On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

MAUREEN AITKEN

I am writing every day this month. I am writing in the early morning before the heat descends, before the first stultifying 95 degrees, followed by storms, then the second set of mid-90s temperatures, then the second storm, which takes out the power for one day, then the second day, then into the third. Out comes the generator, and the culling of food gone bad in the refrigerator. I am writing, too, when smoke from the fires of Ontario bear down, cast the sun orange, and make a simple walk impossible.

As is true in all frenetic times, I am using the Pomodoro method (25-minute sessions of focused writing using a timer) for one, two, sometimes three rounds in the day. Some of that writing is note taking about our collective now. Everything happening is so colossal, so large. It’s climate change, politics, war. It’s violence. It’s dismantling education. Pick any day, I’m taking notes to start, not because I plan to use it for anything, but I have to get it out of me and on the page. We have to bear witness to the details.

Then I turn to fiction, particularly works in progress. Because I wrote yesterday, I am picking up the bones, writing within a story, and there is the beauty, not the discipline, but the creative mind space that discipline brings. It offers some relief, just before I read the headline in The Atlantic, “The End of Reading is Here,” and I am back in the dull-witted feeling of oppressive heat.

There is only one day when I almost do not write. I am at Detroit’s Eastern Market, walking toward Shed #5 at the Detroit Festival of Books. I am signing The Patron Saint of Lost Girls for forty-five minutes at the Wayne State University Press table, then walking around to look at books.

The massive Eastern Market has many sheds, and a flurry of events on the weekend. Ahead of me, it looks like a party in front of Shed #5. Hundreds of people are packed in so tightly they can barely move. I hear laughter, and the bright, snappy sound of talking. I am early, so I walk toward the laughter.  As I close in on that section, I see it is another part of the Detroit Festival of Books, with outdoor vendors. It is the self-published writers holding up books with beautiful covers, the second-hand bookstores, the record shop, the publishers, the table for bookmarks and mugs. I’m overwhelmed by the warm energy of people here who are displaying, signing, and talking about books.

I move into Shed #5 with a DJ and his powerful beats at the main entrance. Wall-to-wall tables of booksellers and writers, and library folks talking and laughing for as far as I can see. The view would break open any reader’s heart. It is so crowded I stop five times because of human traffic jams. This day brings in 20,000 readers and 300 vendors. To give you a sense of how massive this is, Pine Knob concert venue nearby only seats 15,000 people. But here, on this day, there is no major performer. Books are the band. Readers are the groupies. The crowd itself is the proof, the beauty, and the main attraction.

It contrasts with one kind of truth published in The Atlantic article. But this is the proof of what I have witnessed in twenty years of teaching writing. Yes, the readership of books has decreased across the board in this country. But a part of our population reads more than ever. Maybe it is a response to book bans. Maybe it is in defiance of “end of reading” headlines. Maybe it is a protest against defunding education. But these are guesses. Here, on this day in Detroit, Michigan, I know one thing.

These days I’m reading to escape the worst kind of noise, the noise of manipulation. If the billionaires are taking over media and forcing a cultural narrative of division and hate, I’m turning more and more to books that offer me wisdom. Reading, like writing, brings camaraderie, stillness, and wonder. Books offer beauty in what feels like an oppressive time.

I get to the WSUP table, look out to the crowd, and know I am, in my reading habits anyway, not alone. The table is hopping. Many are in groups with t-shirts about libraries, their book clubs, or the book associations they work with. Two friends from grade school–grade school!–show up to say hello. Another friend, an amazing writer I’ve known since college, shows up, too. I sign books. Another friend brings me chocolate and a bookmark she made. I meet new readers.

My book sells out, as do many books at the WSUP booth. After the signing we wander around. I buy some books. We get pretzels and lemonade from a food truck vendor and talk on the street crowded with people, bikes, and other trucks.

On this day, I write one sentence, my minimum goal. But the events of the day will give me fuel for writing for all the days that follow. I grew up in Detroit and went to college at Wayne State University. The Detroit I grew up in instilled a quiet defiance that feels right for our time. If trends are against reading, who profits from that narrative? If reading is over, what are 20,000 people doing here?

These are days of volatility, of heat and storms.

But they don’t get our spirits. They don’t get our souls.

Tomorrow, I’ll be writing.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Curious.

