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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September 1, 2026: Malia Márquez
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Malia Márquez’s magical murder mystery, City of Smoke and Sea, won the 2023 Red Hen Women’s Prose Prize. Queenie Rivers is the star of this slim novel. She’s almost thirty and because things are not going well, she moves back to her grandmother’s one-story bungalow in the Del Rey Hills of Los Angeles.
Anke Rivers is eighty-four and smells of rose and sandalwood and cooking. She has “special knowledge of Southern California’s flora and fauna,” and “all sorts of secrets.” Her stories and myths about gods and tricksters “made non-human things like plants and animals seem important, connected…vulnerable. They made you feel like it wasn’t all about you.”
While Queenie takes Gran’s dog Daisy for a walk and Gran heats soup and rolls for dinner, something bad happens. At the end of Chapter Three, Queenie stands at the doorway.
Beyond [the first responder], out the open door, the dark curve of the street was puddled with faint yellowish light from the lamps above, I had the odd sensation that I wasn’t inside looking out, but outside looking in.
And so Queenie begins her journey to the inside.
Malia’s descriptions are one of the pleasures of this book as you can see from the passage below that details a room so that we know this is surely a place where magic lives.
The room glittered in the light of fixtures of all shapes and sizes. They hung from the ceiling and stood on the floor and were attached to the walls, shedding golden light over the poured concrete floor, walls painted the color of river clay, and the very old man who sat on a stool weaving the most enormous fishing net I’d ever seen. It flowed from his fingers like tides. Sections of it hung on random hooks on the walls and over wall lamps and it was layers and layers and layers deep, mounds upon mounds of intricate fibers.
Later in the novel, Queenie wakes up to the sound of someone in the backyard.
The young woman was quite beautiful, with dark tangled hair to her waist and wide brown eyes. She looked as if she didn’t get a shower often. Her clothes were worn and stained.
The woman, who introduces herself as Mo, tells Queenie that her grandmother “lived kind of like I do once. A long time ago. She was a wanderer too. For a short while.”
After Queenie has another scare, Mo says, “Your grandmother wasn’t who you think she was, and neither am I… And neither are you.”
Kirkus Reviews calls this beautiful book: “A unique multilayered story that will enchant readers with its blend of magic, mystery, and fabulist fantasy.”
Malia is also the author of the novel This Fierce Blood, and her fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in Poetry, Literary Hub, and The Georgia Review. She believes that if you’d like to be a better writer, you should observe chickens… As you will see from City of Smoke and Sea, she loves to play with stretching the bounds of conventional narrative while retaining elements of the familiar. She has taught creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at UCLAx. Born in Santa Fe, New Mexico to parents of Chicano, Native, and European descent, she now lives in Los Angeles where she teaches, writes, and wanders around in nature.
Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how MALIA MÁRQUEZ spends her days.