how we spend our days

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.

January 1, 2012:  Cheryl Strayed

There are some things I miss even before they’re gone. The sound of my children’s feet against the wood floor as they run from their bedroom at one end of the hallway to the bedroom I share with their father at the other end of the hallway is one of them. It might be six-fifteen in the morning; it might be seven. No matter the hour, that pitter pat of two pairs of childfeet is the way I begin most days.

On this day, like all school days, the four of us rise and scramble through the dress-eat-brush teeth-locate books, backpacks, snacks, and coats routine in various states of calm and agitation, rancor and love. By 8:25, I’m walking my children to school. It takes about ten minutes to reach the big brick building where my son attends first grade and my daughter kindergarten. I hug them one by one in their separate classrooms, and then I walk solo down the hallway and out the side doors into the cool December air and I’m free.

It’s 8:45. Time to work.

Sometimes it seems as if there’s a giant kitchen timer installed permanently in my momhead that begins ticking the moment I push through those school doors. I know precisely how many hours and minutes I have before the bell will ding.

I pull out my iPhone. I want to be the sort of woman who walks down a sunny morning sidewalk without checking her email, but I’m not currently that woman. I scroll, I skim, I almost break my ankle tripping over uneven chunks of sidewalk while I read the tiny text on my screen. By the time I get home I know who I have to answer first and I do that while drinking the coffee my husband Brian has kindly made for me, even though he doesn’t drink it himself. He’s an artist too—a filmmaker—and we chat briefly before he departs for his office a block away from our house.

I don’t have an office. I’ve tried in the past, but an office hasn’t ever been terribly productive for me. I’m not a desk person. So instead I currently work in my bedroom while sitting on a blue velvet chair I bought in a thrift store when I was pregnant with my first child and revising my first novel. My cat Gulla sleeps on the bed nearby. Every couple of hours she rises and comes to sit on the wide arm of the chair and lick me before stretching and returning to the bed.

I answer email. I tool around on Facebook for no good reason. I open the calendar on my computer and see today is the day by which I’m meant to send my publicists the answers to a Q & A they plan to use in promoting my forthcoming memoir, Wild.

I open the document and begin. It’s more challenging than I thought it would be. I wrote the book. I know the answers, and yet I have to craft each one carefully. I try to be entertaining and intelligent without repeating myself. Soon, I understand that this thing I thought would take half an hour will take most of the day.

In one question my publicists write “…there’s an almost Homeric feel to your journey…” and I have to Google “Homeric” so I can answer the question, but when I type the word into the search field my overly helpful computer changes it to “homoerotic” and so I end up spending a good twenty minutes reading about a long-dead Italian painter named Carlo Saraceni who made a painting called “Saint Sebastian,” which depicts a young naked man with an arrow shot into his lower abdomen/upper groin. Eventually I realize I really do know what my publicists mean by Homeric, so I return to my document and answer the question.

After a while, my iPhone makes a little sound: a text from Brian. Do I want to have lunch and then take a walk with him? he inquires.

I do. I’m too busy to do this because the great kitchen timer in my head is ticking ever so loudly and I’ve gotten distracted by an early-Baroque Italian painter, but I say yes.

He comes home and warms a pot of soup and makes kale salad and slices an apple while I shout to him from the blue chair in our bedroom that I’ll be right down. We eat. We walk. I don’t ask him what Homeric means. He goes back to his office and I go back to my blue chair.

Can you introduce us to Monster? my publicists want to know when I return to the document open on my computer screen. Monster is the name I gave my backpack on the long hike I wrote about in Wild. It’s basically a character in the book. I begin to describe it, but then I decide it would be better if I had Monster sitting right beside me as I wrote my reply, so I go down to the basement to get it and instead I see a mountain of laundry near the washing machine, so I sort and start a load, and return to my blue chair empty-handed, remembering only when I reach it why I left it.

I email my publicists to ask if they really, truly need this Q & A by today. Within minutes I’m given an extension until after the holidays.

I answer more emails. I make comments about people’s status updates and photographs on Facebook. I text Lidia. I text Sarah. I text the other Sarah. I text Brian. In an hour and a half he’ll get the kids from their afterschool class.

I open a folder titled Novel and then a Word document titled Emily and I read what I wrote the last time I wrote anything in this particular document and I feel sort of excited about it and I feel sort of sad too because it’s a new novel that I’ve begun ever so slowly to write knowing I don’t have any business starting a novel right now because I’ve got other writing commitments on the burner and my soon-to-be-out book to promote, but I start messing around with a paragraph anyway and pretty soon an hour and a half has passed and I hear loud footsteps on the porch below me—Brian and the kids—and though the day isn’t over and there is what-are-we-going-to-have-for-dinner and having dinner and play time and bath time and out loud reading time and zapping off quick emails and texts on my iPhone in between all those times—there is a way in which the day is done and the front door opens and my kids yell, “Mommy! We’re home!” and the great kitchen timer in my head goes ding.
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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?

• Pam Houston’s new novel Contents May Have Shifted, which will be out from W.W. Norton next month. She’s so perceptive, so intimate and intelligent on the page. I felt known by this book, like I do by all of her books. I got an advanced reading copy when Pam and I were interviewed on stage together at an event at the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller’s Association Trade Show in Denver a few months ago. I gobbled it up immediately and have been waiting impatiently to share it with the world ever since.

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

• My first bit of advice is to take only the advice that works for you. Writers have different processes, different approaches. There aren’t rules. Having said that, I’ve found it helpful to read every word I write out loud at least twice, but more like three or four times. There’s something I can’t seem to know about my sentences and scenes until I’ve heard myself say them.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I take walks by myself when I’m deep in my writing. The walks aren’t breaks, but rather an important part of the writing process. Something I can’t get in a chair always clicks into place when I’m walking alone. I don’t think it’s strange, really. A better way to put it is that a strange thing I’ve learned about writing is sometimes you have to not be writing in order to get where you need to go.

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By Cheryl Strayed:

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December 1, 2011: Daniel Torday

There’s this idiosyncratic little thing EM Forster says in Aspects of the Novel I’ve always loved. It goes: “The main facts of human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. Let us briefly ask ourselves what part they play in our lives, and what in novels.” It seems apt for considering a day in my writing life to ask those very questions. To the schematic:

1) Birth. Life: My two-year-old Abigail goes to daycare at 8:30am. My wonderful perfect assiduous wife has already left for the hospital, where she’s a psychiatry resident. I get Abby up, feed her, negotiate her into clothes, make her lunch. The chronology of these things is unclear, but at some point complete. At some point she is at daycare.

Novels: During the semester I don’t have headspace for generative work. I find an hour in the morning to check in with a manuscript. I’ve been at work on a short novel about a guy who makes a brother out of duct tape for long enough that I started before I had a kid. Now I’m revising. Today I layer some parenting stuff that the pre-parenting me didn’t have in his coffers. I take a moment to feel grateful for wife, child, layering.

2) Food. Life: After my hour of revision, in which today I realize that my first reader was right and this thing sure doesn’t need an epilogue and I fold the language from the epilogue into a late chapter, I eat turkey-and-swiss-on-a-croissant-with-dijonnaise. I’m a big fan of compound words. I’m a bigger fan of compound condiments.

Novels: Because who needs an epilogue? And about this language-salvaging instinct. It can be dangerous. It can mean you’re too attached to the sounds or the images or the place you were in the moment you wrote it. In this case I feel convinced there are ideas from the epilogue that need to stay. I’ll keep them for now. In a week or two, we’ll see.

