Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.
February 1, 2010: Miciah Bay Gault
4:45 My husband’s alarm goes off. He’s been getting up early to go to the gym. He takes a shower and goes downstairs to make coffee. I lie in the warm bed, not quite able to fall back asleep. I hear the clanking of the egg pan. I hear the coffee grinder. My husband and I are coffee lovers together. This is something we’ve always shared. Sometimes when it’s winter in Vermont (like now) and will continue to be winter in Vermont long after it’s spring everywhere else, I wake up in the morning feeling like there’s nothing to look forward to. And then I remember coffee.
5:45 My alarm goes off, which means I must have fallen back asleep.
6:25 I’m doing yoga after my shower. Having a hard time concentrating though. I try to push my thoughts gently aside and focus only on my breath and movement. But instead of focusing on my breath, I’m thinking about this post, and how I’ll explain how much I love the mornings when I have the house to myself: the chilliness and the beauty of the light on the snow and the sweet familiarity of all the neighborhood rooftops. I catch myself and try to focus on my breath again. Then I start wondering what I’ll say about my yoga practice, and how I’ll find the exact right words to explain my lack of focus.
7:05 I’m a writing nomad. I don’t have an office, and I migrate from
place to place around the house, sometimes around the town. Sometimes I write at the dining room table, sometimes I curl up on the couch. I have a desk up on the third floor, but right now we’re renting the third floor out to an old college buddy of my husband’s. Lately I’ve been writing in the guest room, which is where I am today. I sit on the futon with a blanket over me (there’s no heater in this room and it’s COLD. My hands get numb on the keyboard) and prop my laptop on my lap. I sip my coffee. I like the view from this room. Out the back windows the sky is always rose and yellow in the morning, crisscrossed with black branches and telephone lines. I like the shapes of the roofs against the sky; I feel a great tenderness for the roofs of my neighborhood.
I try to start writing by 7. Some mornings I write for an hour, some mornings I stretch it to two. I don’t write Thursday mornings because that’s my “walking school bus” day. My stepdaughter, Lily, is with us half the week, from Wednesday to Saturday. On Thursday I walk her to school. We stop to pick up her buddy Isabelle. Then Isabelle, Lily and I walk down the hill to pick up Eleanor and Louisa.
After writing (or walking school bus) I run off to work. I’m the editor of Hunger Mountain, the arts journal at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a job I love. Today, though, is a day off. So I have more time to write. Precious time. Makes me feel anxious to tell you the truth, hoping I’ll make the best of it. Nothing is worse than finally getting a little bit of extra time and wasting it.
7:10 I just checked Facebook rather than getting started. Yesterday was my birthday and I wanted to see if there were any birthday wishes.
7:12 I’m starting a new story. Right NOW.
8:45 I’ve written five paragraphs and eaten some pancakes. I look over the paragraphs now and feel kind of dull about them. I know they’ll probably change, maybe even be cut entirely before I’m through with this story. But they have to be written before they can be revised, before they can be cut. I’m an incredibly slow story-writer. It can take me years to finish a story. I only have my hour or two a day to write, for one thing, now that I spend so much time editing Hunger Mountain, teaching at the community college, parenting, cleaning house, making dinner, spending time with Jeff. In grad school I would spend five, six hours a day writing. Now, life crowds in. But I’m slow for other reasons too. I’m a thorough reviser. I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I go through forty or fifty drafts. This new story, the premise of which kind of thrills me, won’t be finished for months, maybe years.
11:17 I decided to send an unpublished story out to a few more places, and I’ve spent the last two and a half hours making very slow progress on this. I submitted it to Ploughshares using their online submission manager. Then I made a list of four more places I want to send it: The Southern Review, Epoch, the New England Review, and the Missouri Review. I’ve gotten little handwritten notes of encouragement from the editors at Epoch and Missouri Review, so that’s why they’re on my list. I feel a kind of loyalty to the New England Review because, like the journal I edit, it’s located at a Vermont college. The Southern Review is on the list just because it’s so lovely.
