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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January 1, 2025: Laura Warrell
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Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, published in September of 2022, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. It was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the CIBA Golden Poppy Book Award. It was also named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by NPR, Oprah Daily, Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Millions, and Hollywood Reporter. The novel was chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick. It is Laura Warrell‘s first book.
Circus Palmer, a single, forty-year old jazz trumpet player, is the glue that holds Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm together, but it’s the women who make it shine. Eight women. Each one has some kind of relationship with him. Each one is hurt by him. Each one has a voice in the book. In a particular chapter, or a particular moment, Circus may overshadow. But the more you read, the more you hear the voices of the women together, the less important he becomes.
The first words of the novel belong to Circus but not the last words. There are twenty chapters—six are in his point of view, five in the point of view of his daughter, Koko, and three in the point of view of her mother, Pia. We also hear from six other women–Maggie, Odessa, Peach, Angela, Raquel, and Josephine.
Maggie is awesome–strong and the most self-assured of all the women. “Love is lonely, Tip. Just you and another person, and the rest of the world falls away.” She’s a drummer, and in her chapter, which falls in the number three slot, she’s pregnant and trying to decide whether or not to keep the baby. There’s an amazing scene where she feels the early presence of a baby inside her as a rhythm to such a degree that it interferes with her drumming.
“Rhythm,” she answered over the shimmy of the high hat. “Everything is rhythm. Our bodies, time, the planet, man. It’s all moving in beats you just have to catch.”
Toward the middle of the novel, Circus says to his daughter, Koko,
“This is my house, Koko, my time, I decide how I’m going to spend this day, you hear me? I didn’t ask to see you today. I’m sorry if the time you get isn’t good enough, but I gotta do for me.”
This is just one of the many things Circus says that make us not want to like him. So it’s quite a trick what Laura does. Just like these women, we do like him. His big, sturdy shoulders and thick curly hair–and on top of that, he plays the trumpet. Here’s a flash of his magic. Koko asks him why he plays jazz, insinuating no one listens to it.
“I could give two shits who listens,” he shouted. “I play to feel joy. Maybe you can’t dig that because you’re little, but I play, and the world gets easier. You should be so lucky to find something like that in your life.”
Later on in this chapter, he tells his daughter that one day she would understand. “You’ll want to be something someday.” Her response, “I already am something.”
Lynell George wrote more about the music of the novel. “What makes Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm captivating is Warrell’s ability to write like music rather than about music, which is language in its own right. There’s a burnished precision to her prose; like a shimmering ride cymbal, it moves us from pattern to pattern, vignette to vignette, building on the theme of love.”
Laura grew up in Ohio and currently lives in California. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and The Writer. She is a fellow Vermont College of Fine Art alum, and I got to spend a little time with her this past September at a Writing by Writers’ event where she was teaching.
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Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how LAURA WARRELL spends her days.