3) Sleep. Life: Five, maybe six hours.

Novels: Sounds boring.

4) Love. Life: I love my wife and my kid and having a kid allows me to focus on both. That said, by far my favorite thing in Forster is his wry (the wryest in all of western literature?) description of love, which I take as a really good joke but fear Forster took seriously: “Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in it, as in other animals, which changes often lead to union with another human being, and to the production of more human beings. And our race goes on.”

Novels: Part of me just wonders: why didn’t Forster put “love” under “birth,” then? As for my writing, I’m actually a fan of the sex scene, but novels about brothers made out of duct tape definitely don’t need sex, duct tape or otherwise.

5) Death. Life: At the end of my day I host a reading by one of my favorite short story writers. At lunch we talk about a colleague who’s been diagnosed with cancer. We wonder what it must mean to live over that abyss. We’re writing nerds, so we talk about what that meant for Chekhov (TB), Flannery (lupus), Dostoyevsky (epilepsy), Kafka Keats Orwell Thoreau (TB TB TB TB). We talk about that thing from “Gooseberries”: “Every happy man should have someone with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him— illness, poverty, loss.” We thank the Lord for our health. Later we go say things about or from books in front of people.

Novels: The novel I was working on in the morning is about a kid who makes a brother out of duct tape. It’s also about the brother’s chronic illness. And about living with chronic illness. And ooh—after I give the audience my introduction, as I sit in the wash of language as one of my favorite young story writers reads on stage, I hit on this: that “Gooseberries” thing might make a good epigraph. Or a profoundly bad one. Only one way to find out.

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?

• Adam Levin’s The Instructions. We just kept making eye contact across the bar. I’m glad I finally took it home.

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

• I’m an inveterate perseverator, so here’s my favorite thing to tell my students when they’re having a hard time revising: In life, it’s important to make good decisions. As a writer, sometimes it’s better just to make a decision, and not worry if it’s a good one. Or, to put it another way: in writing, unlike in life, there’s always OpenApple+Z.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Candy. Lots of candy. Often Good ‘n Plenty, which gets strange looks at the movie theater but only plaintive sniffs from the cat in my home office.

By Daniel Torday:

The Duct Tape Brother, excerpt in The Kenyon Review
Hunger Mountain, The Writing Life, List #3
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November 1, 2011: Mari Strachan

Everything has shifted slightly. Yesterday my husband left for two weeks to teach in Kenya. But today will be different, also, because I have to travel from my rural village south-eastwards to our capital city, Cardiff.

But, first things first. I drink a mug of coffee, Italian blend, and use the remainder of the hot water to mix a mash with some oats for the hens.As usual, they behave as if they haven’t been fed for a month and gobble up the mash, then race out of their pen to roam the garden and cluck and peck at everything as they go. They are comic creatures and invariably make me laugh. I shall tempt them back into their pen with chopped tomatoes and green leaves and corn before I leave; there, they will be perfectly safe from our nocturnal visitor, the fox. Some sunshine has been promised for today by the weather forecasters, so the plants in the glasshouse and the polytunnel need watering: tiny alpine strawberries, a good crop of tomatoes, spreading courgettes, the last of the filet beans, ripening butternut squashes, spinach, kale, salad leaves, fragrant coriander, parsley and mint – our smallholding is about eight hundred feet above sea level and the covered spaces lengthen our growing season by several weeks. Then I return indoors for breakfast and another cup of coffee, and to do some preparation for the event I am travelling to Cardiff to attend.

Literature Wales, the body which supports writers in Wales, has been offered a shop space in a prestigious new shopping development in the centre of the city, and it is being turned into a pop-up Lolfa Lên – a Literature Lounge – for a month. It has been set up at short notice and the event today is one of the first to take place there. In a ‘Meet the Author’ event Deborah Kay Davies and I, both Canongate authors, will be reading from our prose works and taking questions. I’m looking forward to meeting Deborah, and to being in Cardiff, the city where I attended university and worked for a while many years ago. My youngest son, Cai, lives and works there now, and I shall stay with him tonight.

The bus leaves from Aberaeron, down on the coast, and for the first half of its journey meanders through lush green countryside and villages and small towns: Felinfach, Llanbedr Pont Steffan, Llanybydder, Llanllwni, Llandysul, Pencader and then Caerfyrddin, the oldest town in Wales. Their names run off the tongue like a litany, the names of places have a powerful magic, conjuring up their history, their culture, their religion, their people. I like to use proper nouns when I write. My mind drifts in and out of the ideas and information I am gathering for my third book. The novel is at that nebulous stage where nothing is yet formed, so that when people ask me what it is about I sound completely incapable of forming a sentence let alone a novel when I reply. The second half of the journey is mostly on the motorway and not as conducive to gathering thoughts as the first half. Three hours and forty minutes after leaving Aberaeron, with an hour to spare before I have to be at the Lolfa Lên, the bus draws into Cardiff Bus Station, and Cai is there to meet me.

It is wonderful to chat to Deborah, to compare experiences, to hear about her current writing project, which sounds innovative and interesting. A small audience has gathered in the meantime, and we begin our readings. The Lolfa Lên opens out into the shopping precinct and passers-by stop to listen, though most of them resist attempts to bring then further inside! The audience has plenty of questions to ask of us both, and the time speeds past.

The evening ends with a meal in an Italian restaurant with Cai and Hannah, and a walk back through the centre of Cardiff to the area of Roath where I’m sleeping tonight. I lie in bed listening to the night-time sounds of the city, so different to my village where the susurration of the wind through the leaves of the beech trees and the calls of barn owls lull me to sleep. Tomorrow I shall walk back through the morning city to catch the bus, to make the same journey in reverse, to travel home.

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?

• PURE by Andrew Miller, and I had been waiting impatiently for it to be published.

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

• Read as widely as possible.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I write the whole of my first draft by hand in A5 notebooks.

By Mari Strachan:

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October 1, 2011: 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:

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September 1, 2011: 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:

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August 1, 2011: 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:

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July 1, 2011: 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.

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.

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:

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June 1, 2011: 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:

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May 1, 2011:  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:

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April 1, 2011: 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 23^rd.

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.

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 knowher 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:

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March 1, 2011: Summer Wood

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?

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February 1, 2011: 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?

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January 1, 2011: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?

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December 1, 2010: Susanna Daniel:

The problem with writing about a recent day is this: there has been no typical recent day. My first novel came out in August of this year, and the months since then have been littered with activities related to book promotion, rather than book writing. This past month, I traveled to Miami, Chicago, New York, and Colorado. The time I’ve spent in my adopted hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, has been mostly spent packing and unpacking. The fact that I haven’t had a normal writing day in a month makes my stomach hurt a little.

I lead a pretty simple life, which is how I’ve designed it. Though I’ve flirted with the idea of renting a work space or starting a writers’ studio, I can’t really justify either effort. I have a dedicated office here at home. It’s a modest room, overpacked with sentimental antiques from my parents’ house and a large desk I made for myself in graduate school, and the closet is full of bins of old clothes and photos, my wedding dress, and Christmas gifts waiting to be wrapped.

My office could be a more meditative place, more organized, if I put a little effort into making it so, but it’s good enough. The walls are pumpkin and radish — energizing colors, as I think of them — and on the walls are photos of Stiltsville, the setting of my first novel of the same name, plus a watercolor of the Barola, Texas house where my grandmother grew up. The bookshelf is for research books and writing books, including a stack of People and Time magazines from the 1970s, which I bought off of eBay when researching my first novel.

