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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April 1, 2026: Melanie Pappadis Faranello

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Melanie Faranello’s debut collection, Everybody Needs Something, is the 2025 winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence and out in the world today. In the first story, “My Father, My King,” a father, standing at his father’s grave, tells his son that his grandfather’s name was Frederick but everyone called him Ralph, and when the son laughs, the connection between the two expands to fill an ache the father has had since he was a child. In “Flotsam,” after Jack’s wife dies, he spends an evening with an old high school girlfriend. While the encounter is longer and more complicated than in the first story, it’s still laughter that fills the emptiness. These stories value moments of connection.

In “Take Me Out,” at the suggestion of her therapist, Leah decides to try ballroom dancing. (Her husband, Nick, has left their five-year marriage “to live on a catamaran, like some kind of made-for-Netflix movie.”) It is Leah’s interior push-pull with the therapist that gives the beginning of this story its propulsion. The dance class takes place at the Community Center (“which to Leah sounded the same as the Senior Center”) in the basement, in a children’s ballet room where Leah herself took ballet as a child. She finds a picture of her ballet class, and her nine-year-old self, on the wall. When the instructor offers her a butterscotch, the same candy her father used to keep in his pockets, her father comes alive for her, and despite the physical connections made with her ballroom dancing partners, it is the connection to her father made during this one class that changes things for Leah, that reconnects her with herself. 

“The Treehouse” is my favorite story in the collection because of its writing, honesty, and structure. Here, a couple’s seventeen-year-old daughter goes missing in October, six months before the beginning of the story. Take a look at how interesting the writing is:

They were still Martin, still Dawn. The dogs, still the dogs. The coffee, the knitting, the mornings. Some things never change. But they were not Martin-and-Dawn anymore. The calamity having taken up residence in that seemingly benign conjunction between their names.

The story begins with Martin talking about the weather as they head to the treehouse, a quarter-mile walk into the woods they’ve been making every morning for the last six months. We are in Leah’s point of view. “Martin knew she didn’t like talking about the weather. It was like painting a picture of air—just air…” But Martin continues with the weather, while we learn that the day before, their daughter, who turned eighteen in March, had sent a text and photo of herself to a friend. She was fine. In the excerpt below, so much truth:

…[A]nd here they were in the actual outdoors, Martin insisting on his report. A low rage roiled at the base of her sternum, and still she didn’t answer him, because really, what was there to say about any of it? Because if she opened her mouth, she was afraid of what kind of monstrous trapped creature might fly out.

The structure of the story is simple, yet powerful. There’s the walk to the treehouse, what happens at the treehouse, and the walk back. You will have to buy the book to enjoy the pleasure of the walk back. 

As well as of the pleasure of “Just Fine,” a close second to my favorite story and the first of three interconnected stories, where the tension between a father and a son is magnified by what is happening in the restaurant where they go for breakfast. There, everything is decorated in red and green, the wait staff dressed as elves. The father and the son must swim upstream against the current of Christmas in August. 

These fourteen stories range in length from two to nineteen pages, and inside these pages, in addition to truth and connection, you’ll find “molasses-like quiet,” “suffocating mugginess,” and “meaningless exercise clothes.” There’s something so visual about the writing. I can see these characters, and I won’t soon forget them.

Melanie, a believer in creative writing and stories as a way to connect and to explore human experiences, is a teacher and the founder of Poetry on the Streets. Her stories and essays have appeared in Swamp Pink, StoryQuarterly, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, Vol 1. Brooklyn, HuffPost Personal, Blackbird, StorySouth, Catamaran, and Connotation Press. She is the recipient of a Writer-in-Residence Award from Monson Arts and an Artist Fellowship from the CT Office of the Arts. She has also researched oral Limbu folklore in Nepal. Originally from Chicago, she lives with her family in West Hartford, Connecticut, where she is at work on a novel that has been shortlisted for the Dana Awards and the William Faulkner Wisdom Competition and that has won a Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLO spends her days.