of my generation and my temperament to learn how to follow the man’s lead. Note the drop-dead-serious tango face! 

Afternoons is also when I take care of the business side of writing – interviews, publicity, working with editors, etc. I like doing the creative stuff in the morning and the more nitpicky things in the afternoon.

There’s a shelf in my home office where I keep the foreign editions of Love in Mid Air. I worked on my novel for eight years and one of the fantasies I privately nursed during all that time was the idea of foreign editions. My parents had an import business, and I traveled to Europe on buying trips with them when I was a teenager. I used to go into the bookstores and wander around looking at all the titles, wondering who the writers were, imagining what it would be like to have your work read in Rotterdam and Pisa and Istanbul. So now I display my foreign editions and they – horrible pun alert – mean the world to me.

On this particular Saturday after writing, dancing, and walking, I went with some friends to see the premiere of a movie called Redneck Roots. It was funny and light and a guy in my writing group was one of the producers. We watched the film and then there was an after party with barbecue, biscuits, and bluegrass. A rainstorm came up and we all fled inside to finish eating. I think my friends and I look like a slightly tipsy Mount Rushmore.

Everyone kids me because I’m such a nerd. By 8 pm on a Saturday night I’m back home in my jammies writing this with a House rerun in the background and Otis snoozing at my feet. 

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson. I love what she does with voice, and the opening twelve pages of this book are just stunning. I was looking for a literary mystery and the owner of a small indie bookstore recommended Atkinson.

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • Read everything you write out loud. It’s very hard to catch mistakes in your own writing, whether it’s something minor like a tendency to repeat certain words or major problems like plot holes you could drive a truck through. Reading aloud slows you down and helps you come to the work fresh. It also is a good test of whether or not your writing has a conversational, natural quality. If a sentence is awkward to read out loud, it often means you’ve lost the rhythms of human speech and that sentence would be equally awkward to read silently.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I don’t really know how unusual this is, but I write my books completely out of sequence. In Love in Mid Air, the first scene I wrote ultimately became the next-to-last chapter in the book, and in the mystery I’m working on now I’m starting with the revelation of the murder. It drives the people in my writing group crazy!

By Kim Wright:

Love in Mid Air

How We Spend Our Days: Shaindel Beers

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Shaindel Beers:

Already, the way I spend my days is changing—during a normal school year, full-time teaching shapes the days. But I’m due to have my baby (Liam Eliot—named after William Shakespeare, William Blake, George Eliot, and T.S. Eliot) on April 23rd.

Today starts with Aeschylus, our black cat. He jumps on my side of the bed to let me know he’s lonely or that the water dish is empty. Because I’m on maternity leave and Jared doesn’t have class until this afternoon, we pet Aeschylus as he lies between us.

Jared says, “I was supposed to put in laundry for you. What time’s your meeting?”

Despite being on leave, I’m co-chairing an arts festival next week. The planning committee meeting is at noon. It will be cutting it close to have dry clothes, but when your partner has taken over all of the housework during your pregnancy, it seems silly to complain. Jared lets the dogs out, runs the laundry downstairs, and I roll from side to side in bed, stretching, hoping my hips or lower back will pop. Mourning doves coo outside.

By the time I’m up, Jared has started coffee. Decaf. We were gone all day yesterday to the nearest city with a mall, buying last-minute baby things, so there are no clean bowls. He brings me a small Tupperware container of raisin bran and milk. I check my morning email and see that there’s a student who needs a letter of recommendation by tomorrow. I’ll do that after my meeting. Another email announces that sadly, but fortunately, the college’s baseball game for the day has been cancelled. I’d promised my students on the team that I’d come to a home game during maternity leave. That would have been today’s game. One of my creative writing students asked if I went into labor when he was pitching, if I’d name my baby after him.

Normally, when my students write, I write. If I’m giving poetry prompts, I write poetry. If I’m giving fiction prompts, I write fiction. It sounds like the advice mothers of newborns get, “Sleep when the baby sleeps.” I try to get the most writing time I can out of summer break as well.