On any given day — any typical day — I think about something the late Andre Dubus said in his wonderful essay collection, Meditations from a Movable Chair. He said that every morning when he rolls in his wheelchair into his tight galley kitchen, whether or not he remembers to get the milk from the fridge before moving past it to make toast and coffee can determine the tone of the entire day. If he forgets the milk, then he must either turn around in his chair, or back out and roll forward again — both terrifically frustrating in the small space — or forego milk altogether. If this happens, his day is pretty much shot.

I might be butchering the retelling of this story, but my memory’s version of it is woven into the fabric of my day, every day. Because in my life, as in the lives of many writers, I have only one overarching goal of the day: to write well.

There’s a certain magic to writing well, and I don’t know exactly how to cast the spell. All I know is that I have to be able to sit down at my desk early in the day, in a quiet and empty house, and have several uninterrupted hours ahead of me. No mid-day meetings, no fast-approaching deadlines, no piles of laundry that need attention. If I can do this, then maybe I can make writing well happen.

Every other daily goal — making it to the gym, spending quality time with my family, getting a wholesome meal on the table at a reasonable hour — is secondary. If I can write well and accomplish some or all of these things… well, I can’t remember the last time I did that. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s bliss when it does.

Of course I shouldn’t compare my daily domestic hurdles (getting my willfull toddler dressed and fed and off to preschool with all supplies needed for that day; cleaning up the vomit and/or urine left by my sweet, dying dog; finding lost laundry for my husband) to those of Andre Dubus. But still I think of him, if for no other reason than that he was a magnificent writer, and perfectly captured a relatable experience.  He’s my Patron Saint of Smooth-Sailing Mornings.

On a good day — again, this is a good typical day — I’m up at 7:15 a.m., and my son and I are out the door with a minimum of tears (on both our parts) by 7:40 a.m. I’m sitting at my desk with coffee and oatmeal by 8:05 a.m. (I write weekdays, except for Thursdays, when my son is home with me.) I write until 12-ish, when hunger forces me to get up and make myself a sandwich, after which I will probably focus on other tasks, like meeting with my writing group or scheduling an interview or replying to email or working on an essay. I leave the house at 2:30 or so, to run errands and hit the gym before picking up my son at 4:15 p.m. Either I cook or my husband does. After dinner is my son’s bedtime, and after that is leisure time, which either involves television, or reading and a glass of wine, or some project (recently, a mosaic of my husband’s face, which he claims makes him look too pretty, and decorating for the holidays).

My daily life — the life I lead when I am not traveling or promoting a novel — would probably seem tiresome to many people. But I am so grateful for the ability to work at home, to do what I love as often as I can manage to do it. And I’m happy that the past month is over and the next has begun. It will be the first month in several when I won’t board an airplane even once. Come back to me, quiet writing days. I’ve missed you.

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?

• My writing group reads published work when we’re not reading each other’s work, and recently someone suggested James Hynes’ NEXT. It’s exactly the kind of book I would not choose for myself — it’s about a discontented middle-aged academic with a roving eye, looking for the next youngest thing — but I absolutely loved it (and I loved the main character, who turned out to be much more complex than my reductive synopsis). I’ve recommended it to everyone I know and bought several copies for friends.
  

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

• I try to think of myself as an actor as much as a writer. When I’m writing a scene, I’m also living that scene mentally. Like an actor, I have to imagine all five senses at play. Getting these sensory details on the page is what brings the scene into focus for me, and for the reader.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• My strangest habit is a new one, and I don’t know how long it will stick: I save each scene as an individual file on my computer. My hope is that this will clarify the structure of my novel as it progresses, and fix my problem of losing track of what exactly is happening inside a draft.

By Susanna Daniel:

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November 1, 2010: Bruce Machart:

For the past seven years, I have lived a tad more than 1800 miles from the woman about whom I care most, my fiancée Marya.  This is not the set-up of some lame, testosterone-laden joke in which the success of a relationship is attributed to distance. The time zones between us are most assuredly not the reason why we are still together.  Rather, that distance was the elephant in the room (in the hemisphere?) for years.  Now, we are quite vocal in our loathing of this damned pachyderm. But the facts remain the facts:  I have a job and a child in Houston, Texas, and Marya has a job and two kids on the North Shore of Massachusetts.  Simply put, I have two homes.

After three hours of cramped, shuddering air travel, I flinch as the plane slams its tires down onto the runway and taxis to the gate.  When I turn on my cell phone, the thing sounds like a carnival on amphetamines.  I have voicemail.  I have text messages.  I have email.  If the damned thing could tell me that I have a bad case of self-consciousness, I’m sure it would.  Before I disembark, I find the messages I am looking for–one from Marya, welcoming me “home,” as she always does, and one from my older brother, Chris, who has flown with his wife to Boston for the first time.  The plan is this: Chris and his wife will sightsee in Boston for the day; I will take all the luggage via commuter rail up to Marya’s house; Marya will finish work and then meet me there.  Later that night, Marya’s parents will arrive.  Tomorrow, my editor will come to town from NYC, and we will celebrate with three or four dozen friends and neighbors at the publication party for my novel.

But now, after the crush of bodies on the T, and after hugging my brother the way I was taught, so many years back, by that wonderful Philip Levine poem, I’m once again traveling on my own.  I’m on the commuter rail.  God, how I love trains.  The conductor announces each stop, and I lean my head against the window as the world works its way by, thinking, as I do, about the character in my novel who leans his head against the window on his way out of harm’s way.

I am in Boston.  Then I am in Chelsea.  Then Lynn…then Salem…North Beverly…but I am a hundred years back in time, living the life of a young man who never breathed air as a human being except within the pages of my book, except within the heartwood of my imagination.  In the next three weeks, I will give more than a dozen readings in more than ten cities.  I will meet and greet and read and teach, and I will call Marya and say, “I miss you, love,” and she will be strong, and she will wish that she could see what I see, hear what I hear, feel what I feel.  And I will miss her all the more for her empathy and for her patience, for the myriad desires for which I can offer no immediate satisfaction.

But that is all in the future.  Right now, I am a man on a train.  I am going to see my beloved.  I am a novelist.  I am a father.  There are people in the world, most of whom I will never meet, turning the pages of my book.  Some of them will feel compelled to pass judgement on what they find inside.  Some will print those judgements in newspapers or on blogs.  Some will love the book, and others will hate it, and it’s unsettling for me that, most of the time this happens, I will have no idea whatsoever that it is happening.

Outside, the leaves are turning to show their favors to the earthbound before they flutter with their helpless, final fanfare to the earth.  The windowglass is cold against my temple.  And then the train lurches into a short tunnel, and when I emerge from the darkness…it will only take seconds…I will know, with an unexpected thrill and novelty, that I am exactly where I am meant to be.  I am home.

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?

• Peter Geye’s Safe From the Sea, which I’m actually right in the middle of right now, but I can already tell that this is a special book.  Lyrical, loaded with compassion for its characters, one of which is this arresting, dangerously alluring coast of Lake Superior.  This is a gripping wonder of a book.

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

• Description is transient, not static.  We don’t look AT things.  We look from one thing to the next.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I’ve never written a full rough draft of anything in my life.  I revise every day, page by page, as I move forward.  It’s a terrible, inefficient way to go about it, but it’s the only way I know how.