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

• Foster by Claire Keegan.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• A month ago our cat escaped, and I discovered the dedication and passion people have for finding lost animals. About 70 percent of cats are found, and I learned not to give up. It can take two years. We used advice from a YouTube video, followed every step, and our cat, who was gone for three days, was caught within hours. Now I look at the posts where animals are lost and found, and I am hitting all the hearts. 

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By MAUREEN AITKEN

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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August 1, 2026: Maureen Aitken

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Maureen Aitken’s linked collection, The Patron Saint of Lost Girls, is the kind of book I love to read. Sharp writing, fresh images that allow me to see in a new way, and a varied sentence structure that feels exactly right. Maureen leaps and trusts us to leap with her.

His face was like a catcher’s mitt, warm and beaten. He reminded me of one of those boys who had moved away when I was little, but Paul had returned a man.

I felt as though something enormous had just swept through town. Time seemed to lift, like a needle off an old record. It was June.

And also, even though it’s not a novel (my favorite thing to read!) all the stories take place in Detroit in the 1970s and ’80’s and all are connected by a single character—Mary. Together, these elements give the collection that novel-ish feel. 

Mary is the youngest of three, a kid who loves her dog Chip so much, she vows not to have any fun on a family vacation he is not allowed to attend. She’s smart. “Neal leaned over the engine, and the way he wiggled the parts, with dull misunderstanding, made me want to kill him.” Mary knows her limits. “People threw people away. I couldn’t fix that.” She cares about buildings. When she thinks one looks lonely, she leaves her car there and walks home. “When I glanced back, the place looked comforted, like it belonged.” And above all, Mary wants to make her own way in the world.

What I wanted traveled within us and without a name, like a car barreling through the darkness, passing a roadside evangelical travel agent who proclaimed, ‘Screw the maps. The America you knew? That land is gone.’

You can really get a feel for Mary in this bit of dialogue.

I sat in the front row. The judge proceeded with general questions for the group. Had anyone on the jury ever been robbed. I raised my hand.

“Anyone ever had trouble with a drug dealer?” I raised my hand.

“Anyone ever have trouble with a police officer?”

Up went my hand. Of course, I thought. Hasn’t everyone?

“Known an addict?”

Please, I thought, my hand raised again. This was America. Who doesn’t know an addict but the addict himself?

And this is something I especially love about Mary.

The days run so fast together that they collapse on their own. It aches sometimes to see them go, to see what I am and what I still yearn to be.

Finally, a few other sentences I can’t resist mentioning. 

For originality in meaning: “What was beautiful knew how to veer on a whim.”

For a combination of discordant sounds and smells that make me pay attention to the moment: “The church bells rang eight times, and the air still languished in gasoline exhaust and sweat.”

For the way the personification evokes the mood: “Everyone in Detroit knew an uncle or a brother who had been laid off by a car company during record profits. In the ’80’s, the entire city sat at kitchen tables trying to figure out how to pay the bills.”

For the way the sentence structure mirrors the content:  “When she had to get up, we inflated the mattress. That was all that mattered now. She had to be able to get up. We worked constantly. The bathroom, the bag, the Boost, the Vernors, the ice, the water, the fire. The gifts, the time, which passed so fast, as if it were a conveyor we couldn’t stop.”

The Patron Saint of Lost Girls won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel and was originally published in 2018 by Southeast Missouri State University Press. It received a starred Kirkus review and the Foreword Review INDIE Gold Prize for General Fiction. It was also a finalist in the Minnesota Book Awards. The collection was reissued in 2025 by Wayne State University Press. 

Writing is in Maureen’s blood. “My grandmother wrote a column for a local newspaper and my grandfather was an editor at The Detroit Times. My mother wrote about food.” Maureen started in journalism before moving to Minnesota for graduate school. Her stories have earned a Minnesota State Arts Board’s Artist Initiative Grant, a Loft Mentor Award, an award from Ireland’s Fish Short Story Prize, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Maureen has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and Hamline University. We met at a Writing by Writers workshop.

Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how MAUREEN AITKEN spends her days.

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.

