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

MICHELE M. FEENEY

When I was a child growing up on our family farm in Michigan, our barn housed several cats, all nameless. Most looked like the well-worn Velveteen Rabbit, missing eyes or ears or parts of tails, sometimes with patchy fur, and soiled. Unloved. No one knew when the cats arrived or from where; we seemed to be the Goodwill drop-off for unwanted cats throughout the township. The cats swarmed our front porch a couple of times a day in search of food. I recall my mother remarking, eyebrows raised, in response to their bereft appearances, “If you cobbled all those cats together, you’d maybe have one good cat.”

This is how I sometimes feel about my writing days: as if one would have to patch together the bits and pieces of a string of days to make one good writing day.

Today, the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University is my writing home. My office is on the third floor. Two floors up, mock trial try-outs are ongoing. A student, dressed in a suit and tie, talks to himself in a glassed-in study room between my office and the bathroom; he is practicing an argument. Other students, also formally dressed on this Saturday morning, linger in common areas, comparing notes now that their try-outs are complete. The coaches will call me only if there is an emergency: an unexpected request for accommodation, a cheating incident, or a medical situation. In other words, an event demanding the presence of a university employee.

I can write anywhere. This declaration is time-tested: basketball tournaments, airplanes, swim meets, restaurants, dance competitions, the back seats of cars.

A door I can shut is a gift, silence is a prayer.

Today, I’ve been up since six, and it is now nearly eleven. What have I been doing?

Let’s call it, “Not-Writing.”

I buzzed around my house clearing the aftereffects of a university party last night, figured out what to wear for a charity event tonight, ran errands on the way to the law school, checked in with the judges and students running try-outs, organized the stack of papers that had accumulated over the past week, including everything needed to file my taxes, and planned my time for the upcoming week. I stopped short of blocking writing time on my calendar; that never works. I texted my sister and a friend and spoke on the phone with another friend. I figured out what non-writing tasks must be done today.

I asked my husband to drive all the knives in our house to the farmers’ market to leave with the knife sharpening guy.

I sorted my time like loose change: quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies.

Every day, I choose three writing tasks I absolutely want to accomplish. Today, it is complete this essay, write two pages of new work in longhand (my preference), and find a good date for a book club a friend offered to host. I wrote the three tasks in my writing journal. When the day is done, I’ll enter a few lines about what I actually accomplished—and call it “good.”

This process seems to be the predicate to my creative life: do my chores and clear my head as if it’s a field of brush, sometimes brush fires. Set the stage with my time-tested habits.

In my third-floor office, with a window that looks out on a Chick-fil-A and a Starbucks, I’ve turned on the quiet classical music and the scent machine (the university-approved alternative to a sweet-smelling candle). I can hear bubbles coming from the machine and the scent of eucalyptus fills the air.

Now, I have an hour. One hour.

Then, it will be time to have lunch in the try-out room.

I began seriously writing in 2000 and persisted for almost twenty-five years before Black Rose Writing published Like Family. I managed a law practice and an academic job. My husband and I took care of five children, and two houses, my Phoenix home and my childhood home in Michigan. All my writing happened in crevices just like what I have available today. I wrote many essays, hundreds of short stories, and at least four “practice” novels. I took dozens of classes, both online and in person; attended many conferences, usually two or three a year; and worked with a writing coach. I applied for MFA programs in 2019 and was admitted to Bennington’s low-residency program in 2020. I graduated in 2022.

I struggle with all the same things other writers do: focus, time, space, confidence, imagination, and distraction, to name a few. Over the years, I’ve used many systems to carve out writing time and space, switching them up as my life changed. For example, the 4:00 a.m. wake-up time I relied on for years, which afforded two scant hours of quiet time before my children woke, is now a 5:00 a.m. wake-up time. This is because I no longer need an extra hour to make sure everyone is up, fed, and launched before my own workday—I’ve recaptured that real estate. Or the writing “office” in the root cellar of the Michigan house—damp and dusty but secluded. I now have a lovely desk in my bedroom, for those times I can’t use the dining room table.

Still, that one “good” writing day mostly has eluded me. A day that includes a snowy field of uninterrupted time to generate new work, with time for thoughtful reading and collegial communication with other writers, time for planning. A day on which I tick off a few tasks that are purely administrative, but part of a writing career.

Savoring the calm seclusion of my office, I have ideas for my new work, a second novel. In my imagination, I am deep in the era of the Great Depression, identifying the roots of when and why my main character, Mollie, became politically active. I wonder how maternal/fetal medicine was different in 1932 than it is today. I decide to ask my sister, a doctor, and my niece, a medical student in her obstetrics and gynecology rotation, to read a childbirth scene for accuracy. I think about how adult adoptees and orphans process identity issues. I imagine a scene where Mollie, a teacher, confronts a playground bully who is the child of a very powerful parent, one who can end Mollie’s employment, employment Mollie badly needs to support her family. All these themes are playing in my imagination…even as I receive the text that my one hour has just turned into thirty minutes.

I am needed to pick up the boxed lunches.

Like Family would not exist without the COVID-19 pandemic, which cleared my calendar of most social and professional obligations and created islands of time each day conducive to “deep work.” While the pandemic was a horror, that clearing was a gift. I was as alarmed as everyone about what COVID-19 meant. Now, we struggle to remember how terrifying conditions were at the beginning of the pandemic: sirens rang out all night long in New York City, no vaccine was available or even in reach, we were washing our groceries. The fear and disorientation in 2020 compelled me to work out my alarm and terror on the page.* I couldn’t write on-the-nose about COVID-19—none of us knew how that would turn out. Instead, I went far back to a time in history that resembled COVID-19, the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. These conditions—white space on the calendar, fear and disorientation, and curiosity about how people dealt with pandemics in the past—allowed me to build the story of Like Family.

Back in my office, lunches delivered and eaten, I re-start the music. I have another solitary hour and will use it well. One can do a lot with snippets of time clipped from the fabric of a life. And one needs a life to have any stories to tell.

Still, I aspire to one single “good” day before I die—that elusive “one good cat” my mother imagined.

*“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at,
what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Joan Didion, Why I Write, from The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

Persistent.

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

Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

I make a hand-written list of what I have to do each day with entries segregated into prescribed colors: Private Practice = red, ASU = purple, Writing = green, Household and Family = blue, Volunteer = brown, Personal = pink. These colors track on my electronic calendar, my paper calendar, the colors of file folders I use, and even the colors of index cards I choose to use. I can eyeball each day and see if I am maintaining balance.

By MICHELE M. FEENEY