It may not sound like much, but I’ve had more time for writing recently than I did a few years back when I taught at the college five days a week and worked Saturday mornings from 8 to noon as a fitness instructor and Sundays from 9 to 2 as a farm laborer.

I have a naïve hope that Liam will be a good sleeper, and I’ll be able to write when he’s asleep. I know how I spend my days is changing and will continue to change; I’ll just have to be creative to find time to squeeze the writing in.

After the meeting, I head to my office for phone calls and to write the student’s letter of recommendation, which I tape to my door in a sealed envelope with her name on it. I haven’t had time to eat since breakfast; it’s 2 and I’m almost 37 weeks pregnant. I buy an apple juice from the college bookstore and snack on some dried fruit I keep in my desk drawer. I would go straight home, but the car is almost out of gas. After putting $20’s worth in the tank, my cell phone rings. It’s one of the guests for the festival with logistics questions.

I pull into a parking spot in the grocery store connected to the gas station. After the call, I go in and buy soup from the grocery store deli to use in the sourdough bread bowls I got off the bakery discount rack a few days ago. Roasted red pepper crab bisque sounds amazing.

When I get home, Jared is still working on the library remodel. Instead of being normal people who just decorate a nursery, we’ve shuffled the whole house around. Jared’s music room (he’s a singer-guitarist) moved to the basement, what was his music room became my library, and what was the library is becoming the baby’s room.

Last week, he stacked all of my books neatly on the floor, ready to be reshelved. I kept going in and staring at them longingly. Finally, I thought, this is my first time off from teaching in eleven years; I’m reading something I want to read. So, I ran in and grabbed Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country as my first book of maternity leave.

Luckily, Liam will be rooming with us in a co-sleeper (a basinet that attaches to our bed) for the first four to six months, so there’s no rush on getting the nursery done.

Jared heats up a bread bowl for me, heats up the soup, and continues remodeling the library… He says he’ll eat when he’s done.

Time is getting short. Only twenty-four days until my due date. After I write this essay, I’ll sit down and judge the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Muse Prize. The entries await in a fat manila envelope that arrived in yesterday’s mail. Later, we’ll watch a movie on Netflix or a TV show on Hulu since we don’t own a TV. Despite all of the rushing, life seems simple. It seems good.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • I’m just finishing up Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country that I chose from the stacks on the floor because I just wanted to read it. I’ve taught Mason’s short story “Shiloh” for years and have always felt a kinship with her. Her stories take place in rural Kentucky, and I grew up in rural Indiana, so I always feel like I know her characters—sometimes too well. When I like something I’m reading, I make Facebook posts about it. Here are a few recent ones on Mason:
    • Shaindel Beers likes reading Bobbie Ann Mason’s fiction. It’s like spending time with her family, but when she’s had it with them, she can just close the book.
    • Another reason to ♥ Bobbie Ann Mason. From her novel In Country: Maybe the universe originated quietly, without fireworks, the way human life started, with two people who were simply having a good time in bed, or in the back seat of a car. Making a baby had nothing to do with love, or anything mystical, or what they said in church. It was just fucking.
    • Another favorite is: “’That explains it, then,’ Sam said disgustedly. ‘That’s what you were doing in Vietnam. That explains what the whole country was doing over there. The least little threat and America’s got to put on its cowboy boots and stomp around and show somebody a thing or two.’”

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • Write what you want to write, the way you want to write it. Write for yourself first. I had a horribly weird dream a few nights ago. (Pregnancy hormones give you weird dreams. Who knew?) In it, I was teaching a fiction writing class, and I had nursing students in it, and I overheard one of them say something like, “I wanted to write such-and-such, but I didn’t know if it would be safe for work.” And in my dream, I snapped and said, “Safe for work? Fuck. That. We’re going to get past all of everyone’s silly little inhibitions right now.” Then I discovered there was a business class sharing the same classroom, and they looked horrified over the exchange, but that’s pretty much how I feel.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • When I’m on breaks, I like to get into a read-sleep-write cycle. I read until my mind’s a little fuzzy and tired, and then I take a nap. When I wake up, I write my own material. I don’t know how strange that is. The other one would be that I write really well in prisons. What I mean by that is when I teach a workshop in a prison, every time I give a prompt, something amazing comes out of it. It might be that I feel comfortable because it’s a huge white room with an old-old conference table, and we all sit around it and there’s all of this writing energy. It could be that everyone is really excited to be there, since you have to be on good behavior for so long to get into a prison writing workshop. So, when the inmates are there, they’re ready to write. It could be that it’s always a group of guys, and I feel like I have about fifteen brothers hanging out with me. I’m not sure. It’s just always a comfortable place for me, and I produce good work there. I’ll have to teach at a women’s prison sometime and see if I have the same feelings and results.