~

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—

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

Photo Credit: Jamey Stillings

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July 1, 2026: Tayyba Kanwal

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In Tayyba Kanwal’s Talking with Boys, the stories begin in Houston in 2015 with a girl running away from home and end in Houston in 2020 with a woman buying a home. In between the first and the last of these fifteen linked stories, we also go to Dubai and to Pakistan as well as back in time. This collection was the winner of the 2023 Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Prize.

In the first story, “The Girl Who Ran,” eighteen-year-old Amal is described as a runner with “headphones on, house music throbbing, salt air in her hair.” When she discovers that her father’s threat to send her back to Pakistan to marry her off is more than vague, she takes things into her own hands and marries herself off—to Zeeshan, a friend of her brother’s who lives in the US and whose family has money. While this is a bold move, there’s a conversation between Amal and her new mother-in-law, Zeba, that cracks Amal’s world open. It begins with Zeba asking Amal what it will take for her to “give me my son back.”

For one relief-flooded minute Amal pictured herself entirely unbound, on the road to who-knows-where. But she couldn’t deny the most practical reason she’d needed Zee. For a place to rest. For a home base from which she might wander at will. She admitted to Zeba that Zee had missed some school. “I could help him focus again,” she said. “He’d do anything for me. He loves me.”

“But you don’t love him,” Zeba said quietly. She searched Amal’s face. “Those eyes of yours are always on the horizon.”

Amal thought she should resent Zeba’s words. But, somehow, she felt seen rather than seen through.

You’ll have to read the story yourself to discover if there’s something that would make Amal give Zeba her son back.

Maybe my favorite story in the collection is “Mehr,” which takes place in Pakistan in 1986. Here’s the super visual first sentence: “Mehr perched on the crescent moon at the tip of the minaret of the town mosque.” The narrative voice is light and echoes the feeling of a character who could fly around town. Two weeks earlier, it turns out, her father had told Mehr that not only was it time for her to start wearing a burqa but also that he had saved so he could have one made for her out of a new lighter fabric. “Your Ammi’s was so heavy,” he says. Mehr challenges her father, asking how he will recognize her if she’s wearing a burqa, and he replies, “A father knows his own daughter.” We will see, right?

“Telling Tales,” which takes place in Dubai in 1989, begins with attitude and a gorgeous first paragraph.

Anyway, the scandal of it all was lost on me. The mirror had seen everything, and all of it was true, every tale already known in our hearts. I, like countless others, had come to Dubai on the wings of our relatives’ dreams; and sometimes, to escape the web of nightmares they spun around us. We came with papers but no plan.

Shireen is the one with attitude. She’s the henna girl in a salon. The mirror in question is mounted in the back panel of a clawfoot china cabinet. Shireen watches the mirror and comes to understand it, wondering “how many memories it took to drag the mirror down one millimeter” and “if different memories had different weights.” There’s a beautiful moment in the middle of the story when Shireen thinks of hanging a curtain over the mirror to give it some relief.

Then I thought, would I rather have been blind than seen what my father did to my mother? Instead, I began to wipe the glass front of the cabinet with vinegar and newspaper. If the mirror could see, let it have clarity.

These stories are intricate and detailed, and most have a subplot as interesting as the main storyline, making the reader wonder what if Tayyba had shone her light over there… And more than once we find that in a later story she has moved the light. So much to be discovered in this collection. If you’d like to read more about Talking with Boys, I highly recommend these two conversations at The Rumpus and Necessary Fiction.

Tayyba is a Pakistani-American writer who grew up in Dubai and came to the US at the age of seventeen but returned to Pakistan every summer for two or three months. She is the Managing Editor at Conjunctions and the Associate Fiction Editor at Cutleaf Journal. Her writing has appeared in Witness, Meridian, Gulf Coast and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow. Tayyba is also a mathematician and a technologist, holding an MS in Mathematics from the University of Oregon.

Come back on JULY 1st to read how TAYYBA KANWAL spends her days.

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

JOYCE HINNEFELD

I’ve been thinking about how I spend my days for a lot of days now. At various points I would have sounded pretty bitter in response to this question. But this month is one of my favorites. The days are brighter, and so am I.

In late November 2023, my husband Jim, who’s a good deal older than I am (I’m 64), fell and suffered a brain bleed. He was in the hospital at the time, and he fell after taking a shower during a nursing staff change-over (7 pm—a time I’ve learned to dread in hospitals). I returned from driving home to get his things for what would be, we thought, a simple overnight stay and found him on his hospital room bathroom floor, barely conscious.