By Bruce Machart:

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October 1, 2010: Hannah Tinti:

6:30 am: I get up and walk my dog, Canada. We try to go through Carroll Street park, but the gates are locked.

7:30 am: I pack my computer and walk across the Gowanus canal to my writing space.

7:30-9:30 am: I work on re-writing a chapter in my new novel. Final scene involves a man shooting a whale. Should I cut the whale? I think about this for half an hour. Then I decide to keep the whale.

10:00 am: I catch the train up to Columbia University, where I am currently teaching an MFA seminar on the relationship between writers and editors. It takes an hour and a half on the subway, and I use this time to read and take notes on two upcoming issues of One Story: “Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman  and “No Flies, No Folly” by Josh Weil.

11:30 am: I drink coffee. I read through D.T. Max’s 1998 New York Times article, “The Carver Chronicles.” I re-read Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

12:00-2:00 pm: I teach my seminar. For the first hour, I have the class take on the responsibilities of being an editor. They draft rejection letters. They go through editorial notes they have prepared for fellow students. For the second hour, we discuss the editorial relationship of Gordon Lish & Raymond Carver. We go through Lish’s edit of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” We consider the difference of the name “Herb McGinnis” vs. “Mel McGinnis.” We decide the two items we missed the most from Carver’s original version of the story were: the tale of the old married couple dancing and listening to the snow fall, and the nod Laura gives the narrator at the end.

2:00-3:00 pm: Office hours. More coffee.

3:00 pm: As I head back to the subway, I think about the giant praying mantis I found the day before on Broadway & 86^th street. Afraid that it would be stepped on, I carried it to Central Park and released it under a tree. Along the way the praying mantis crawled back and forth up my arm, its triangle head turning back and forth, its pricker legs sticking to my skin. People stared and one guy stopped me and asked me where I got it. “Broadway,” I said.

3:00-4:30 pm: On the train back to Brooklyn I read Raymond Carver’s 1983 Paris Review interview, conducted by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee. I am struck by this quote: “[Fiction] doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that’s taken in reading something that’s durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow, however dim.”

4:30 pm: Home. I get the mail and in it is the new issue of One Story, “Man-O-War” by Claire Vaye Watkins. Inside the issue is a postcard promoting the 2011 Sirenland Writers’ Conference, with a beautiful picture of Positano.

5:00 pm: I walk Canada. This time, we head to the piers. When we reach the harbor, we stop for a minute and look out at the water. Then we turn around and walk back.

6:00 pm: I run into the UPS guy on the street. He knows me. I get a lot of packages. Today he has brought issues #1-5 of Jeff Lemire’s comic book series, Sweet Tooth. I started reading this series on issue #6, and am very, very excited to find out what I missed in episodes 1-5.

7:00 pm: I finish reading the first 4 comic books.

7:30 pm: I realize I have an enormous bunch of spinach in my refrigerator that will soon go bad. So I cook it all. And I eat it all. I wait for my arms to sprout Popeye muscles. But they do not.

8:00 pm: I tweet this: “Once more, in German: RT @powerHouseArena: Komme zu @onestorymag OUT OF TOWNERS Donnerstag, 28. Oktober von 19:00 http://fb.me/KlnCY1SA”

8:00-9:00 pm: I answer 50 emails.

9:00 pm: I tweet this: “@NASA discovers 1st earth-like, habitable planet: Gilese 581g, AKA “Goldilocks”: http://bit.ly/cTZhsV”

9:00-10:00 pm: I answer another 50 emails.

10:00 pm: I start writing this.

11:00 pm: I look at the whale chapter again. I tweak a few lines. I decide, again, to keep the whale.

11:30 pm: Canada and I go for our last walk of the day, over the Union street bridge. The moon is hazy through the clouds. The Gowanus smells like the sea.

12:00 am: I read the last comic book. Sweet Tooth, Episode 5: Out of the Deep Woods. The spread on pages 7-8 is an amazing work of storytelling and art.

12:30 am: I start Myla Goldberg’s new novel, The False Friend.

1:00 am: I think about the mantis again. I open my notebook. I write how the front legs, the praying legs, locked onto my hand when a gust of wind blew down 86^th street. Then I close my notebook and turn out the light and fall asleep.

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 would have to say In the Valley of the Kings by Terrence Holt. I read it as a judge for the PEN/Bingham award, and I was grateful to be introduced to a writer willing to jump into the void and trust the reader to follow.

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

• Write something that you would like to read.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I often read while I am walking. This can sometimes be a problem on a crowded street in New York City.

Books By Hannah Tinti:

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September 1, 2010:Louise W. Knight

Today I’m dealing with lists. I have my List of Book Events, and under each date, a list of things I must not forget to do: buy plane ticket, let my host know when my train arrives, find a place to stay on October 5th in New York City, send the book festival organizer a blog post of 350 words….  And I have my List of Urgent Tasks: add the chronology of Addams’s life to my author website, revise the Wikipedia entry for Jane Addams (it is full of errors), write my next talk about Addams and the history of women’s suffrage. I do this list work at my consulting desk, with my laptop. It’s where I engage the executive part of my brain — where I earn my living working with nonprofits and foundations, manage life’s pesky details, and, at the moment, organize my book tour. In this space, with its big, white door-table, and many file cabinets, I make quick decisions and act on them through emails and phone calls.

But where I long to be is sitting at my other computer in another corner of my study. It’s your basic machine, with a big monitor that sits on a glass-topped desk that has a built-in tray for the keyboard. This workplace, which is where I wrote my book, is nearly encircled by bookcases, a blank wall, which the computer faces, and, to the right, above an oak table, a window. I placed a curtain rod between two bookcases and hung a curtain behind me, and, voila – my writing cubicle. There is something about writing in this enclosed space, lined with books, that helps me concentrate, but it is not only that. For me, entering this space means entering the portion of my mind that writes.  It is a deep, creative place that I have to inhabit fully to write a book; this cozy corner helps me get there.

And the reverse is also true. When I leave the corner and pass through the curtain, usually around noon, I leave that part of my mind and that feels good too. My creative brain goes dormant, out of sight, out of mind, until I go back behind the curtain the next morning.

Now, so soon before my book comes out, I’m not writing a book in my corner, but other things, like book talks and book reviews. I just finished and sent off yesterday a review about two new books on feminist intellectual Charlotte Perkins Gilman for the Women’s Review of Books.  I was able to immerse myself in Gilman’s world for a while. I enjoyed it, although I also suffered from the handicap I suppose all biographers suffer from when reading other biographies – the desire to try my hand at shaping the life myself.  Not an option, I told my creative brain as it tried to take over.

My creative brain is feeling a bit thwarted I guess because I’m spending so much time at my laptop, trying to figure out the logistics of speaking and travel. I don’t think I have ever had as crazy a two-month (now stretching into a three-month) period in my life as that which is coming up. The fretting has begun. What will I forget to take? Should I pack all my vitamins and mineral pills in little daily packets for the whole two months, since I probably won’t have time later? I started this morning making a list of such tasks to do ahead. What about my bills? Maybe I should switch to online payments so I don’t miss one. And I’m trying to start using my new smart-phone, with its digital calendar. Help! What if I screw up? I know I’m going to end up carrying around printed versions of my schedule, like a Linus blanket, because I will not be sure I can rely on the phone.

But part of me is also excited. Contact with readers at last! Though I am stuck today at my laptop, fussing with lists, I will soon go out into the world, to talk with people who are interested in what I wrote behind the curtain. Hello to all you readers out there! Let me know what you think!

