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

MALIA MÁRQUEZ

Open the curtains. Los Angeles has the best light, the quality so changeable at different times of day, sometimes cool and gray in morning, searing by 9am these days, and pink, blue, purple, and gold at sunset. I’m obsessed. Having lived in the Chicago area for seven months last year, I can’t get enough of the sky, the air dense with particles of the Pacific and of course pollution. Breathing it in, I am filled with the unique energy of this place.

Get back in bed for a few minutes to regard the world outside. Dreaming is an important part of my work, so I like to transition gently if possible. Read a few pages of a book (nearing the end of Hollow Spaces by Victor Suthammanont—highly recommend.) Throw on running clothes, pour more coffee in ceramic mug. Out the door to take one of my teenagers to school.

*

It is afternoon, and I’m working on this essay after:

reading for student workshops and updating syllabi, walking the dog, school pickup, beta reading a colleague’s not yet published dystopian cyberpunk novel, and as is always the case when I read others’ work, I’m learning something.

There’s a challenge to this writing about my day for others to read. I don’t think my life is particularly boring, but it is so very familiar. Stepping away from it—I write mostly fiction—feels like a breath of fresh air. For me, writing is so much about learning and dwelling in things that are not me. Exploring other places, other times. But I suppose looking out is, in that magical way art operates, also a way of looking in.

“Know thyself” (gnothi seauton or γνῶθι σεαυτόν), inscribed by ancient Greeks on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, was at the core of many Stoic philosophers’ philosophizings. Useful for writing, but also a delicate balancing act, even perhaps a trap. I say to my students—there’s a piece of us in every character we write, no matter how inconsequential. Maybe authenticity is the healthy version of knowing thyself, where the inside and the outside finally match, and navel gazing is what happens when you forget to stop examining your own reflection.

I’m thinking about what it means to ‘know thyself’ through writing. It’s a practice, sometimes serious, sometimes play. We’re always trying to get to the bottom of something, whether it’s a mystery or the kernel of divinity and truth in a poem or what we really think or feel about something that has caught our attention. That and escape. And existential comedy. I do love a good romp. Camp is high art. It buoys the spirit.

Lately, I’ve been listening a lot. Last year in Chicago, I spent a fair amount of time commuting by train from the outer suburbs into the city to teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I hardly drove. I could get work done on the train. I loved working with art students. It was glorious. Now, back in Los Angeles (traffic-ridden city of my heart), I spend a lot of time in the car, which means I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Today it’s Maria Semple’s Go Gentle, about a divorced, Stoic-obsessed philosopher who gets pulled into a darkly comic romp involving stolen art and her own buried trauma.

Okay so I’m sitting here on the couch in my living room tapping away, dog on my left, cat on my right. AC is on because we’re experiencing a wave of hot (relative to LA) weather, sliver of lemon bright sun coming in through the curtains, and long buried memory of my own arrives out of the blue of my middle school friends and me armed with a Sony camcorder filming a skit for English class, a satire of the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus. We constructed a wearable airplane out of cardboard which I, cast as Narcissus, a self-obsessed jet-setting businessman, hung over my shoulders like a pair of suspenders and trotted around my friend’s suburban neighborhood spurning poor cursed Echo until I fell into a (drawn with sidewalk chalk) pool of water and turned into a daffodil. Which makes me think of the scene from Mary Poppins––

(“I don’t know. I might pop through a chalk pavement picture and go for an outing in the country,” says Bert.)

I can relate.

I give my students an exercise to analyze this line from King Lear in the context of writing fiction, focusing specifically on characterization: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” They are fantastic and articulate and so smart, often well versed in Shakespeare, and they’ll talk about how the line means no one else can truly define you, and we see Lear realize this only when he’s being stripped of status and power, forced to face his own identity, free of external scaffolding. However, flipped into the context of writing, we begin to grasp the immensity of responsibility we take on as writers, for bringing characters to life, for building out of words the essential core of a character’s being on the page. To say I enjoy being in conversation with my characters and their worlds is an understatement. Writing is how I process things, and without a project I am left looking too much at myself. So the task becomes remembering to look outward whether I’m actively putting words down or not. Who is it who can tell me who I am? Writers are always writing, whatever they’re up to.

*

For dinner, sardine surprise. A garlicky, lemony, peppery pasta with tinned fish, heavy on the parsley, which my partner and I both loved even before we met. We are both stubborn and opinionated, some might even say a couple of contrary Marys, but this is something we always agree on. I think the Stoics would have approved of the meal’s frugality, if not of the garlic and spices, which might have been considered extravagant by their standards.

Then a little TV (the new Ted Lasso episode, it’s Wednesday!), some reading, and bed. Dog on my left, cat on my right. Animals are pains in the butt and also the key to happiness. We’re in between eclipses—the solar eclipse in Leo giving way to the upcoming Lunar eclipse in Pisces. Did you know the ancient Stoics are the ones who made astrology intellectually respectable? I find it fascinating. For any moon-influenced people out there, buckle your belts, I know I am.

~

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THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Instinctive.

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

• Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, selected, edited, and translated by Jean Benedetti.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Squeezing limes with my teeth. It looks gross but I swear it’s not and is actually the best way to get all the juice out.

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By MALIA MÁRQUEZ

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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