He recovered from the brain bleed, maybe. It’s still not clear what’s happened since. After a week in the hospital and two weeks in rehab he came home, and despite endless rounds of physical therapy he never walked without a walker again. Two and a half years later he has dementia, is in a wheelchair, and has been in a memory care facility since the beginning of February. I visit him most afternoons. He has a number of health issues, we still aren’t certain about the source of his dementia, and I could no longer care for him on my own, even with the help of two lovely part-time aides who were here to help me on weekday mornings.

The only other thing I want to say about this situation is that at one point, Jim’s gerontologist told us that basically, when you hit 80, it’s all going to start going downhill (Jim’s now 82). Ever since then I’ve been doing the math, calculating how many good years I have left. It’s not a bad exercise really. So if you’re within counting range of 80, you’re welcome, I guess.

*

Here’s something my friend Rita, who lost her husband to glioblastoma eight years ago, told me when Jim came home from rehab in the dead of winter two and a half years ago, and I was sleeping on a recliner next to the fold-out sofa bed I’d bought for him on the first floor of our house: Start noticing, and appreciating, really small things. I wish I could describe how she said this to me. It was more of a command than a Hallmark-style, self-care bromide. So I’ve been doing that, or trying to, ever since.

It’s our instinct as writers to notice small things, I think, but we can lose that capacity when life is crashing around us like a flood—which, of course, it basically always is now, if you read the news. These days I try to start a round of writing by reading something to slow my pulse and my racing mind, to remind myself to breathe and to notice things. Lately I’ve been reading Larry Levis’s collected poems, Swirl and Vortex. So far I would describe these poems as setting nostalgia and yearning up against loneliness and violence and seeing how everything shakes out. Yesterday I read a poem called “The Double,” and now I’m in love with these lines:

This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.
This poem so like me
it could be my double.

Another way I try to pay attention to small things is by following the advice I read on Rob Walker’s Substack The Art of Noticing: “sky before screens.” This morning I heeded that advice by taking my coffee outside and sitting on a bench and looking up at the sky, then at the blooming irises and honesty plants in the garden, and then at our lovely old ramshackle house that needs a lot of work and that I may not be able to handle for that much longer. And I remembered how very, very fortunate I’ve been.

Before the sky, and the poetry, and some time on a writing project, though, there are the pets to deal with. We have three aging pets—two cats (Frankie, age 18, and Mouse, age 15) and a dog (Rusty, age 14 and a half). They’re all rescues; the cats were chosen by our daughter Anna, who’s now 25 and living in New York, but the dog was my doing. I love them, they’re good company, but they also need care—medications; a couple slow, ambling walks a day for Rusty; endless cleaning up of pet fur and vomit and litter boxes and the like. The pets like me and my company more than they probably should, because I can be pretty cranky with them. When I’m noticing small things, though, and also reading and writing, I tend to slow down and just enjoy their purring and tail-wagging and ceaseless begging for treats.

*

Today I’ll go to visit Jim at lunchtime, because there’s a pre-Memorial Day barbecue and live music at the place where he’s living now. Usually I go after lunch, and if it’s sunny and not too hot, I take him on a couple loops around the pretty grounds, and then we sit for a while and look out at the sky and the trees. Other days we sit in his room and watch a movie or something on YouTube; lately that’s meant Architectural Digest videos about modern homes or the architectural history of New York City, which is where we were both living when we met, and a National Geographic program about desert animals. We hold hands while we sit, and I am learning to simply breathe and enjoy that too. Because I miss the Jim I used to know, the one I fell in love with, but this Jim is sweet and loving too; in that sense, he hasn’t changed.

*

Some evenings I still get myself out of the house. Last night I had a public library board meeting, tomorrow evening I’ll have dinner with some friends. But late this afternoon I’ll get Rusty out and then settle in to watch the storm that’s predicted for our area, and I’ll be glad for the rain, which we need here in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. I’ll check the news to see who will be our Democratic House of Representatives candidate come November, after yesterday’s primary. I’ll fix something simple to eat, and maybe I’ll watch an episode of Hacks or Rooster, because it feels good to laugh, even on my own.