Why, you might be wondering, did this process take me two and a half hours? Here’s one reason: the story was thirty-one pages, and Ploughshares doesn’t want stories longer than thirty pages, so I had to go through and cut words and sentences here and there until I’d cut out a whole page. Here’s another reason: my stepdaughter can’t find her homework folder for school, so her mom stopped by and we both searched the whole house. No luck. It must be in my office at the college. On Wednesdays and Thursdays Lily walks up after school and sets up camp in my office. She does her homework, has a snack. She raids the library of Children’s Lit books we’ve got up on the fourth floor of College Hall.
12:10 I walk to my office at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and retrieve the homework folder, which is indeed right there on my desk. Then I walk down to the elementary school.
1:30 Sitting in Capitol Grounds at a table by the window, overlooking the river, which is still frozen and snow-covered. I’ve got a Chai Latte. I’ve spent a few minutes looking at people. What do I do now?
This is the question I’m always wrestling with. Whenever I hear the word “wrestle” I see that famous painting of Jacob wrestling with the angel. It’s stuck so deeply in my mind that I can’t help picturing whatever I wrestle with as an angel. Angel of piled-up laundry. Angel of ungraded papers.
2:00 Grading papers.
4:00 On the way home I run into Robert ice skating in front of VCFA with his son Truman. We talk about our novels a little bit. He says he’ll read the story I finished last week. I trust his opinion so this is great news.
4:25 Grocery shopping at the co-op.
5:10 Gotta run. Late for the Black Door, where I’m meeting folks from work.
5:25 Change of plans already. Since Lily’s at her mom’s tonight and I’m out at the Black Door, Jeff decides to go play poker in Craftsbury.
6:45 Leaving Black Door. Mild out, chilly but softly so. My friends Bill and Flo have called to invite me over for dinner.
9:30 I get in bed to read The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle. I’m also reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire, who’s going to be here this summer for the Writing for Children residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Also The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, The New Yorker, People Magazine, my friend Ann’s YA manuscript, Taking Charge of your Fertility, and The Pushcart Prizes. I’m always reading a bunch of books at once, and writing a bunch of stories at once.
Usually my nights are all about making dinner, getting Lily into the shower, and then various bedtime activities. At dinner we always do “High Low.” Lily’s first grade teacher taught us this. We read somewhere that the Obamas have a similar dinnertime activity, but they call theirs “Rose and Thorn.”
After Lily’s shower we all climb into the big bed together and I read. Currently it’s my all time favorite books: the Emily of New Moon series by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables, but they’re better than Anne, in my opinion. Emily is a bit more dreamy than Anne. Her friends are cooler. And she’s more serious about her writing plans. She doesn’t suddenly give up all literary ambition in order to have six kids, which is what Anne does, and over which I guess I still feel a certain sting. I was so intensely shaped by these books, which I’ve read every year since I was ten. All my ideas about ambition, and friendship, and family, and independence, and education, and romantic love, and sense of belonging were formed by these books. My ideas about myself as a writer were formed by these books.
Anyway, tonight I climb into bed alone with my books. Luxurious hour or two with the bed to myself. High Low, Miciah? High, extra time for writing today. Low, not quite enough time for writing. It’s like this every day.
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?
- Some of the stories in Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link were just lovely. I liked “Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose” and “The Specialist’s Hat.”
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- I feel strange giving advice since I’m just a hopeful, struggling writer like many of the folks reading this. But here’s what I’d like to say as an editor: It’s about the slush pile. So often hopeful writers think that editors at lit journals have an antagonistic relationship with the slush pile, but it isn’t true. We need it; I’m always hoping to find a gorgeous gem of a story. We can’t solicit everything we publish, and we wouldn’t want to. We rely on the slush! Remember that when you send stories out! If yours is rejected, it’s not because of some snobbery or, worse, corruption amongst editors. Maybe your story’s not quite polished enough, maybe it’s got some other flaws, or maybe it just isn’t right for the particular editors who read it. Send it out again! Be patient! Be persistent!
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- I like to write while walking. Sometimes if I’m particularly stuck, I take a notebook and a pen for a walk. It always feels kind of adolescent somehow. But it works. I get unstuck. I also like to write during concerts and lectures. If the lecture is about science, that works best.
By Miciah Bay Gault:
O Liberated Eyes
City of Lonely Women
Hunger Mountain
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February 1, 2010: : Alexander Chee
7:00AM I wake up, cough. I’m tired, have a cold, but I feel I should be downstairs. I can feel the novel waiting.
