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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September 1, 2025: Maureen Stanton
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At the age of 35, Maureen Stanton quit her job to focus on her dream of becoming a writer. At 40, she graduated from an MFA program where she wrote the first draft of a memoir that would be published, yes, but not for 25 years. In 2024The Murmur of Everything Moving won the Donald L. Jorden Literary Prize, which grants the recipient $10,000, and publication by Columbus State University Press, located just a few miles from where I live in Columbus, Georgia.
In between the first draft of The Murmur of Everything Moving and its publication in March, Maureen has not been sitting around eating bonbons. In 2012, her debut, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting was published and won a Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. And in 2019, her second book, Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, was published and won the Maine Literary Award for memoir.
The Murmur of Everything Moving, a title I love for its length, its sound, its evocation of the heart and time, is a memoir of love and illness. A beautiful one-and-a-half page Prologue begins with Maureen’s memory of being six and walking down the street with Frankie S, the boy next door, and culminates with the three sentences below that tell the story of the memoir.
When I met Steve, at 27 he wanted, for the first time in his life, to find love. At 23, full of myself, I thought I knew what love was. In time, we would both learn about love, the hard way.
Maureen and Steve meet in the 1980’s. Early on, Maureen must decide whether to stay in Michigan with Steve or return to Boston. She calls her mother. “Just follow your heart,” her mother tells her. “Everything was clear then,” she writes. “[M]y heart was with Steve, and Steve was in Michigan.”
Of course, it’s not that easy; relationships never are.
Quickly my life in Michigan failed to live up to my expectations, though I wasn’t even sure what my expectations were. I hadn’t envisioned this life I’d chosen, hadn’t put any rational thought into my decision to move here and live with Steve.
At a year and a half in, they hit a particularly rough spot, which coincides with the arrival of Maureen’s sister Sally in Michigan. Sally is full of life and plans, and Maureen understands that she has lost herself.
In the year or so that I lived with Steve, I hadn’t swum at the Y, I hadn’t seen a foreign film or visited an art gallery. I hadn’t written any stories. I’d traded my night time reading for snuggling with Steve on the couch, watching television. For comfort and safety, for love, I’d opted for passivity, for a circumscribed world.
A month later, the Challenger explodes, and Steve checks into the hospital with acute back pain. We are on page sixty-eight. Part II, of the book and their life together, begins.
Throughout the memoir, Maureen weaves in moments of her past that enlarge the current narrative. For example, as a child, she stepped into deep water in a lake, where it was quiet and dreamy. After being rescued, she fell asleep to her babysitters singing love songs. “For a long time after, I associated loving somebody with that feeling of drowning.”
The writing is clear and a pleasure to read. Maureen will often start a paragraph with a short declarative sentence that grounds us, like “In love we are vulnerable,” or “Places shape us.” As we read on, she goes into more detail. And Maureen also writes sentences that lift us off the page.
There are moments in our lives when the wick of desire is lit, when standing on a threshold we glimpse possibility, a larger world that awaits us, and we are forever changed.
Maureen lives in Maine and teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Some of you may already know Maureen and Steve’s story from a NYT Modern Love column that appeared last June entitled, “An Engagement Ring, but No Fiancé.”
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Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how MAUREEN STANTON spends her days.
