I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.
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Laurie Stone in 2022 at age 76
October 1, 2024: Laurie Stone
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Laurie Stone might be the most interesting writer I read. I like what she has paid attention to in her life and the way she allows it to mix with what she is paying attention to now and the way it all spills out of her onto the page. Oldster Magazine, which I love, introduced me to Laurie through her regular feature “Notes on Another New Life.” After that, I read her most recent book, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was published in 2022 and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Now I read her Substack, “Everything is Personal,” which is in its third year, has over 10,000 readers, and which Lit Hub recently named as one of the seven best literary publications on Substack.
In the introduction to Streaming Now, Laurie says that this book marks a shift in the way she writes.
When my sister was dying, I would walk in the city mornings and sit on a bench and write what came to mind, and I got to thinking of these exercises as ‘postcards’ …
I have been writing in this form since then. What is the form? You could see it as a series of ‘meanwhiles.’ Also, as a series of ‘yes, ands’… I have been wondering how to describe what people will read in this book, composed almost entirely of these intimate dispatches that, garnered together, form an atmosphere.
Here’s the bit I think goes straight to the heart of why I love to read her:
[T]his book invites something of the overheard of life and the caught-in-the-act of life, the dashed-off idea that can be exaggerated and raw.”
On July 22, 2020 Laurie remembers a man burning incense on Halsey Street in Brooklyn. It’s a hot day in Hudson, NY, where Laurie is physically located. Beckett’s plays pass through, she bought a pot roast, she and the man she lives with watched Roma on Netflix, and
I found postcards my mother had sent me at camp. She said, “I miss you. I can’t wait for you to come home.” And I could see her standing alone in the back of our little house in Long Beach, staring past the flagstone patio to a giant green hedge.
And, Laurie remembers that her sister died three years ago the day before.
In September 2020, she sees a friend on Zoom. In the bath, “I thought with distaste about abstract nouns such as conflict and abuse, although I like the phrase coined by Sarah Schulman that is also the title of a book she wrote, Conflict Is Not Abuse.” Laurie writes to the friend she saw on Zoom, whom she knew when they were in their thirties… Excerpts don’t do this type of writing justice. The thoughts are so intertwined and particular, and part of their beauty is the way one thing leads to another. There’s more, and then there’s this:
That’s when I slipped back to the party at the giant apartment of Nanette Ranone, how I had marveled at such a place with so many rooms and women living together with lovers and children and conflict. How could there not be conflict, and how could women not want to help each other through our beautiful, awkward lives? I missed the sense of being on the lip of things about to unfold: the large and small details of female existence, how we talk to each other, how we can’t wait to tell each other what we are doing and thinking about, how we take each other’s faces in our hands. Nothing is more interesting, not really, if you wake us suddenly in the middle of the night and say, “Who are you? What happened to you along the way?”
Click on “Everything is Personal” to take a look at Laurie’s Substack. If you’re not familiar with Substack, it’s a new way of creating and distributing literary writing. It’s also a community where readers and writers can interact with each other. If you subscribe to “Everything is Personal,” which I recommend, Laurie’s writing will arrive in your inbox. Here are my top three favorite pieces from the last year.
“Two Mistakes,” from March 17, 2024, begins like this: “I’m thinking about two mistakes I made that seem related. The first is getting married in 1966, when I was nineteen. The second is not finishing my dissertation.” If you got married at nineteen (or twenty like I did), this essay will likely give you back a thought or two you’ve forgotten, as well as some thoughts you’ve never had, and at the least, another chance to look back at your young self with curiosity and compassion. There were so many of us doing the same damn thing.
“Anatomy of a Fall,” March 27, 2024, is about the 2023 French film directed by Justine Triet from a screenplay she co-wrote with Arthur Harari. I’m not even going to try to excerpt anything. Especially if you’re a woman, you just need to click over and read it all.
“The Grandstand and the Arena,” from June 25, 2024, I think about all the time. The subtitle is “Where do you live?” Here are the first two sentences: “In my twenties, I knew a woman who said to me, “You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life.” We were in graduate school at Columbia.” I love the way this essay winds around, all its twists and turns, and again, to appreciate it fully you will have to read it for yourself. But in the excerpt below, you will see, I started to say what Laurie does best, but she does so many things best… In any event, you will see.
That insight or prediction [“You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life”] has been the shadow hanging over my life ever since. Not really and yet maybe really. I just said it. It just came to me, the way everything I write just comes to me unplanned, as the keys click along, as if guided by spirits the way a ouija board is guided, or by some collective unconscious or dybbuk.
Laurie Stone was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, a theater critic for The Nation, and a critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian Prize in Excellence in Criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She also writes for The Paris Review, Evergreen Review, and n + 1 and is the author of six books.
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Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how LAURIE STONE spends her days.