And then, my reward after a full day: time with a book. I just finished Tana French’s The Hunter, which I enjoyed for the intrigue and the depiction of life in a small farming community in the north of Ireland, but mostly for the character of Lena, who “takes an expert’s fine-tuned satisfaction in the fact that here she could distinguish March from April blindfolded, by the quality of the damp earth in its scent . . . .” Now I’m savoring Volume II of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (with thanks to my friend and fellow writer Alix Ohlin for the recommendation), a meditation on time and a master class in the art of noticing.

*

These days I feel lonely and nostalgic, and also lucky and still in love. I’m like those blinking amber streetlights in the Levis poem—getting ready for nightfall and thinking about time in a new way, like the character Tara Selter in On the Calculation of Volume. I’m giving all the articles and videos and algorithmic brouhaha in my Instagram feed about longevity and looking youthful only the quickest glance before I put my phone away, then head for the garden bench or my favorite reading chair. Which is what I’ll do later today, once the storm is over and I’ve opened the windows to the cooler night air.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Necessary.

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

• There isn’t a single book that I read repeatedly, but I often go back to W.G. Sebald, especially his book The Emigrants. Sebald’s novels move me deeply, maybe because there’s a sense of dislocation and strangeness in his work—something that’s not uncomfortable or unhappy, but instead quite beautiful—that I’ve always found relatable.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• These days I think it’s probably a little strange that I look forward to bringing in the print edition of my local newspaper, The Morning Call, every morning, then scanning the headlines and reading a bit of local news while I have breakfast. It’s actually pretty expensive to subscribe to the print edition, but I like reading a newspaper this way. I also think it’s important to know what’s happening in your local community and region, and I’m grateful that we still have a good, functioning local paper.

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By JOYCE HINNEFELDA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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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?

…

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.

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

YAEL VALENCIA ALDANA

In the morning
I have been waking up about seven thirty. I could go back to sleep, but this morning I decide to get up. Miss Spicy, my small black cat, is mewing determinedly on the other side of the door. I open it, and she rushes over my feet and onto my bed, followed by her brother, a larger tabby.

Beyond the open door, the remaining council of cats stares at me, disgruntled. A still larger gray and white tabby, an orange tabby, and the distinguished Russian Blue mix. They only gather like this when my son hasn’t fed them the night before.

I wander out to the kitchen to feed them. I didn’t mean to have five cats. I was content with one. Then my son brought home an orange kitten he found at his high school. Then after my sister died, I inherited the Russian Blue. Then a family of cats appeared in the back yard, led by a frisky black kitten I named Miss Spicy.

Next is fresh espresso, an egg over easy, and toast. The previous day still lingers. I was driving to work when I saw a small brindle dog, alone, limping down the road, one of his hind legs tucked tightly against his stomach.

I wanted to stop and scoop up that dog. Take him to the vet if he needed it. But I couldn’t, I was heading to my new job, and I had to be on time. As I drove, I thought, what has happened to my life. A main life goal was always to stop and help if some animal needed it. And I couldn’t do that. I was heading to work to be a small cog in a larger corporation’s wheel. That isn’t what I wanted or thought I would be doing at this middle age.

Leaning against my kitchen counter, sipping my coffee, I am still frustrated, but a new idea is working through my mind. A year and a half ago, I lost my partner in crime, my son’s father, Geoff. If he were still here, I would have stopped, called him, and told him he had to meet me and get the dog. He would have groaned but come. I would have continued to work, and he would call to let me know what was happening with the dog. Did he go to the vet? Was he putting up lost dog flyers? Now there is no Geoff, and the dog and I are on our own.

I sit down on my couch and survey the living room. It’s like Geoff never left. The room is full of his collectibles accumulated over decades: African masks carved for ceremony, a stylized Aboriginal painting of a turtle, a lacquered mother-of-pearl screen, and a standing world globe he got from who knows where.

My life feels like a wind chime for the dead. Two years ago, we lost my older sister, then Geoff, then early this year, another close friend passed. I stopped asking what was happening. I was numb. Every day, I focused on dealing with what was in front of me. The goal was just to make it through the day.

On my writing desk
Percy, my sister’s former cat, is sitting, resting against a pile of poetry books. I rub his soft head and open Julie Marie Wade’s collection Skirted and read the poem “Ekphrasis.” A beautiful, layered work that is both simple yet knotted with ideas and meaning.