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 would have to say The Feminist Promise by Christine Stansell (Modern Library, 2010), which I chose because of my interest in women’s history. If you are curious to know what came before the Second Wave of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s as well as to understand the Second Wave and what has come after, then this beautifully and intelligently written book, which covers the history of American feminism from 1792 to the present, is the one for you.

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

• Edit your writing with generous, experimental abandon. Most of us are too careful when we edit, weighing each removal with intense scrutiny. Loosen up. You can always put whatever you take out back in.  But I find I almost never do.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I cover the flyleaves and all available front and back blank pages of a nonfiction book with notes and page numbers while I am reading. I am re-indexing the book so I can take proper notes or find what I want later. Publishers who skimp on blank pages and put art on the flyleaves create big problems for me.

Books By Louise W. Knight:

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August 1, 2010: Diane Lefer:

Mountains or coastline? I’m due at Peace Camp 2010 at the Circle X Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu to give a group of high school and college student activists a crash course in street theatre. There’s no direct route. I can drive south, then crosstown, then north up along the Pacific beach, but there’s thick coastal fog this morning. I can go north over the hills, then south again down the windy narrow mountain roads, half-awake first thing in the morning on a single cup of espresso, or else on a main road traversing the canyon and through a tunnel cut in the mountain rock, hoping they did indeed inspect it for safety after yesterday’s earthquake. I opt for the canyon.

I’ve never subscribed to the macho philosophy that if you’re a Writer, you put your ass in the chair every day and write. (I say “macho” because I think men feel more compelled than women to conform to the outward sign that writing actually is a job.) But writing is about life, and life is too valuable and fleeting to be lived only through the written word. Anyway, there are so many other things to do: earn a living, work for social justice, have a personal life, too, goddammit! Still, though I don’t write every day, in the past I have put in my share of 12 or even 14 hours without interruption at the computer screen. These days, even if I wanted to, I can’t.

Several years ago–and this is a warning to all you writers out there–I lost my eyesight for eight months when too much staring at the screen made all the focusing muscles go slack. When I could read, write, and drive again, I began to limit my hours at the screen. This spring, when my right eye started going blurry, I panicked. This time around, the doctor says my muscles are physically fine, but my brain is no longer communicating properly with my right eye. My left eye is good. I limit my hours at the computer. I function.

Mornings start with a hot compress over my eyes. Then a gentle scrub of the inner eyelids with much diluted baby shampoo. Then a shampoo wash on the outside followed by artificial tears. Because I won’t be home till late, I add the exercises which usually wait till late in the day. I hope Desi, the best cat in the world (or at least in this apartment), won’t be too impatient as this departure from routine will delay the brushing she gets every morning.

First a warm-up with a card that features green and orange squares that I have to make join up again just by looking at them. Next, with 3-D glasses, I turn on a computer program that shows me red and blue squares that I have to overlap until a 3-D object pops out for me to click. When I visit the doctor’s office, I get to look at doubled images: Bo Peep has a sheep only on one side of the screen, her staff only on the other; Ole King Cole has a pipe on the right side and a bowl on the left; Humpty Dumpty is sometimes missing his hat and sometimes his cane. I have to merge the images by thinking them. Sometimes it actually happens. I’m hoping the doctor can teach me to bend spoons with my mind and then I can take the show on the road.

I think well on the road. So with two hours stretching before me en route to the ranch, maybe I can unravel a problem I’m having with the novel I’m just starting. But maybe I should rehearse the lines of the piece I’m going to perform. Turning some of my fiction into performance pieces is one of the ways I’ve found to be creative away from the computer. For today, I’ve adapted a story to demonstrate how art can be used to stimulate discussion of issues. The piece is also designed to explore whether these kids suffer from a common activist affliction: confident when standing up for someone else, embarrassed or silenced when they need to speak up for themselves.

Maybe I should just enjoy the scenery and let my mind go blank. Blank is what allows new ideas to surface. It can make the difference between carefully crafting what you already know and gaining access to something wholly unexpected. Alas, the only idea I gain today is how I can solve a costume-change problem simply by removing shoelaces in advance from my black running shoes so I can switch in full view of the audience from Guantánamo jumpsuit, hood, and handcuffs to human rights t-shirt to high heels with cocktail party dress.

At last, I’m headed down a long steep dirt road. Then, a cluster of tents, adult mentors, and sixteen young people–male and female, mostly it seems Latino, and ranging from a sophisticated Berkeley student to a young lady who explains the deteriorating quality of her favorite music (techno) is due to interference by the federal government. They’ve been making tie-dyed t-shirts and I smile to hear them regret they were born too late to be hippies or beatniks. They are all part of a movement in Southern California that has already won significant victories. When budget cuts threatened phys. ed. programs in the public schools, the military stepped in to provide free Jr. ROTC programs–especially in low-income neighborhoods. While military training is still an option, it can no longer be required. Firing ranges are being removed from school property. I listen as they brainstorm on means other than war that might help women in Afghanistan.

I’m here to suggest theatre, imagination, creativity as additions to the activist toolbox. After my performance and some initial exercises and reactions, we play a theatre game in which half the group becomes God and half are inanimate lumps who have to be brought to life and controlled. Then they switch roles and we can talk about power and the pros and cons of being leader and of being follower. Did any of them look around to see if someone else’s God was better? No. So we talk about how hard it can be to stay aware of alternatives when your attention is fixed on a single idea–something progressives need to guard against as much as anyone else. We make music on improvised instruments: empty coffee cans hit rhythmically with chopsticks, plastic jugs, shakers, whistles made from plastic straws. We do some quick improvisations: protesters in chains; a judge wearing a wig made from a mop and wielding a gavel made from a cardboard cylinder topped with a roll of toilet paper; a young soldier following a seductive beat. I explain “invisible theatre” in which a scripted incident is played out in a public place as though it’s real life in order to get bystanders engaged in conversation. Today two girls create a scene in which they walk affectionately arm in arm through what they tell us is a shopping mall. Their accomplices then approach kids who play unsuspecting shoppers and get their reactions in order to open up conversation about homophobia and gay marriage.

We try a brief scene in which one person is rude and mean to another and we play it over and over again to see how many different responses are available to the “victim.” Then I ask one of the kids who had just played the mean girl to explain to her best friend how she’d just behaved. She brags about her bad behavior. Then I ask her to imagine telling a therapist. She tells the story deadpan and when pressed, only says she had her period and was in a bad mood. Next, she has to go home and tell her cat. Now, she admits doing wrong and feeling bad. We notice that the cat doesn’t judge her.

One of the kids tells about a boy who horrified the members of the high school Peace Club when he showed up one day to say killing was part of human nature, people have always killed and he’s looking forward to going to Afghanistan so he can have his chance. It’s just as important for activists as for fiction writers to be able to imagine their way into someone else’s experience. One girl agrees to portray the boy–”I really felt like him,” she says later. “Man, that was hard!”–as we try exercises aimed at seeing him as a whole human being. Kids take turns engaging him in conversation, trying to see if they can connect on a human level and what approach will make him most willing to open himself to other points of view.

The sun has come out. I should release them from the workshop and let them hike the trails that wind through this mountain canyon. Unless you know the world is beautiful, why would you bother to save it? And me, I should rethread the laces of my shoes and go with them. But for a while no one gets up. We sit under a blue tarp that rustles in the wind and we talk about the world that is and the world we dream.