My boyfriend Dustin opens an eye. I’m worried about you, he says. You’re not getting enough sleep. Can you stay in bed another hour at least? He turns and puts his head back down and then turns back. I’m not telling you what to do, he says, and grins. It’s just a suggestion.
I smile, go back to sleep.
8:30AM I wake up again and feel much better. Dustin was right. He opens an eye again. How do you feel?
Better, I say.
He goes back to sleep. I pull on my favorite old sweatshirt, a navy Puma hoodie, some yoga shorts and go downstairs. I have a two-bedroom faculty housing apartment Amherst College rents to me as their Visiting Writer and I’ve made three writing spaces in it. On a library table I bought on E-Bay for very little in the dining room, a big spare room with bookshelves. On the kitchen table, really a slightly different library table. Each of these matches the floors of the room they’re in: the one in the dining room has a wooden top, the one in the kitchen is as pale gray as the linoleum. I use the kitchen table as much as I use the desk in the dining room, as I like to cook for myself and I write as I do so. The third place is my office.
My pantry/office is located right near where the "A" is in this satellite image below from Google Maps.
The house my apartment is in was once a great house belonging to the college’s astronomer, now divided into three apartments. My kitchen was the kitchen for this house, the pantry larger than anything I could use, and so when I saw it was the only room in the house with ample built-in shelving, I installed a stainless steel desk from a used office-supply store.
I write in three spaces in my house because sometimes, if I know I’m writing, it paralyzes me–this way, I can sneak into it. A fourth room, upstairs directly above the pantry, is now called “Dustin’s Room”, and is his away office from his apartment in New York. We can work separately and not hear each other until we’re ready to do so.
I make coffee, act as if I
‘m just looking over scene notes from the day before and begin writing.
10:30 AM Dustin comes downstairs, hungry. I pause, make kimchee fried rice with hamburger and eggs. We devour it hungrily.
11:30 AM I run upstairs. He’s asleep again, his book open next to him. I feel terrible about having woken him up in the middle of the night.
4:30PM At the library, I print 700-some pages from 5 years of drafts, hoping to turn them into 400-some pages for my forthcoming novel, The Queen of the Night, under contract with Houghton and due soon. The final draft for some time has felt like it is rising up out of these different files, as if I’ve left this here and this here, and now all of the pieces finally meet.
I also can’t work on the computer right now–the screen is too small. I recently realized that most of what I saw as rejected material for this novel is actually…the novel. I just wasn’t ready for it. At this point I need to reconcile at least 7 different drafts of the novel across 5 years, taking the best moments from three different directions. I print the different drafts with cover pages indicating the computer files I found them in, and create a folder with the date and the phrase “print revision”, so I know each document I took text from.
And when I’m done, an hour later, Dustin and I walk home across the now-dark campus.
7:30PM While I read my novel, Dustin makes a meatloaf wrapped in bacon with sriracha. I get up and decide if I’m going to drink bourbon for this cold (the cough returned) it should be Manhattan, perfect (with sweet and dry vermouth) and blood orange bitters from Maine. It works once again, but longer. And the meatloaf is delicious.
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 Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst. I picked it up because I realized I’d seen the television series and not read the novel. That felt terrible.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- Write down the page number where you stop work on your writing, so you can start there again the next day, and not begin on page 1 per the computer’s software. You’ll destroy less of your work that way.
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- Lately, apparently, using a typewriter. I bought a manual to avoid the internet, an Olympia. It turns out to be a device to speak just with your work. Unlike our computers, which have become televisions, shopping malls, newspapers and mailboxes.
By Alexander Chee:
Edinburgh
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January 1, 2010: Abigail Thomas
It’s too early to get up but the dogs don’t know that, so we’re all headed downstairs at six thirty in the morning. I open the door and Rosie and Carolina race into the dark, noses to the ground, tails waving in the air, as they track whatever creatures have crisscrossed our yard during the night. They’ll be at it for hours, hounds have a work ethic like you wouldn’t believe. Except for my old beagle Harry, who likes to sleep in.