By Shaindel Beers:

A Brief History of Time

 

including 3 stories by Shaindel

 

How We Spend Our Days: Summer Wood

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Summer Wood:

photo by Dorie Hagler

This morning, February 15, what I write in the notebook is: RELEASE DAY.

Which means that, as ordinary as this day might seem on the surface – sky mostly blue, air still winter-cold, woodpile dwindling but the first glimpses of migrating songbirds promising warmth to come – this day has a special shine for me. Ten years after I scribbled its first words in my notebook on a morning a lot like this one, my second novel ships. It’s out the warehouse door, today, headed for bookstores and mailboxes.

It feels good. Really good. And to celebrate, today, I drink the coffee. Take the shower. Walk the dog. Open the notebook. Because the only way I reached this day was to have all those days that came before.

***

I drink the coffee. I make it strong enough to jump start my sleep-mired electrical system, and one good cup in the morning lifts me enough to move forward – but not far enough to run in circles, which is what two will do. I’ve learned how deeply what I consume affects what I produce, and try to steer clear of the obvious pitfalls: the easy afternoon boost of caffeine that exacts its revenge in hours of late night sleeplessness; too many Wheat Thins (because, oh! That crunch!); the allure of a glass of wine and then another and another when I want to celebrate how well the writing has gone – or be consoled at how poorly.

I do eat Wheat Thins. I drink wine. Sometimes I even go for the short cup of coffee at 3pm because I’m willing to pay the price to blast through to the end of a chapter or a story. But the only way I can sustain for the long run is to moderate these impulses. So, like the good construction worker I used to be, I pack a lunch and I get to work.

I take the shower. I make a clear distinction between down days – when I can laze around the house in sweatpants and slippers – and work days, which require socks and shoes and clothes with waistbands and, yes, a bra. I cannot write fiction without a bra. (Poetry, yes, but that’s a different story.) I know there are writers who do superb work in bare feet and boxer shorts. I’m not one of them. If I have a phone meeting with my agent or editor, I might even dress up. Most days, working from home, I don’t see anyone but my family, so this dressing business seems silly even to me – but it helps send my brain the message that something is at stake. There’s work to do. Get cracking.

I walk the dog. Half for his sake – he needs this, and it’s our agreement – and half for mine. If I don’t walk, I don’t know where I am. It grounds me to move my body briskly out in the world. The exercise feels good, sure, but even more I love the kind of thinking that accompanies it. I could run and be done quicker, but walking sets a pace my thoughts can keep up with. Trudging up hills, pacing along a trail, even ambling along city streets, there’s something good about renewing my connection with the terrain that claims me. He pees on things. I refrain from that, but mark the territory in other ways: by conveying its details to the page.

I open the notebook. On days like today, full of human interactions and the kind of commitments that accrue with a new book, there’s not a lot of time to sit in the company of a blank page. Lately, being an author bumps doing the writing to the back seat. Still, there’s nothing else like it: that brand-fresh-new feeling of making something from nothing. The magic of having words – good, bad, I don’t even care – manifest out of breath and ink and memory and imagination. It’s why the author stuff exists, and why I bother with any of it. Because nothing is ever guaranteed, but every time I open the notebook, anything can happen.

Today Wrecker ships. In another day or two, people will hold it in their hands, will open its lovely cover, and start to read.

On those days, too – just as on all the days that led to its creation – I’ll wake up, drink the coffee, take the shower, walk the dog, and open the notebook.

