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

TAYYBA KANWAL

Houston has been in full summer thunderstorm mode for weeks: flash floods, flashing lights at intersections, the day gray as steel wool except when the sun has fought through briefly only to turn the city into a mass sauna. Last night I fell asleep to the kwaking of treefrogs and tossed as the old live oak across the street snapped another branch. But I’ve woken to silver light. No sun, but no rain either. This means the slow morning walk around the block with my mother-in-law is on. Which also means, deadheading a fading rose I notice by the front door, throwing together breakfast-on-the-run for our college-going son, then one fried egg for our cats (the only way they will have it—and have it they will), shredded marigolds for our uromastyx and unloading the dishwasher to leave the kitchen pristine for this full household and the dinner to be cooked later this evening.

I share all this to say that when I was younger, I harbored a simmering resentment for everything I was obliged to do other than writing. I fancied the life of an “art monster.” It has taken me a few decades to appreciate the riches of caregiving—how it sustains by giving back love, how it shows I am only one knot in the fabric, and how it makes me more than my art. My writing is different these years, with this understanding.

It is 7:30 am. The pace in the kitchen has been slow, as will be the outdoors walk a little later. The coffee has kicked in. Off to the treadmill for forty-five minutes—today I run through Stone Town, Mozambique, and marvel at the technology and effort put in by who knows whom, that lets me dive into this fantasy. My running playlist is Billie Eilish-heavy lately. Some Collective Soul, some Manchester Orchestra.

I’m walking at a steep incline when I suddenly have an answer to a plot problem that has been tearing at me in my novel-in-progress. And I have a new insight about a character. This will change everything—now I know why he and my protagonist are together, and what she has been quietly fighting inside herself. My novel is in its very early stages. It doesn’t come to me the way my short stories do. It comes to me in scenes. I know the novel’s emotional arc. The plot feels uninteresting relative to all the moments that have been unfurling in my mind. I suppose I will have to trust the plot to fall out. I cool down by scribbling all these flashes in my notebook before the oncoming flood of emails washes them down the metaphorical drain.

A few hours now on the back end of websites and in spreadsheets and of course, email. Amidst all the logistical tasks, I never want to lose sight of what really fills my soul in my work at the journals—the writing we get to bring into the world. I make sure I read some submissions every day, even if only one. Today Submittable will be tackled over lunch. And then I will write, I promise.

I return from lunch to an urgent phone call with the designer for our journal’s website. And a reminder email from my press about edits due before the second print run of my short story collection (woo hoo!). And a second reminder email for a book I’m reviewing. I shouldn’t be checking emails after lunch, but the designer made me do it.

Now I’m anxious because the clock has slipped deeper into the lull of late afternoon—my prime writing time, I have learned. Being a morning person does not mean being a morning writer. My brain is too hot in the morning. That time is for checklists. The afternoons bring a quiet to my mind, take the edge off so that my creative attention can emerge from wherever it’s been cowering. I hang up, having noted all the work-related follow ups in some file to be looked at the next morning. All windows closed except for Scrivener.

Only an hour today. It’s okay—there is a scene that I know how to deepen. Finally, words on the page. You see how slowly this book will be written. But I trust that some words every day will add up. I am not worried because so much of this book is being written as my body is busy elsewhere. I will, shortly, drive my husband to the airport so we can have our first alone time together all day, and look forward to writing more in my head on the drive back. I will then make kababs for dinner for the rest of the folks at home, and again, I trust I will see something as I’m frying, some spark that will have me sneaking for a minute to my notebook as others make their way to the table.

9:00 pm, I sit down to read. Tonight, it will be a very promising submission I’d set aside to reread in the journal queue. And it will be another story in Hasan Dudar’s collection Carryout, a book that particularly thrills me because I first came across Hasan’s work when I was editing at Gulf Coast and the story we published then is in this collection. To be immersed in the rich world Hasan has built up around that story is a wonder. Serendipitously, yesterday I’d also picked up Julia Elliott’s collection Hellions at our local bookstore, seven stories of which first appeared in Conjunctions. People ask if my work at the journals interferes with my own writing. On the contrary, it completes me. It’s going to be a late night though. I have to skim Rachel Cusk’s Second Place again because tomorrow I’m seeing a friend for lunch who has, to my utter delight, fallen as much in love with this book as I have, and we have agreed to break it down together. A writer couldn’t look forward to a better conversation.

~

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THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Percolation.

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

• Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Cooking some elaborate multi-step multi-hour dish when I desperately need to be alone.

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By TAYYBA KANWAL
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—Other Writers in the Series—