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?

• Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, recommended on this site, has the most evocative descriptions I’ve ever read of the experiences of singing and of falling in love. Thank you, Cynthia!

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

• When they ask for more, give ‘em less. (When someone wants to know more about a character, it’s usually because you’ve tried to explain motivation in some way that only opened up more questions. If a character seems alive, rather than explained, motivation takes care of itself.)

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Desi is usually curled up next to me as I type, purring, her front paws on my thigh, but if she’s elsewhere in the room meowing for attention and I really don’t want to be interrupted, I tell her I can’t play with her right now but I’ll write her into the story. It assuages my guilt–a little. The frequency with which cats appear in my work is a good indication of how guilty I feel.

Books By Diane Lefer:

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July 1, 2010: Tracy Winn

My idea of a perfect writing day goes like this: Wake up naturally without being alarmed by the alarm clock. Eat breakfast in silence staring at something nice to look at: my husband, a bouquet, the garden growing. Read a story from one end to the other, uninterrupted. Write for two hours. Have a snack and stretch outside. Write for another hour. Eat lunch while reading another story. Take a half hour nap. Write for another hour. Take my dog for a long walk in the woods. See everyone I’ve been missing, laugh, answer emails, pay bills, do errands, eat, drink and be merry until it’s time to sleep.

Of course, that isn’t the way it happens. I’ve only managed days of such openness to creativity at a residency or a self-imposed retreat. To catch a writing day means waking early and hoping to stew up a good cocktail of desire and discipline in the course of events.

How my daughter is doing determines how I am and how I’ll spend my time on any given day. She has a major anxiety/depression disorder and has been living on her own for a year, almost to the day, as I write this. (If you are wondering about my sharing my daughter’s information, it’s okay. She wants to de-stigmatize mental illness and writes an articulate blog to that end.)

Today, when the alarm rings, my husband, who has to take a re-accrediting test for his work, rises almost as reluctantly as our dog. The dog, who sleeps next to our bed, lingers and lounges and yawns and groans until I tell him to quit the malarkey and get to work. You know the koan about the dog having the Buddha nature? He thought that up in a previous life.

My first obligation is to take the dog with the Buddha nature for a walk. He weighs almost as much as I do. I am tall, but he makes me look short. We walk along an old railroad bed where Henry David Thoreau tarried under these same trees. Today, while the dog is being here now on a bush, I see a fox with a kit playing in the shadows of the path then vanishing into the shadows, like shadows themselves. The woods are generous that way, giving me glimpses of lives other than the human kind. I am grateful for those gifts — those sightings — to a degree that is hard to explain. It has to do with what I consider the most basic fact of being alive: humans are completely and indivisibly OF the natural world whether we appreciate it or construct elaborate defenses (physical, philosophical, or technological) against it. I am a dedicated appreciator of the interconnections.

My next stop is across town to meet a good-hearted contractor who has volunteered to donate his time at Gaining Ground, the organic farm where one of the hats I wear is as chair of the land committee. Gaining Ground grows produce with the help of volunteers, and gives all of it to local food pantries and meal programs. We’ve just leased two acres from an abutter of the farm and are returning those acres to agricultural use. To get to the new acres with a tractor, we need to build a little wetland-protecting bridge. Luckily, this contractor knows building the way I know short stories. We’re calling it “the bridge to somewhere.”

I’ve made it seem as though I live in woods and farmland, but I’m only twenty miles from downtown Boston. Since there have been no distress calls from my daughter, I stop for a good cup of coffee at a little Italian market in town. I raise my cup to her, really proud that she is doing well on her own today.

It’s time to get down to work, which, despite my email box’s insistence to the contrary, is NOT to promote Mrs. Somebody Somebody. First, I read a little, almost always a short story. Today it is from Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s astoundingly excellent collection, Cold Snap. Then I reread what I wrote yesterday. This is the trickiest part of the process because my tendency is to get bogged down perfecting yesterday’s work. What I’m trying to do is enter the “fictive dream” John Gardner described so perfectly. If I am unlucky, I will grind out 250 words of struggling prose almost all of which will get tossed tomorrow. If I am lucky, I will be lost in the fictive dream until my husband’s returning car alerts me to the fact that the afternoon is gone. Either way the luck flows, I’ll be at my desk writing.

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?

• One of the books I’ve admired greatly in the last few months is God’s Dogs by Mitch Wieland, a novel in stories not to be missed. I chose it because we were on a panel together talking about short story collections.

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

• Unplug your internet connection while you are working.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• All of my habits seem perfectly normal to me, but maybe not everyone has to create a safe place — a saved file — for the parts of a piece that clearly need excising. In order to cut, I have to fool myself into believing that nothing is lost.

By Tracy Winn:

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June 1, 2010: Lucia Orth:

While at work on edits of my first novel, I visited a French woman, a writer I know from our years in Manila. She has published novels, children’s books, and had a screenplay produced.
We sat in her beautiful garden.
Editing is endless, it’s like pulling weeds, I said.
Corinne said, Ah, I love the edit, it is the finish – like putting on perfume.
Corinne, chic and greyhound lean, riding dressage when she isn’t writing, must be a careful writer, I thought. She puts her words down and only needs a slight touch of a perfumed hand to set her piece in order. Whereas I plunge in, having only a vague idea of where the writing might lead, and what is left at the end is the result of chopping, pruning, and weed pulling.

This morning about 7:00 I look out our second floor windows. The sun reflects on the pond and glimmers the willow and maple trees, the stone paved walks are lined with catmint, salvia, yarrow, lavender, Siberian iris. Our driveway winds about an eighth of a mile down and beyond it and our orchard and acres of native prairie I can see the western hills of Lawrence, Kansas, about 7 miles away, and what I know is the edge of the university there.
But my attention is also drawn by what needs fixing or doing – the tire swing rope is splitting and needs to be replaced, the floating dock needs another coat of linseed oil, tiger eye sumac needs to be dug and moved, fences need checking — a neighbor wants to board her horse here over the summer.
My time spent in the rhythm of work outdoors, especially in summer when I’m not teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University (in the Indigenous and American Indian Studies department), is when I do much of the thinking about, or subconscious dancing around with, the writing. Ideas, problems, fixes, characters are all also at work, or at play.

This weekend is our anniversary, another of those Memorial Day Weekend weddings, ours after both graduating from law school, and during the time we’ve been together we’ve lived in England, Manila, Washington D.C., Beijing, and Trento, spent summers in Istanbul, and again returned to Lawrence. Berkeley of the Midwest, they told us it’s called, when we were considering a move here with our three children. Maybe. But now we’ve lived here in Lawrence longer than anywhere else, on these 90 acres, with these fields and woods, these flowers and orchards and gardens.

The novel I’m working on now is set in part right here – in 1898 young men from Lawrence signed up, volunteering to fight in the Philippine-American War, often called our first Viet Nam, in what became a needless, senseless war of imperialism. They walked the downtown streets, studied law at the university, left from our train station, had a send-off at the same historic Congregational church I spend some Sundays in, and where I helped lead the process to make the church the only one in town that openly, on our signs and in the service, welcomes our LGBT community.

So, say one of these young men in 1898, about 23, from a privileged family, had never felt he quite fit in here and wanted a way to leave his family and leave the town. Everyone says this war will be over before you know it – it seems the perfect way to freedom and his own life. He can travel, afterwards. He will go to Constantinople and on to Europe. His best friend since he was a boy is a worker at the local barbwire factory, and he signs up, too. So does a young black stoneworker. One dies. The other two find themselves on the serving end of cruelty and atrocities to the Filipino people.