Because I’ve learned that all I have to do is make the opening, prepare the way, and let come what may – and that the thing itself, the doing of it, is the biggest reward there is.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • I just finished The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich. I love her work, and this one is no exception. I’ve had it on my bookshelf for a long time and wanted to read something that I knew would deliver me deeply to the natural world. It did the job.

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • When you think you’re finished for the day – all wrung out – go a little further. Write a little more, with no expectations of quality or anything else. Just do it. I surprise myself with what comes out when I’ve finished my work and just let myself play.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I nap a lot while writing. Okay? The truth is out. And I’m embarrassed, but not enough to stop doing it. Maybe if I called it a “fugue state” I could garner more sympathy, but the truth is, it looks a lot like sleeping on the job.

Books by Summer Wood:

Arroyo

Wrecker

How We Spend Our Days: Cornelius Eady

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Cornelius Eady:

As I was taking the bus into town this evening from LaGuardia airport—a mad last minute dash from Kansas City, MO in a bid to beat out an on-coming mid-winter/midwest blizzard headed East in order to have a better shot of making a writers’ conference later in the week in Washington, DC—I put in my ear buds to listen to some music. The random song on the shuffle was Ray Davies of the Kinks, singing “Complicated Life”:

I went to the Doctor, and the good doctor said/I gotta slow down my life, or I’m gonna be dead/ Cut down the struggle and strife/ to Un-complicate my life.

How true, I silly-grinned in my seat. How wonderful to have a theme song! I’ve just begun my first semester teaching at a new position as Miller Family Chair in Writing and Literature at the University of Missouri/Columbia. My wife, the novelist Sarah Micklem, and I have a house in Columbia, MO and an apartment in the West Village that we’ve been renting for over 20 years. Sarah also has a full time job as a graphic designer in New York. We love my new job, and we both love New York.

So I’m a chronic commuter, and the question of how I start my morning largely depends on which location I wake up in. Each has a different look and feel to it.

It’s winter, and in our small, North-facing basement apartment in New York, this means there’s no light cue when morning arrives, expect for an overhead plant light Sarah has set on a timer to help the plants and tree she’s taken in from our back yard. Other than this, we have only one large picture window for light in the entire apartment, and this week, snow storm after snow storm has piled on the lawn furniture, giving it the look of frosting.

Sarah is always the first one up—she uses the time for research and writing—the same way I use the hours after she goes to bed in the evening–and I, absent her space, roll over into a half-sleep in the wan light, the gurgle of our coffee pot and the local NPR station in my ears.

A few hours later, I’m fully awake. We do breakfast. (We have been married over 33 years. We have never missed breakfast). Then Sarah’s out the door to her job, and I’m at the desk soon after.

Waking up at our house in Columbia, MO, is a bit more complex. Sarah can only be in town the weekends she has a flex day off at work, and I never sleep as well, but there are a few perks we don’t get in New York:

1) More light: Sarah fell in love with the place as soon as she saw the large windows in the dining room and kitchen. Though a bit dubious at first—we had just left a large house in South Bend, IN when I was teaching at Notre Dame, and I was in bungalow mode–as usual, she was right; late afternoons in the house are especially pleasing as the rooms slowly arc with the sun before it sets.

2) The lake: Though Sarah desired the house almost as soon as we walked through it, it was our friend and my colleague Aliki Barnstone who led us to it. The house, in Aliki’s (now our) neighborhood, only has a partial view of the lake, but it is, as Aliki promised, a wonder to gaze upon.

3) I have a room-mate: The other reason Sarah wanted the house was the possibility of convincing her mother Carolyn Micklem, who was Cave Canem’s first director, to move in with us. This happily worked out.

This week, the same storms that frosted the lawn chairs in New York, have half-frozen the lake in Columbia. Carolyn and I watch the geese as they whirl past the kitchen window towards the open breaks in the ice. Then she’s off to her office on the second floor, and I’m off to mine. Later, on the mad dash to KC, I have to slow down as the same geese waddle from one side of the road back down the slope to the water.