Cold and gray. Oh dear. I measure the water and the coffee and plug the pot in and worry about the day stretching ahead. If I’m not writing there’s not much point to being me, and I’ve been stuck a good long while on my project—the history of a thirty year friendship, one that withstood a big hole blown through it some years back. It’s a good story, but I’m not convinced it’s ever going to be a good book. I’m stuck at the part where we became friends again because I can’t remember how we did it, or when, or why. Neither can he. I can’t write through it or around it or past it and I can’t make it up so I’m not writing. If I’m not writing, I’m a cat without whiskers. If I’m not writing, I’m depressed. Morbid, even.
I never used to think about dying. Any thoughts of death have really been just that, thoughts, experienced from the eyebrows up, not the hideous, almost Biblical
knowledge that jumped me last night. I settled in bed with my three pillows and my three dogs, the curtains pulled, door closed, lights off, everything the way I like it, but this time my heart was pounding in my throat. Out of the blue came a fact: this body of mine, the one in pink pajamas, the one hanging on to her pillow for dear life, these pleasant accommodations in which I have made my home for 68 years, it’s going to die. It will die and the rest of me, homeless, will disappear into thin air. I could actually hear my heart now, pounding.
But hard on the heels of this came a worse bit of news. My beautiful children, now in the middle of their lives, are going to grow old and they are going to die too. I won’t even be here then. When that thought struck, I felt an awful meaninglessness, and then nothing, and that absence of feeling was the worst thing I’ve ever felt.
The coffee is ready. Harry is up. He’s barking at the top of the stairs, waiting for me to wait for him at the bottom, and once I’m there, he makes his cautious way down. He’s less sure-footed in his old age. He wants to go out too, but not before checking everybody’s bowl. Harry’s an optimist. I love this old dog. Off he ambles into the yard, tail held high, head held high. Peeing on everyt
hing perpendicular. I settle down with coffee, my notebook and pen. I’ll write shopping lists if nothing else comes. Just keep the pen moving on the page. Eggs butter sugar.
Late in the day I have a bit of luck. Yesterday I discovered a bowl of plums in the icebox that had sat there forgotten for a month, and I took the bowl into the back yard and tossed the plums one by one onto the icy grass near the woods where I’ve seen deer. A dozen dusky purple plums, past their prime: an offering. And this afternoon when I go out to look, the frozen grass is bare, and I am filled with a joy I can’t get to the bottom of.
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?
- There have been a few contenders–the one that affected me most in the chills and laughter department is Julian Barnes’ Nothing To Be Afraid Of–which is all about death. argh.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- Try and keep the faith. We all have good days and bad days. Keep writing, stay in the habit of writing, even if it’s laundry lists.
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- I like to paint on the reverse of glass, make a huge mess, and stop thinking so hard.
Books by Abigail Thomas:
Pearl Paints
Getting Over Tom
An Actual Life
Lily
Herb's Pajamas
Safekeeping
Three Dog Life
Thinking About Memoir
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December 1, 2009: Elizabeth Benedict
I set the alarm for nine o’clock, but can’t sleep past eight today, even though I went to bed at two, or was it three? Never been a good sleeper. And there’s no such thing as a routine when promoting a book.
In that semi-dream state before getting out of bed, I remember an event I haven’t thought of for years: soon after we moved to Manhattan, when I was eight, my parents woke us in the middle of the night. There’d been an explosion nearby, and we had to leave the building. Outside, the air was filled with sirens, the sidewalks with sleepy families huddled together, coats over their pajamas. We walked many blocks, looking back to see what we were escaping. All this time later – 1962? 63? – I can’t summon the details. If I write about it, I can force myself to remember – and make up the rest.
As I lurch to the computer at my desk, the memory falls away and instantaneously, I’m deep in email country, answering an editor who wants to reprint Jonathan Safran Foer’s essay, in Mentors, Muses & Monsters – aka the 3Ms. Her emails are about contracts, waivers, jpgs – not the sweet solitude of reading or writing.
I make coffee and raise the blinds to see Riverside Park, the West Side Highway, and the distant outlines of New Jersey. The sky is gray, the city is waking up. I decide against checking the weather report. If it’s going to rain tonight, I don’t want to add it to my worries.
Mostly what I feel is excitement about appearing at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, the city’s brand-new indie, with four of the contributors to the 3Ms – Alexander Chee, Mary Gordon, Martha Southgate, and Lily Tuck – after years of watching nearly every indie in the city shut its doors.
