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.

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.