This is the story that pulls me deeper into the town, its history, its geography, its place.
I know the soil – friable, crumbly, perfect. Our wooded hill to the south is said to be, by geologists, the most southwestern place where the glaciers ended. This morning, a blue heron again sits in the locust tree across the water, waiting, I believe, for the first light of morning to warm it. Then it glides down and walks the pond’s edge looking for the frogs that sing half the night.
Last night the frogs were joined in their music by a few whip-poor-wills, an endangered species in some places, whose cry at dusk and on into the night is charming until it repeats itself about 200 times in a row. A group of whip-poor-wills, I have heard, is called a seek.

Now I remember. During the night, I heard their calls, in my half dreaming, as Whip? – or Whirl? Whip? (work) Or Whirl? (dance). A choice. I think of the Sufi men we saw dancing in Istanbul, whirling, a constant whirling in their dance of faith, their work of faith. To work, or to dance? On the best writing days they become the same.

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?

• Ransom, by David Malouf. Based on one event in the Iliad – the day King Priam goes to Achilles to ransom the body of his son Hector. Malouf fictionalizes this account, adding the point of view of a wagon driver, who alone survives the war.

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

• Not advice, but for me, reading poetry before I begin writing tends to ground me, helps keep the focus on words, rhythm, and strangeness.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• When I was growing up, my grandfather owned the only bookstore in Hannibal, Missouri. I was a voracious reader then, and this might be the reason I tend to read many books, fiction and nonfiction, concurrently, and also why I hold on to so many books I like.

By Lucia Orth:

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May 1, 2010: Daniel Asa Rose:

Having yet another midlife crisis. About two-thirds of the way through this one, best I can tell. Can’t blame it ALL on my last book–but yeah I think I will. The extended family was annoyed that I would help my cousin Larry procure an illegal kidney in China when he had given them nothing but grief for years; the immediate family didn’t like my spending precious resources being away two months; the intimate family discovered it was more peaceful at home without me. Less “stormy,” she said. Plus, of course, then I was Storm Central writing a book about it for the next eleven months. So yeah, I WILL blame the book.

Accordingly, I find myself in the desert. Fleeing everyone I’ve ever known, I have taken myself far from my 1780 Colonial in the lush farmland of Massachusetts and am holed up in southwestern New Mexico where I am slowly reconstructing myself, day by day. Here’s how it’s going today so far.

Feeling fragile, in biking clothes and cowboy hat, I step out of my sublet with a wrench to refasten the license plate which has been clattering in the dust storm all night. Cast a baleful look at my enemy, the empty mailbox heating under the baby blue sky. Hop on my motorized mule of a bicycle and ride two blocks past the empty ragtag storefronts of Broadway to an organic café where Outlaw Ray is behind the counter, for some reason looking more skittish than rakish today. He’s been hitchhiking for 25 years, either that or he’s hitched the country in its entirety 25 times, I always forget which. Whenever he got in a tight spot, he told me once, he’d “make like smoke and blow away.”

But like many of the dislocated souls here, he was just passing through when the town grabbed hold — specifically, in his case, Tessie, the pretty but no-nonsense 40 year old granny who owns the Safe Haven and who’s fallen for him but regards him sternly. He tries hard to please her but does have those decades of open road under his belt, after all, and a stint in the slammer for armed robbery.

(“You’re 20 years old,” he explained to me once when Tessie was out of earshot. “You hook up with a buddy who’s also 20 years old, you both want to be outlaws, bingo: armed robbery. Showdown ended with my buddy sticking his shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Closer than you are to me right now. Two years in the county jail and two years in the pen. But I learned my lesson: Come at the day with what YOU can bring to the day, not with what the day can bring YOU.”)

In various ways it’s done my heart good to have witnessed this romance develop over the four months I’ve been here. Right now it makes me less apprehensive about the rest of my day. Maybe I’ll soak in the hot tank when I get back to the trailer. It’s a steel cattle feeder in my dirt yard; all I have to do is twist the spigot and out gushes 112 degree water from the ancient volcanic lake just beneath my feet. In ten minutes I’ll be sinking up to my armpits in 385 gallons of hot springs with no sulfur stink, and more minerals than anywhere on the continent – including lithium which my grateful pores drink in until the words “blessed, blessed” escape my lips. And then the stars!

Or maybe I’ll drop in on Toni for an all-afternoon massage ($50 for three hours). Or find a fax machine somewhere to send in my application to adopt-a-highway, a barren stretch of stunted cacti and wondrous sunsets I want to take care of. (If I can’t nurture my boys at home, at least I can nurture a road, right?) Or ride the motor mule along some desert trails and watch coyotes scamper daintily out of the way. Or take the bed sheets off the line, which in the bright wind of the high desert will have dried in the twenty minutes I’ve been gone –

“Sorry, no truffles today,” Outlaw Ray informs me.

I am bitterly let down. These are world class truffles Ray makes from scratch, with coconut flakes on top and a ganache center.

“Got this here lasagna just out of the oven, though: spinach, mushrooms, and béchamel. I just love sayin’ that. Bechamellllll.”

Tessie watches through narrow eyes as he cuts an overgenerous piece and charges me $4.49. Pricey for this town, but it IS organic. And will take care of dinner.

“Is the rumor true that Real John was forced to move his van from the corner?” I ask.

“Building inspector ran him off.”

“I’m gonna miss his midnight yodeling.”

“Know what, though?” Ray says. “It’s spring, sap rising, man gets hankering. I think he was HAPPY to go park on the banks of the Rio Grande, all that breathing room …”

I note his wistful expression. “YOU stayin’ put, Ray?” I ask.

“Yes sir I am.” He looks at me solemnly, as if making a vow. “Despite an overnight tomorrow in Amarillo, seeing my only son for the first time in three years.”

“Nervous?” I ask.

“Naaaaaah!” he says nervously. “Am I nervous, Tessie?”

“Only thing he talks about.”

“How old’s the kid?”

“Be four tomorrow.” He kisses Tessie, who raises her eyebrows skeptically, then kisses him back hard. “But I’ll be back straightaway.”

I walk out with the lasagna in a white Styrofoam container with raised letters on its top: “Have A Nice Day.”

And you know what? I’m starting to.

the open road

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 REREAD MY OLD FRIEND TOM COBB’S BOOK “CRAZY HEART” AFTER SEEING THE MOVIE TO SEE IF IT WAS AS GOOD AS I REMEMBERED WHEN HE PUBLISHED IT SOME 20 YEARS AGO. IT WAS.

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

• BE A GOOD BOSS TO YOURSELF: GENEROUS WITH PRAISE, LIGHT WITH CRITICISM, RELAXED, KIND, FORGIVING.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• TAKING MY NOTEBOOK TO BED WITH ME? THO IT SEEMS PERFECTLY NATURAL TO ME.

Books by Daniel Asa Rose:

Larry's Kidney--out today in paperback!

Hiding Places

Small Family With Rooster

Flipping For It

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April 1, 2010: Robin Black

There’s an enormous window in my bedroom, so when I wake up, the first thing I see always is the day. Today, it’s rainy and doesn’t offer much incentive for getting out of bed though of course I have to anyway. My husband is away, working in Hong Kong for two weeks. My older daughter is here to help get my younger daughter to school since I have a back injury and can’t drive. But still, I need to be up and make sure that everyone has what they need – including Watson, the dog, who very much wants to be outside. That is, right up until he too notices the wet misery of the day, at which point he gives me the look that means: I’ll go if you go. So out I go, nightgown and all, into the rainy garden.