All afternoon, I read my students’ short stories. On my way to the subway, I fall into aimless worrying. Have we done enough promotion? What if only five people show up?
The mood at Greenlight is festive and welcoming; the store is a lovely, bright, well-lighted place. It doesn’t take long to see that the guiding principle here is quality, not quantity. By 7:30, every seat is taken. We are introduced by master literary blogger, Ron Hogan, senior editor of Media Bistro’s Galley Cat, who was instrumental in arranging tonight’s event.
“The response to my invitation was overwhelming,” I read from the introduction to the anthology. “One after another … in a matter of weeks, two dozen fiction writers said yes, they wanted to contribute to this anthology…. I seemed to have hit a nerve.” The nature of the nerve is on dis
play as panelists read briefly from their essays – Lily on Gordon Lish, Alex on Annie Dillard, Martha on Harriet the Spy, and Mary on Barnard teachers Elizabeth Hardwick and Janice Thaddeus.
We swap stories about what made the essays hard to write (Alex: “I was writing an essay about the woman who taught me to write essays.”), whether writers need mentors (special books, says Martha, can inspire more courage than you can imagine), whether mentors can be destructive (read Mary’s essay on the transformation of Hardwick from mentor to monster), and the hazards of writing about someone who’s still alive (Lish lives 4 blocks from Lily; she was sure to clear the essay with him).
The audience wants to know if peers can be mentors (yes, Mary’s first novel, Final Payments, was one of mine), what sorts of things we pass on to our students (our affection for cherished books, personal insights of the sort that professors don’t usually offer), and do we think of our families when we write (absolutely – Alex has several ancestors he can’t shake).
As we sign books, private conversations continue. A woman introduces her grown stepdaughter, Rosa, explaining that she’s Laurie Colwin’s daughter. I didn’t know Laurie Colwin, the beloved novelist who died suddenly in 1992, but know many people who did. I ask if Rosa’s a writer (yes). I sign a book for her and remember to myself the shock of her mother’s death, and the eight-year-old I knew she left behind. For the first time all night, I’m speechless.
Hours later, packing for an early morning train, the dazzle and anxieties of the day fading, I’m still thinking of Rosa. Of explosions in the night when we’re young, of who and what save us and show us the way, if we’re lucky: books, writers, teachers, mentors, stepmothers.
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?
- It’s hard to choose, but I’ll go with Life with Sudden Death: A Tale of Moral Hazard and Medical Misadventure, by Michael Downing. I’m a long-time admirer and read everything he writes.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- Get in touch with your material. Write from that place rather than a place of cleverness, artifice, and/or showing off. Editing the essays in the 3Ms reminded me anew of the power of starting with our deepest material – and then doing something wonderful with it. I’m not advocating memoirs, but of using material we care deeply about as a foundation and then working it through all the steps, to a high sheen.
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- When I’m stuck, I get up and do things like wash the bathroom mirror or dust a shelf – no major projects. In mid-dust, the right word frequently comes to me and I sit down, drenched in relief.
Books by Elizabeth Benedict:
Slow Dancing
The Beginner's Book of Dreams
Safe Conduct
The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers
Almost
The Practice of Deceit
Mentors, Muses & Monsters
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November 1, 2009: Sheri Reynolds
My cat wakes me up early, predictably, tapping at my nose with her paw. She’s always gentle at first, but if I don’t get up and feed her, she’ll use her claws, so I get up. Downstairs I make the coffee, wrap up in blankets and go out to the porch swing with my laptop. I’m between writing projects at the moment, and nervous because my editor has had my just-finished novel for three weeks, and I haven’t heard back. So I do research for a new idea – I’m studying the cloth-diaper industry and learning about diaper services – and I write for an hour, just brainstorming. Then I join my partner Barbara out on the back deck, where we watch the day lighten, drink more coffee, visit with the birds.
After breakfast, we walk to the bay. We live on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and every morning, we take our dog down to the beach to run. Today we wear ear-muffs and gloves, even though it’s only October, because the north wind’s blowing. Home again, I get ready for work.