Complicated, no? Flying back and forth during the winter takes its toll, and there are moments when a book I think is in Missouri actually laughs on my desk in New York. But what seems like clutter from afar feels like rare luck to me. Ray Davies wrote his song as irony—the poor singer finds out the safe, uncomplicated life just ain’t worth living.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • I was chair of the poetry panel for the 2010 National Book Awards, and though I read a lot of strong books, and am very pleased with the finalists and winner, everyone on the panel had a short list of books that for one reason or another, didn’t make the short list. One such heartbreak for me was John Murillo’s UP JUMP THE BOOGIE, (Cypher Books) which I still think is an amazing debut, and hope gets the attention it so richly deserves.

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • My advice—don’t depend on advice. Write.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • Coffee is my Shepard. I shall not want.

Books by Cornelius Eady:


How We Spend Our Days: Jean Thompson

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Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Jean Thompson:

I get up when my dogs get up. I started out having dogs; now I pretty much live in the dogs’ house. Sometimes reveille is as early as 5:30, sometimes an hour or so later. And this time of year, it’s dark. One or both of them has to hit the back yard. You ignore such requests at your peril. The old dog likes to hang out there on dawn patrol. Sometimes, if the temperature isn’t too brutal, I leave the door cracked and go back to bed.

I’d say the first two hours of my day, whenever it starts, are spent going to the dog park and back again, feeding dogs – the old dog is very old and requires different medicines and special feedings – and playing spirited games with stuffed dog toys.  I also fill the bird feeders.  I’m not even going to tell you how much I spend on birdseed, especially when there’s snow on the ground.  Neighbors call this the Disney House, because of all the creatures that fly and flutter around.  I see wrens, sparrows, five pairs of cardinals, doves, juncos, jays, woodpeckers, and hawks, which have to eat too.  I’ve seen robins drinking from the heated birdbath this month, though I’m not sure what they find to eat when there’s snow cover.  We’ve had twenty inches in December, pretty close to a record.

Once everybody’s settled down, I can think about writing.  I’ve been retired from full-time teaching work for almost seven years, and if that sounds enviable, well, it is.  The trick is not to sabotage yourself by engaging in necessary but distracting household chores, or reading newspapers online.  I have reasonably good work habits and self-discipline, plus if I slack off or give my work less than my best effort, self-loathing sets in.  I don’t have a dedicated writing space.  The computer sits on the dining room table, but the yellow legal pads that I use for first drafts get dragged all over the house, and I perch (or recline) with them in different places.

I’m a brick-by-brick writer, that is, I have to make sure that what I’ve written previously is solid.  So I’ll usually begin by re-reading a story or a chapter from its beginning, making changes along the way, then I try to produce the next installment.  I think I’ve gotten slower but surer as a writer.  I may not get much new material done in a sitting, but I also don’t take too many bad steps forward.  I work for two or three hours, then I feel the need to get up and out of the house.  Midday is for going to the gym, buying more birdseed and dog food, meeting friends for lunch, dentist’s appointments, oil changes, and the like.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever managed to write books while I was teaching a demanding schedule, as well as tending to all the usual business of living.  I’m pretty sure I slept less.

In the late afternoon, it’s time for another episode of Dog World, another trip to another park, feeding, play, etc.  Then, if I have nothing else scheduled for the evening (or, to be honest, if I can avoid the siren call of the television), I’ll put in another session of writing.  I seem to need a steady sense of momentum with my work, and to keep in touch with it on a daily basis.  If you make your best conscious effort, as Graham Greene said, then your subconscious does its work and presents you with solutions.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • I very much enjoyed Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD.  It wasn’t a question of finding it; all the attention around it made it pretty hard to avoid.  I admire experimentation of all sorts if it’s faithful to the core demands of storytelling: making a reader want to know what happens next.

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • Persevere.  You  do need to know when to hold em and know when to fold em when it comes to any given piece of writing, but sticking to your work habits will see you through most challenges.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I tend to re-read books I like over and over again.  The best ones always hold up, and reveal new pleasures.

Books by Jean Thompson:

The Year We Left Home

Do Not Deny Me

Throw Like a Girl

City Boy

Wide Blue Yonder

Who Do You Love