When I come back in, my daughters are arguing over something so ridiculous that I purposely try not to hear the details. A necessary mothering skill. And there’s still my youngest’s lunch to be made, still my own tea to drink, still – it turns out – the car keys to find, a task that takes longer than seems possible; but then finally, quite late and both grumpy, the girls are gone and I head back upstairs.

And now I start thinking about my work.

For better and worse, I often write in bed, still in my nightgown, a fact that embarrasses me. It sounds so slovenly. Though – as I remind myself on these mornings – what I choose to wear while alone in my house or on what piece of furniture I prefer to be immobile while I write isn’t actually a character issue. Still. . . there are days on which I throw on jeans and a shirt just on principle. But not today.

The work at hand is fiction. This is the first story I’ve written since finishing my collection a few months back and I’m enjoying the feeling, even the inevitable frustrations. There’s something nice about writing without worry over whether it does or doesn’t fit in with the other pieces. Something nice about having all those other stories out of my head. It also helps ground me into the actual business of writing, as opposed to worries about publication. By the time my older daughter gets home and announces that she’s going back to sleep, I’m deep into the worries of Ethan and Charlotte, my fifty-somethings who are visiting Mont St-Michel because she’s become obsessed with religious fanaticism and he is hoping that a trip might restart their non-existent sex life and so on and so forth – or something like that. I’m still at the stage at which I don’t really know what’s going on, surely don’t yet know who these people are, don’t understand why I’ve put them where I have, given them the habits they have – all of which is subject to change. And as the day passes, an hour, then a few more, I’m pretty lost in trying to describe the couple whom they encounter at dinner. My daughter reappears at some point, to tell me she’s awake again. I say hi, and think about making my characters older. Then wonder if I’ve given the other couple too great a role. And ponder whether it’s right to have this divided point of view; or should I focus just on him? Isn’t that the sensible thing to do? And then I notice that the dog wants to go out again and decide that I too could use a change of scene.

It’s stopped raining so with a bit of hesitation Watson is willing to step out into the yard ever so gingerly on his own while I scrounge in the kitchen for food. Scrounge, because with my husband away and me hobbled by my back, things have fallen off a bit. We’re pretty much down to tuna fish and leftover Indian food that requires too much appraisal, too much effort trying to remember what day it arrived. So tuna fish it is, as Watson, damp and smelly, returns.

When I settle on the couch with my sandwich, he takes his accustomed place up on the cushion behind me – draped over my shoulders like a living stole. I love this dog. I love that he doesn’t speak yet is so endlessly expressive. It’s such an antidote to the excessive degree to which I rely on words.

So I’m happily eating and snuggled by my dog as I dive back into the story and realize – of course! – that I’m done for the day. What is that feeling? That sense of it being gone? The words don’t catch. They feel just like words, a bit disconnected, and not at all like the charged and vibrant vessels of my deepest, most urgent . . . nope. Pretty much just words.

It’s about 2:00. My older daughter has disappeared again and the younger won’t be home for another hour and a half. And what I should be doing now is cleaning something. Anything really – everything could use it. I’m a terrible slob (though I despise that word) and there is always , always plenty of housework to be done. But true to form, I don’t want to clean and so, after a time on email, on Facebook, on twitter, on the Garnet Hill site, AND after putting on some actual clothes, I decide instead to read a couple of stories friends have sent me for comments. I’m one of those people who enjoys reading other people’s work and trying to figure out what they’re trying to do. I find it keeps me sharp and makes me think about my own writing. But I only have time to get through one story – a very strong piece which I’m not at all convinced needs my help – before my younger daughter rings the bell and the dog begins barking his head off, partly to guard us and partly to greet her.

With her arrival, the day takes on a different feel. There’s a certain timeless quality to the hours I spend alone, working. But now I want to hear about her day and I want to get her doing her homework. I also begin thinking about dinner which we decide will be take-out as there’s no food in the house. Cheesesteaks – about which my older daughter mutters with little conviction, “The diet begins tomorrow.” It’s an indulgent kind of evening, just the three of us eating too much and watching Say Yes To The Dress, a show that horrifies and mesmerizes in equal parts.

At around eight, my husband, twelve hours ahead, skypes me from the future and for about half an hour we attempt to talk, though the delay is terrible and most of the time we are either talking over each other or staring at one another in silence waiting for the other to speak. I have the sense too that a week into his Hong Kong trip, he’s already experienced more than can be conveyed over this kind of connection. I can tell he’s too much in the thick of it to want to describe it yet. As we writers like to say, he doesn’t have adequate distance. So with a sense that we’re putting off the real conversation, the one we’ll have for days and days when he returns, I tell him to have a good morning and he tells me goodnight.

I’m not quite done for the day with my other travelers, Ethan and Charlotte, off on whatever trip theirs is going to be. By ten, once the girls and I have said goodnight, I’m back in bed with the laptop on my lap. I don’t kid myself that I’m going to get any great work done – I almost never do at night. But I’m very conscious recently of how much of my writing takes place away from the keyboard, how much of what I do consists of puzzling something through semi-consciously while I do other things; and I want to read what I’ve written so far so I can keep it in my mind, maybe form some new impressions. It’s not always a pleasant experience. How could I have written something that syrupy? What on earth made me think people talk that way? And tonight is no exception, so with a certain part of my brain, I tinker and fiddle, changing abysmal sentences, striking unnecessary attributions in the dialogue. But that isn’t the real work, I know. It’s just busywork I do, while waiting. The real work is larger, structural – and will only come with time. It’s a conversation between me and the story. We’re negotiating – that’s the closest I can come to describing it. I suggest possibilities and it suggests others. Sometimes, it tells me I’m right. Usually, not. Back and forth, until we’re both satisfied. Until it conveys what it needs to convey.

That’s a long way off, though. And it’s time to put on The Daily Show now, though there’s no chance I’ll make it through. Really, it’s time to drift off, thinking about what I’ll be doing tomorrow, thinking about what my children will do, my husband, the dog. Those two characters suspended mid-action in France. All of us. All of it waiting to unfold over time.

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 going to duck the word “best” in part because I’m very conscious these days of the how subjective all that is. In a way, I’ve stopped believing that there’s any such things as “best.” It’s so much about appreciation and one’s own taste. Right now, I’m reading and very much enjoying The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf. It’s nonfiction, about eighteenth century botanists. I try to take breaks from fiction, both to stop obsessing over it and because it helps my brain (and my writing) to think about pursuits outside my familiar sphere.

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

• When you hear writing advice, keep in mind that the person is really saying: “this has helped me.” Try to be open to the idea that it may help you too, but equally open to the possibility that it won’t. The whole point of art is that it’s individual. That doesn’t start with the finished product; it’s inherent to the entire process. Be skeptical of writers who try to tell you there are rules.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I have terrible attentional issues and have had to find ways to contend with them. So I often have the TV on while I write – usually the news. And unless I’m very deep into a particular story, it’s not uncommon for me to jump around among as many as three or four projects in the course of a few hours. It’s a workable system for me – but note, when you asked for writing advice, I did NOT suggest that anyone else do that!

By Robin Black:

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March 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:

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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.

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:

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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 everything 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:

This series began August 1, 2009.