I have an hour-long drive across the bay to Old Dominion University where I teach. Though my classes only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have to go in today (a Wednesday) because I haven’t finished some committee paperwork and because we have a visiting writer on campus. My drive over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, connecting the Eastern Shore to Virginia Beach, is always daydream time for me. I work on a character in my head, try to see the world the way she does. This character pictures people as they were in the womb. Everyone she meets, she sees as a fetus. I see fetuses all across the bay: the toll-collector, the highway worker. Even the seagulls I imagine curled up and slimy in their eggs.
At school, I fill out forms for curricular changes and send emails to my advisees, reminding them it’s time to choose classes for next spring. The poet Jorn Ake is on campus to give a craft talk about his poetry, and I’m secretly hoping the room will be packed so I can say hi and slip out. I have a headache, and I still haven’t prepped my classes for tomorrow. But only eight students show up, so I stay. In the end, I’m really glad I did. He’s fabulous. He discusses the way different components of his poems come together, the historical, the political, the personal.
By the time I leave campus, it’s after two, and I haven’t had lunch, so I stop at a strip-mall for a slice of pizza. (Okay, two slices.) I sit in a booth with my journal, intending to make some notes about my creative writing class for tomorrow, but instead I start a little poem. I don’t really write poems – but sometimes when I’m excavating memories, they come out shaped like poems. For some reason, I’m writing about my great uncle Gurley, realizing for the first time that his name sounded like “Girly” and wondering what that was like for him. The TV is blasting – apparently there’s a funny movie on because the guy working behind the counter keeps cracking up.
Back home, I collapse in the hammock and reread some scenes from Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar Named Desire.” I’m teaching it tomorrow in my Southern Lit class. The sun’s out now, warm on my head. The dog and cat have both crashed beneath me in the shade I’m making. I close my eyes and try to send telepathy to my editor, telling her: “Love my book. Love it!” I check to see if she emailed, but she didn’t.
I send her more telepathy while I’m working in the garden. Something has eaten tiny holes in all the kale. There’s lettuce to pick and then wash. I practice a few songs on the guitar while I’m waiting for Barbara to get home from work. Ordinarily I cook on Wednesdays, but tonight we’re meeting friends at the Pub around the corner. It’s a fun night, but by nine we’re home again, in pajamas, wrapped up in comforters and sitting out back in the dark, being dreamy.
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?
- Michele Young-Stone’s “A Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors.” (Coming out in April 2010) Her editor sent it to me asking for a blurb.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- If your writing isn’t happening, just dance or paint or play Wii or watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s okay.
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- I read magazines backwards, preferring to start at the end and work my way to the front.
Books by Sheri Reynolds:
Bitterroot Landing
The Rapture of Canaan
A Gracious Plenty
Firefly Cloak
The Sweet In-Between
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October 1, 2009: Adam Braver:
I never thought of myself as an early riser. I always preferred the quiet of night, followed by a peaceful sleep well into mid-morning. However, my cat and my son do not share a similar sensibility, and, in direct proportion with the graying of my hair, my circadian rhythms have become inverted.
My day now begins somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30.
In terms of writing, this particular day requires careful management. While a normal morning involves reading several newspapers online, answering overnight email, and getting myself organized for the daily writing schedule, this is a day of deadlines. A promised blurb has run itself up to the final hour, and a magazine article also needs to be delivered. (Luckily, this is a non-teaching day, and I am thankfully caught up, if not ahead on that front.) Deadlines can bring out the worst—cursing the lack of available hours, and rerunning the daily idiocies that have knocked me off schedule for weeks. Warning: run all these grievances through your head long enough and they become their own set of idiocies and time wasters. Best to get to work.
A pot of coffee is always involved, and once my son is off to school, and my wife safely secured into her day, I’m parked at my desk. The goal is to get everything done by 3:00, leaving me ample time to get to the novel I’m working on, and at least end the day with a couple of solid, new pages. Focus and discipline have never been an issue. It’s more about negotiating the obligations.
First up is the blurb. My desk is piled with stacks of papers that, to the layman, might appear to be clutter. It’s a system I fully understand, but if were I put in unfortunate circumstances, it’s one I could never explain. On the back of a National Grid envelope are the notes I have been jotting down while reading Steven Church’s upcoming memoir, The Day After the Day After. It should be simple to distill these notes into a two or three line blurb. But this is a book that I truly like a lot. And I’m scared to death of not quite “getting it right.” I draft out several similar iterations, labeling each appropriately: academic, thoughtful, hip, clever, literary. Eventually I settle on a hybrid of all the versions. In order to stanch the obsessing, 
I immediately email it to Steven.