I pick my pen with turquoise ink. I will work on some poems from my new collection, Cruel Childhood, for a while. Until my Zoom meeting in the early afternoon, to talk about my brand-new idea with a friend. I work on a well-deserved poem about Miss Spicy.

Noon
I watch the sun’s shadows shifting into noon sharpness across my desk. I glance at my phone, and it’s twelve minutes after. I’ll make a quick lunch before my Zoom call at twelve thirty. I throw some creamy dill sauce on chicken and udon noodles, my new obsession. (Why didn’t anyone tell me they were this good?)

My friend
Erik pops up on my computer screen with fake Hawaii beach waves rolling behind him.

“Hey, hey, hey.” He smooths his long hair over his shoulder. He looks like a misplaced hippie from the sixties, but here he is in 2026, not looking a day over thirty-five.

He squints at the screen. I can tell he’s reviewing the email I sent him. “I think this could work.” He pauses. “Yeah, an animal shelter that’s also a writers’ retreat. I think people can get into that.”

He’s the friend I trust with my most crazed ideas.

I say, “I mean, writers are always posting about their pets, right? There is built-in love there.”

He says, “I see it. We need to work on a plan to bring this thing together step by step.”

Miss Spicy jumps up on the desk and peeks at the screen as if she approves. I flick my pen between my fingers. “I thought we could start a newsletter about writers and their pets, start gathering a community. Maybe work in some fundraising?”

Erik nods. “It won’t just be you contributing, will it?”

“I talked to a few of my friends. They are willing to write about their cats.”

He says, “Damn girl, you are moving fast.”

“When I have something on my mind, I get moving. What do you think about the name Pens and Pets?

“Sounds good, sounds good,” he replies.

I scratch out some notes in my journal. We talk about next steps, and we end the meeting.

Miss Spicy is now prancing behind my laptop screen.

“What do you think, Miss Spicy? Do you want to work at a writing retreat?” At the sound of her name, she zips into my lap for a cuddle.

In the evening
San Diego is cooler than expected in April. The temperature is hovering in the sixties and cloudy. I throw on a flannel jacket and venture out the door for a walk. I feel like I am just emerging from the shell of grief. I am finally able to think and make plans outside of survival mode.

People are coming home from work, and the street is choked with parked cars. In some places, the road is just wide enough for one car to pass.

I take a deep inhale and finger the face mask in my pocket. Are my allergies acting up? No. I walk on.  Is Pens and Pets really a good name for the sanctuary? Maybe just Geoff’s House? We were all safe at Geoff’s house.

As I walk by the house on the corner where a small tan Chihuahua constantly escapes, I think, What makes you think you can make this work? I repeat a mantra that has served me well: I don’t know how it’s going to work, but it’s going to work. After all, Erik and I started a press from nothing that is still going strong.

I stride past a fifties-era stove with a sign that says “free.” What should I write about for the newsletter? Maybe about the first time I saw Miss Spicy in my backyard by the shed.  Her mother and her two littermates stared at me warily. Miss Spicy was tiny, maybe two and a half months old, the runt of the litter. She held my gaze unafraid as she skipped and strutted in front of her mother. She was supposed to be a tiny stray cat with no hope, but she didn’t know that and didn’t care. She was too brave to notice.

I reach the end of the block and turn toward home, pulling my collar closed. I should make a poster, “Be like Miss Spicy.”

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Erratic. I have tried for years to have a writing routine, aka waking up at five am with a steaming cup of coffee and writing for a few hours. Invariably, I wander off schedule without noticing. I tend to write to deadlines, even if I have to make one up.

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

• I read Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye almost yearly. It’s the first book I read that inspired me to be a writer. It’s still one of the best books I have ever read. Her writing is poetic, and she breaks many rules. Her protagonist is annoying, complicated, and passive, but it works. Her audacity inspires my own.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• I eat salads without salad dressing, which seems to drive people crazy, especially servers.

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By YAEL VALENCIA ALDANAA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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May 1, 2026: Yael Valencia Aldana

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Yael Valencia Aldana was born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, grew up on the neighboring island of Barbados, and moved to Brooklyn as a teenager. Adopted as a child, at age forty-four, she took a DNA test and discovered her maternal line: Indigenous, origin Colombia. As she tried to find her grandmother, she began writing poems again. Four years later, she entered an MFA program, and at the age of fifty-four, her debut collection, Black Mestiza, was published as part of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series. The first poem in the book, “Talisman” declares “Ancestors…means nothing is lost.”

