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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June 1, 2026: Joyce Hinnefeld
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The characters in Joyce Hinnefeld’s The Dime Museum love poetry and steal books. They live in Venice, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Lisbon. Together, in nine stories, they create the world of this novel, each story told from the point of view of a different character: Charlie, Maude, Liliane, Tess, Nina, Tom, Mary, Min, and Stefan.
Nothing in The Dime Museum is expected, and that is one of its pleasures. I don’t think anyone except Joyce Hinnefeld could have written this book that connects Ezra Pound, the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, a bookstore in Venice, and a vaudeville male impersonator who got stuck in Wabash, Indiana, in the middle of a snowstorm because she missed the last train.
Charlie has the first line of the book. “When I got to Venice in the fall of 2019, I was thinking about death.” Charlie loves books, poetry (Louise Bogan and Adrienne Rich), and Min. “I’m a twenty-first century white guy, I like basketball, and my name is Charlie, so I can’t get out of bed in the morning without being predictable and banal.”
In a later story, we hear from Charlie’s mom.
What can it mean in a world like this, and at a time like this, that my son Charlie wants to be a poet? Which means he spends most of his time in bars, occasionally performing but mostly drinking and getting into fights. is this what it means to be a poet now?
But it is Maude I have a soft spot for with her old stories, her books in neat stacks under the window, her love of Annie. We meet her in the second, and title, story.
Should she tell…the stories she’s never told anyone else? The truths she hid…. About what a failure she’d been at that other thing, that other life as a performer. Or about her time as a dime museum caricature. How could she explain it, the fact that the happiest time of her life was that period, starting sometime during the Great War, when people had paid to gawk at her as she sat on a stool, wearing trousers and suspenders and a monocle over her eye?
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Her father’s view of her as a child had been all wrong, or mostly wrong, the product of bathtub gin and maudlin sentiment. She’d been thin, but also strong. And she sang, but not that well. For a while she’d believed him. It’s probably what led her to the fond and foolish notion that she might someday be a poet. That, and the books of her mother’s she’d carried with her since her death–Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads.
And Liliane wants to be a poet too… Another of the pleasures of The Dime Museum is discovering how the different characters are connected.
As each story adds another layer to the whole, there are questions of privilege and art and wealth and politics. And there are books—so many mentioned on these 173 pages. I started a list, but kept getting distracted by the characters. And the lines of poetry…
Joyce is also the author of the novels, In Hovering Flight and Stranger Here Below, and the short story collections, The Beauty of Their Youth (part of the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series) and Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction). She is an Emeritus Professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, director of the Moravian Writers’ Conference, and a Program Facilitator with Shining Light, an organization that provides reentry-based programming for incarcerated people throughout the US. The Dime Museum was published by the wonderful Unbridled Books.
Come back on JUNE 1st to read how JOYCE HINNEFELD spends her days.