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.
At the Royal Society of Medicine in London earlier this year
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January 1, 2026: Melissa Pritchard
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Florence Nightingale all but soars right out of Melissa Pritchard’s Flight of the Wild Swan.
I may not know why I was born, but it cannot be to wage war on dust and broken crockery. It cannot be to put down in a house ledger, as I do now, meaningless columns of tweedly this, tweedly that.
Flight of the Wild Swan is a big, thick novel structured in short chapters that highlight moments, keep the story moving, and underline the urgency in Florence’s thoughts and in her life. As a child she creates journals from her parents’ old letters, each page “folded into fours, the folded pages neatly stitched down one side.” She fills any blank space.
I am compelled, despite the ache in my wrists, to write down every smidgen of life going on around me, every thought boiling up within me. Nothing is real unless I take it down, pin and straighten what I see and think into measured words, solid sentences.
Florence was born in 1820 in Florence, Italy (hence her name) to wealthy parents. She was a brilliant child, not only interested in healing but in everything. She and her father studied stones and fossils together.
I have collections of coins, seashells, wax dolls. I’ve a cemetery trove of harvest mice, a baby wren, pink-skinned and naked of feathers, a blackbird, two halves of a grass snake…
Her father was also the one who made sure she and her sister received an education, even though both her mother and her father expected the girls to marry and raise families. But Florence was desperate to be out in the world doing things.
A letter, too, from Pastor Fliedner, asking when will I be coming to Kaiserwerth to study nursing. My application has been approved. I would be there this minute! Why am I here, in this house? A seething creature, poisoned by rage, with an oversized brain.
Forced to stay at home by her parents, she does what she is supposed to until she cannot.
From the landing, William Nightingale calls upstairs. She’d not come down to dinner the previous night, complaining of a headache. She has not appeared at breakfast. Hearing no response he takes the stairs. The door is unlocked, her bed is neat, unslept in… Where is she? At that moment he spots a dark, still shape at the farthest edge of the meadow. Hurtling downstairs, flinging open the front door, shouting her name, he runs.
Flight of the Wild Swan was a finalist in the category of Literary Fiction in this year’s Georgia Author of the Year Awards. It is historical fiction and gorgeously written as you can see by these excerpts from the first part of the book. When I was a child, I loved reading about Florence as the “lady with the lamp.” Now I love her so much more, knowing how hard she had to fight to hold that lamp and how much more there is to her story.
In addition to Flight of the Wild Swan, Melissa has published ten other award-winning books. She has received the University of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor Award, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Award, Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Prize. She is a five-time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and frequently shortlisted in Best American Short Stories. WordTheatre has performed her short stories in New York and Los Angeles; two of her books were named New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and “Notable Books of the Year.” She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation in Switzerland, the Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. The Carnation Milk Palace, her fifth short story collection, will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in January 2027 and her sixth novel, Tempest: The Story of Fanny Anne Kemble, will be published by Regal House Publishing, Fall 2027. She currently lives in Columbus, Georgia.
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Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how MELISSA PRITCHARD spends her days.