A new pot of coffee.
Because I’m constantly being saved by music, I was fortunate to have been assigned to cover last summer’s Newport Folk Festival for Rhode Island Monthly Magazine. I’d spent two days in Newport, listening to music, interviewing organizers, performers, vendors, and attendees—leading to an essay about experiencing the festival. Hours and hours of recorded interviews. Pages and pages of notes. All distilled down to 2,500 words. And today I’m parsing words, part shaman, part mechanic. Trying to fix with precision, yet still foresee the choices that will cause me to cringe two days later. With each tweak, it seems, another not-quite-right word is revealed, as though it’s been secretly lying dormant under other troubled words, just waiting to be awakened. Eventually, as with the blurb, I push the send button.
I have managed to meet my 3:00 deadline with tangible accomplishments. But here’s the truth, and this part is undeniably real—I miss not having the distractions, because now it’s just me and the blank pages of this new book; and again, this is the truth here—it’s hard work writing a novel, because, particularly with first drafts, there’s so often very little pleasure.
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 Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. I’d come across her previous book (stories) via word of mouth, and the simplicity of the prose against the power and smarts of the stories blew me away. The latest novel had the same effect.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- It’s rarely the story itself that’s interesting, it’s the way you tell it.
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- The delusion that I have no strange habits.
Books by Adam Braver:
Mr. Lincoln's Wars
Divine Sarah
Crows Over the Wheatfield
Nov. 22, 1963
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September 1, 2009: Dani Shapiro
I awake as I do most mornings to the creak of the stairs, the sound of my husband’s footsteps. Michael brings me a piping hot cappuccino in my favorite blue-and-white striped china cup. I roll over in bed. I’m a little jet-lagged–we’ve just returned to our home in Connecticut from a writers conference out west. I tossed and turned last night, haunted by unusually vivid images of my parents, both gone now. Why were they visiting me in my half-sleep? “Five more minutes,” I beg. But it’s nearly eight o’clock, and the mom of one of my son Jacob’s friends is coming over to pick him up. I open my eyes–the cappuccino helps–and our two dogs Samson and Zeke are by the bed, waiting for attention. They’re like Mutt and Jeff: a big fluffy white labradoodle and an ornery little Norwich terrier. The whole family is up except for me.
Downstairs, we’re still in a summer routine. Jacob eats cereal at the kitchen table. “Sponge Bob”–bane of my existence–is blaring on the television. I put together a tote bag for his day: tennis racket, socks, sneakers, shorts, swimsuit, sunscreen, ipod, earphones. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. Mornings are an attempt to be in mommy-mode and at the same time reserve just a bit of myself in that quiet, dreamy state of just-waking, so that once my family is out the door, I can turn to my work. The mom arrives with kids in tow–the dogs are overjoyed, leaping off our stone walls in greeting. A sweet sight: a little girl still in pink pajamas stands in our driveway, her hair in braids. I wave goodbye, still trying to keep that small bit of myself in reserve.
Michael leaves for his office where he will spend the day writing. The house is quiet. I spend the morning hours in my study, catching up. I write a blog post, since I had fallen behind during our time in Sun Valley. I answer several emails, some of which require careful composition and thought. I check items off lists–my mind zinging all over the place. All the while, I am thinking that I must do something that settles me into myself. Usually, this involves yoga or meditation. Recently I have begun to play the piano again, after many years away from it. I have started to take lessons with Jacob’s piano teacher. I’m starting slowly, with scales, exercises, arpeggios. A lovely Sonatina.
It’s nearly lunchtime before I manage to peel myself away from my desk, the tasks at hand. I have a new book coming out–a memoir called Devotion– along with a new paperback edition of my first memoir Slow Motion–and all this necessitates lots of seemingly small bits of writing which actually require enormous effort. I rewrite the copy for the back of Slow Motion. At my editor’s request, I shorten my bio. I feel as if I’ve gotten nothing done, but in fact all of it has to get done somehow.