And then the speaker confirms that yes,

We are all in here together
xxxdistilled into this one casing of corpuscles.

I love this collection, the way it explores who we are and how we got that way. I also love the cover art. When I asked about it, I was thrilled to discover that Yael herself is the artist. The title of the painting is “Open Your Mouth,” and there’s a poem of the same name in the book. But this beautiful painting came first—before the words.

There’s so much truth in the painting, so much “I am a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots,” and when I turn to the third poem in the first section, Yael’s description allows me to see this place where the wild women live, these women who “know how to stand in more / than one place in time.”

there is a slip of land on la frontera
a land of haunted untamed tongues
forked and black like the dark.
a land of wild women with smoke cloud
hair and legs that span rivers.
they know how to stand in more
than one place at one time.

In “Why Don’t You Write About Joy,” we read

Because you cannot hear me
doesn’t mean I am not singing.

But throughout this collection, we hear the singing.

And we see the “Black Person Head Bob.” This poem, which won a Pulitzer Prize, takes the reader inside. The opening line says so much, you almost don’t need anything else.

I still count. How many of us are in here?

The head bob returns in the third section of the book, in “The F Train 1999.” The speaker is running, running, and then

A wheat colored Timberland boot
pierces the silver line
of the closing doors.
I sail through steel toe cracked air
A head bob the only thanks needed.

That boot, the way it stops time. I can see it. And then the speaker leaps. Like a flying fish.

“I am small dark and moving,” the line and the image, carry us through all four sections of the collection, the first and last, my favorites.

In the last section, the speaker turns her eyes toward her mother, always moving, “iron-forged,” who dies and is buried, and then she turns toward her son “who looks just like his Granny.” And in this way the last section moves us from the past into the future. While always in the present. My favorite poem of this section is the second one, “Titan.”

You couldn’t know that when dealing
with the Titan that you become one yourself.

Yael earned a Master’s degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Florida International University (FIU). Her work has appeared in Torch Literary Arts, Cutbank Literary Journal, Obsidian, and Nelle Journal. Her work has also been featured in Poets & Writers, Ms. Magazine, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Hip Latina, and The National Latino Book Club. She is the Managing Editor at Purple Ink Press and a member of Aunt Lute Press board. She was named a Poets & Writers “5 over 50” for 2025. She lives in Florida.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how YAEL VALENCIA ALDANA spends her days.

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLO

What is This?
I read an article recently about a man who spent years as a monk sitting in front of a blank wall asking himself, “What is this?” The article said this question could change your life. When I tried asking myself, I felt a surprising rush of rapture, reminiscent of being a child let out for recess after the rain, the promise of puddles and a good stomping, and for about ten seconds the thrill swelled inside my chest. Then a deep abyss opened, overwhelming darkness, and I backed away from both the ecstasy and the terror. I returned to the middle, the connective tissue of daily life, and tried not to be fooled by the mundane.

A Different View
I wake and scrawl fragments in my notebook, catching what I can before they dissipate like fog and the dream state is gone. It amazes me how our brains create elaborate narratives while we sleep.

If I were home, I’d lift the shade—to check the weather? Confirm the sun has risen? Reorient myself to the day?

But this morning, my hotel room windows are cloaked with heavy blackout curtains. I heft back a corner to look outside, to witness morning walkers…but my view faces the hotel’s innards. A spiraling rotunda six floors high, carpeted in multi-patterned prints. The only people are those painted on wallpaper stretched along the empty halls. Metallic light fixtures hover like spaceships casting everything a yellowish hue. A shorted bulb three floors down flickers.

Nothing about today is how I usually spend my days; but how I spend my days has brought me here today.

A Debut
I’m in Baltimore for AWP, the national conference that brings together over 10,000 people each year. Four days packed with panels on writing, publishing, teaching, and a massive bookfair with hundreds of exhibitors, literary magazines, and presses, along with author events, readings and receptions throughout the days and nights. It is as nourishing and invigorating as it is overstimulating and draining.

