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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Twins! Ramona and me at Well Red Bookstore in Auburn on 10-12-23, the Alabama stop on the 50 Bookstore Tour
February 1, 2025: Ramona Reeves
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Ramona Reeves’ story collection, It Falls Gently All Around, won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which included publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press. These eleven linked stories are set in Mobile, Alabama, where Ramona grew up, and where my grandparents lived when I was a child. Mobile is a port city on Alabama’s gulf coast, about thirty minutes from the Mississippi border.
In the first story, “Last Call,” we meet Babbie, who’s almost forty and is on a cigarette break at her first job at Gulf Coast General. Rowan, “the best of her ex-husbands,” helped get her the job. In just an hour, she’ll be working her second job as a cashier at the truck stop. When she goes back inside the hospital, it turns out she knows one of the guys being brought in on a stretcher. Skipper.
In her official capacity, she had been the motel’s overnight clerk at $7 an hour. In her unofficial capacity, she had been someone else entirely. During those times, she had locked the main entrance and posted a No Vacancy sign… Skipper had been a relapse. For months before him, there had been no other men… No one at the hospital or the truck stop knew about the men… People said a woman had choices, but they never said how few those choices could be.
Strong sentences, and each one is interesting.
“Giving Way to ZZ Top” features the other main recurring character. Donnie works at the truck stop, but he wants to open a yoga studio. His brother and sister-in-law come to visit, and when his brother leaves to do some work, his sister-in-law offers to cut his hair. Donnie hasn’t had a haircut in over a year, since he stopped driving a truck. The story slows down for this scene.
Pieces of his life fell in quick succession: The inch that had been there when he kissed his wife for the last time. The inch that had tasted his last beer. The inch that had witnessed his eighteen-wheeler being repossessed. He knew better than to cry over a haircut–for god’s sake, it was only hair–so he tried to concentrate on his breath until the snip snip of the scissors quieted. He closed his eyes and just breathed. In and out like a wave. No regret, he told himself. Although some days it was all he had.
This is a brilliant piece of writing. While it’s just a haircut, Donnie’s hair has been growing for over a year so that, in and of itself, makes it a big deal, makes it feel true that he would be thinking back over that year with each clip of the scissors. Also, a haircut can be a signal that something has changed and/or that the person is ready to make a change. It can be an acknowledgment, as well as a reminder of the change. From a writing perspective, it’s such an efficient way to weave in backstory. We watch, mesmerized, as Donnie sheds his past with the inches of hair that fall around him. Then we get the yoga breathing, the new Donnie. And his attempt to move on. No regret. And finally, reality. All that, in a short paragraph.
Babbie and Donnie anchor this collection. They know each other and are wonderfully human. And there are so many other great characters too. And place and class and race. Life.
It Falls Gently All Around is Ramona’s first book, and it also won the 2023 Texas Institute of Letters Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction.
After growing up in Alabama, Ramona lived in New York City where she proofread for a men’s fashion weekly and performed production roles for Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and Esquire, which led to technical editing and writing. After ten years, she moved to Texas and worked for a newspaper until she went back to school for her MFA at New Mexico State University. She currently lives in Texas and is working on a novel.
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Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how RAMONA REEVES spends her days.
it sounds like a great read!
I loved it, Beth!
The stories are very good. Cal
Glad you agree!