Downstairs, to the piano. The light streams through the living room window behind me. As I practice, my mind begins to clear. The concentration on a piece of music–the notes, the fingering, the dynamics of it–makes everything else fall away. It is not unlike the practice of writing. An hour disappears. My mind finally quiet enough to read and to think.
At the end of the day, family life resumes. The three of us have dinner–casserole leftovers from a Moosewood Cookbook recipe for Michael and me, chicken fingers and pasta for Jacob–and at this time of summer, a Red Sox game is almost always on television. “Mom, did you see that? Mom, look at that catch!” I glance up from my iphone, juggling the competing interests. These years of having a young child at home, of domestic life, of writing books–these years are full and rich and complicated, and even as the hours pass by too fast, I know one day I will look back at them longingly.
AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…
At Sirenland
1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?
- The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham. A memoir with an experimental structure–absolutely brilliant and heart-rending.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- How you feel about your work on any given day is meaningless. Show up for it no matter how you feel.
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- When I feel completely, utterly fried, I climb onto the bathroom counter and soak my feet in the sink while reading Elle or Vogue.
Books by Dani Shapiro:
Playing With Fire
Picturing the Wreck
Fugitive Blue
Slow Motion
Family History
Black & White
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AUGUST 1, 2009: Pam Houston
The day begins at first light when my youngest wolfhound, Liam, sings a song. He throws back his head and howls to greet the day. It sounds a little like a donkey and a little like an elephant. Sometimes Fenton and Mary Ellen sing along with him. Mary Ellen’s singing is second soprano, and Fenton’s is practically falsetto. They sing for about five minutes, and I am grateful the nearest house is more than a mile away. Sometimes I can go back to sleep but more often than not I get up, and read to ease into the day. This week it was Margaret Atwood’s new one, another review for Oprah. The Year of The Flood….a dystopian future where everything is screwed up all thanks to men and their penises. Very droll in Atwood fashion. Incredible world building.
Greg gets up and makes coffee, this week it is Sumatra Mandheling ordered especially from Stumptown in Portland, and he makes our protein powder and goat yoghurt and banana concoction, which at first I resisted, but now I love. I look at email, give Mary Ellen her daily pain pill (she only has three legs) give good morning pets to all the pets and dog cookies likewise. I take Deseo (the diabetic pasofino) a pear with three chromium picolante pills stuck inside, and a carrot each for Roany and the Yellow Horse.
After coffee we take the boys (Fenton and Liam) on a walk to the end of the pasture, over the fence and onto the National Forest, up to the top of Lime Creek and back home, about two hours round trip. There is usually a load of laundry to do, before the thunderstorms boom up in the late afternoon (no dryer here at the ranch, so clothes get hung outside on the line.) We have a little lunch, usually leftovers from the night before, or, if there are none, a bowl of instant mashed potatoes or peanut butter and sour cherry jam on a spoon.
The afternoon is work time, which means working on my novel, or writing a review for Oprah, or critiquing manuscripts, or writing an essay for an anthology (or a blog) or whatever else is on the docket for any given day. Some days there is a late afternoon trip to town for mail, or milk, or a fishing license, or a trip to the vet for shots, or a torn ear, or clogged anal glands. The Rockies come on TV sometime between 5 and 8, depending on what coast they are on, and they are ubiquitous in this house on a summer evening. Dinner is the one meal I throw myself into, and it is usually fairly elaborate and fresh and full of whole food/no short cut ingredients. A Thai curry with eggplant and scallops, or a duck with mango ginger sauce, or buffalo steaks with cauliflower mash and sweet corn. So a couple of hours in the kitchen with the Rockies on in the background is my idea of a perfect summer evening. Sometimes we take a nightfall walk, sometimes a nightfall bath. Sometimes we play some chickenfoot dominoes. We usually take books to bed and read a little, and close our eyes until it is time for Liam to sing again.
AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…
- Liam, Fenton, and Mary Ellen
1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?
- Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. It was chosen for me by Pat Towers, my editor at Oprah, but if it had not been chosen for me, I would have read it anyway.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- I must defer to Henry James, “A writer ought to strive to be a person on whom nothing is lost.”
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- Reading Sports Illustrated in the bath tub cover to cover every week.
Books by Pam Houston:
- Cowboys Are My Weakness
- Waltzing the Cat
- A Little More About Me
- Sight Hound
This series began August 1, 2009.
