Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

ELLEN BIRKETT MORRIS

Ellen on the right, with her sister

Here I am, after having shoulder replacement surgery in the liminal space between pain and healing.

Pain leaves me tired and steals my focus. Work, my refuge, a kingdom without barriers, the chance to create the kind of world I want to live in where soldiers like the one in my novel act with courage and integrity and mothers go to great lengths to advocate for children, is not accessible to me now. So today, I get dressed slowly with the help of my husband.

This, coming off the launch of my debut novel Beware the Tall Grass last year that fulfilled many of my writing dreams. The novel won the Donald L. Jordan Literary Prize given by Columbus State University and judged by Lan Samantha Chang. I went on my first national book tour to indie book stores I had admired from my time as a public relations assistant at my local indie bookstore. The novel got a wonderful review from Publishers Weekly. But the best part was that I came out of the pandemic mindset into a world of fellow authors, interested readers, and engaged writing students. Those interactions filled me up in a way that was only matched by the satisfaction of the writing itself, an eight-year journey of teasing out story and theme.

But my days are quiet now. My body bears the wear and tear of hours spent at the desk. Writing is hard work. The writer Nathaniel Rich lamented the toll time at the computer takes on our backs and our necks. My stepmother, who wrote historical fiction, compared writing to digging a ditch. It’s no wonder that eventually I had the sore shoulder that needed to be fixed.

These days are not filled with words, the regular tasks of writing and reading. But filled instead with tiny acts like walking in slow circles around the house. I notice the sun on the coral-colored walls, the pictures on my mantle (the way they all date from a time when film was developed at a drugstore, not printed), my mother gone nine years now, a family photo from a 1960s picnic, my father’s sideburns a dead giveaway of a time gone by, my kind aunt with the generous heart and sparkling eyes. I read the magnets and comics my husband and I carefully selected to cover our fridge. I see the picture of my sister with her two twin boys, just babies then, who are now twenty. There is a feeling of having been Rip Van Winkled along the way. Here I am at fifty-nine, noticing things that had become invisible due to their familiarity.

I do rote exercises designed to limber my joints—squeeze my hands, bend my elbow, flex my post-operative arm, run that same arm across the table seeing how far I can stretch before the pain bites. I look down at the diagonal scar, dotted with staples, for any sign of infection and fill my days with a quest to eat better.

Bereft without the usual book to hold or work to do at the computer, I divert my attention with television, watching Borgen, the story of a female Danish Prime Minister who seeks to do good and maintain power without losing sight of what matters most to her. Just as The West Wing diverted me from the disappointments of the Bush Era, Borgen offers a slight diversion from the horrors of the Trump presidency.

My stories await me—a nearly revised novel and a set of short stories that is being considered for publication. Poems and essays yet unwritten where I may grapple with the razor’s edge of pain, and the gratitude it brings for the simplest things.

I, so like the fields of Kentucky just outside of town, lie fallow, waiting for the spring, waiting for my words to return, my mind empty of all except very small tasks, riding the roller coaster between fear and gratitude, excavating my life for warmth, excavating my life for memories that will sustain me as I heal.

So these days, as I walk slowly around my house, building strength, as I move my body, building flexibility, as I rest my mind, building creativity, I wait.

What I know when the days are hard is that this quiet, this emptiness, is where ideas are born. I will return to the short story collection I’ve developed with new eyes and insights, new stories to tell. I will return to my novel revision with a fresh sense of how to make that work. And later this year, with an arm that moves in all directions, I’ll begin something new, and in being new myself, I will bring something completely different to that page.

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NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

Intuitive.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

Colm Toibin’s Nora Webster for its beautiful portrayal of the inner lives of regular women.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

I am a huge fan of retro television and have been a lifelong reader of the television credits (everyone should have a byline). I can draw connections between the early work of David Chase, who was a writer and producer on The Rockford Files and went on to create The Sopranos. I can tell you which episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show were written by the great Treva Silverman.

By ELLEN BIRKETT MORRIS