I’ve come to do a panel with four other writers; a group off-site reading; and my first ever book signing at UGA Press’s booth. It feels both exciting and daunting.

Worker Bees
The metallic light fixtures are sculpted like honeycombs. This feels appropriate. Almost spring, I imagine worker bees emerging from hives, flying toward the source of nectar, hoping for—reconnection? Community? A secret key to the enigmatic publishing industry?

Over the past two decades I’ve attended AWP a handful of times in various cities—Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia. But this is my first time as a “published author.” My debut story collection is being released at the conference, and this feels like a small miracle, a constellation of many steadfast years.

The panel’s called “Debuting After Fifty.” It’s scheduled for 9 a.m.

Folders
If I were home, I’d be at my desk in a small walk-in closet turned writing office.

On the left side of my desk, a printed draft of my novel manuscript is covered with notes for revision. On the right side, a vertical file holder separates a dozen current projects in earth-toned folders—sienna, charcoal, caramel, moss; a system I recently created to manage the sprawling overwhelm. The colors, I read, were grounding.

The moss green folder, labeled AWP Panel, I’ve brought with me today.

Nectar
Baltimore Convention Center buzzes and swarms. It’s 8:30 a.m. and the energy is frenetic, lanyard-clad crowds ready to feed and absorb and commune.

A mass clusters in the hall where tactical officers guard the doors. Our assigned room is already packed. They’ve cleared the aisles. A Fire hazard. They have to turn away many who are waiting to attend a panel about debuting after fifty.

Panel—Room 321-322
We talk about the long journeys on our various paths to publication, perseverance, the ups and downs, failures along the way, how with age comes perspective…

During the Q+A, hands shoot up. What we shared seems to have resonated and it feels good to connect.

Poetry on the Steets
If I were home, I’d finish working on novel edits, then head outside to talk to strangers. I’d bring the honey-colored folder labeled Transit Stories with my postcards to hand out at bus stops.

Later, I’d work on the charcoal folder—The Community Poem Project and update entries.

Book Signing
Instead, I ride the crowded escalators down to the bookfair, wander the enormous aisles, browsing literary magazines and books displayed among candy, pens, stickers. I find University of Georgia’s booth where they’ve set up my book signing. A few gracious and generous friends stop by, and I gratefully sign their copies. I sell only one to someone I don’t know. She introduces herself and tells me she read my essay last year in Electric Lit. This feels like magic—how words from my walk-in closet have traveled across time and space and somehow connected us here. Everything swells with meaning, and it feels like this is the point.

Commitment
We have little control over whether our work will slip through the gates. But we do have control over the dedication to the practice, the belief in creating alternate realities by putting words on a page, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. This focus and attention, stepping outside of yourself to inhabit another point of view, imagine another way of being, is a powerful and worthy practice in and of itself. I say something about this during the panel.

3:00 Author Headshot—Room 313
I’m annoyed at myself for thinking it was a good idea to try the sample-sized hair gel. I’ve never worn hair gel before. Everything feels sticky and weird.

This is definitely not how I spend my days.

I bookmark a panel to attend tomorrow—”Sustaining a Private Life in a Public Vocation.”

Dinner
If I were home, I’d be making dinner for my family, helping with homework, loading dishes.

Instead, I commune with writer friends at a restaurant nearby the convention center. One friend is considering rewriting her novel manuscript from the beginning. We all cringe, it’s painful, brave, and yes, we agree, a good idea.

Maybe this is why we gather. This is the nectar. This is what we carry home, sustaining us when we return to the work. That we understand each other and are not alone.

Return
In my hotel room, I Facetime my family, my touchstone. I feel ready to go home, return to my base, my hive, the work, the page.

I read a little before bed. My mind slips off the words, and I let it drift, wandering toward the dream state, readying to create its own story, hoping that when I rise, I’ll catch fragments before they dissolve again into day.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Committed.

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

• Not a book, but a poem. “Stepping Backward,” by Adrienne Rich. It hangs on my office wall, so I look at it daily. Lines from the poem serve as different epigraphs in three of my novel manuscripts!

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Talking to strangers at bus stops (Transit Stories!) Or asking strangers on the street to write a poem (Poetry on the Streets!)

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By MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLOA

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A

—Other Writers in the Series—

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

xA

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.