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On the first of each month,
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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.

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On the first of each month,
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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March 1, 2026: Erika J. Simpson

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“Imagine this is your mother”  is the powerful first line of Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir This Is Your Mother.

Imagine this is your mother. Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten. She’s a June Gemini, inquisitive and playful, so sensitive she cries before the switch reaches her legs. She pretends to be the teacher in games of schoolhouse, leads the neighborhood kids on adventures along the creek, and most of all she yearns for a life beyond the fields of North Carolina.

This first chapter, called “Genesis,” continues for only two and a half pages and spirits the reader from Sallie Carol’s childhood to Erika’s departure for college. When we turn the page to the next chapter, it’s a couple of decades later, August of 2013, and Sallie Carol’s cancer is back. The doctors give her two months to live.

In This is Your Mother, two timelines move us forward. In one, Erika is a child growing up in Atlanta with her mother who is trying to make ends meet (and often they don’t), and in the other, Erika is an adult working in Chicago with her mother dying in Atlanta. Erika is creative with structure and form, using second person, lists, transcriptions, short screenplays, a TV game show, and scripture. This memoir is alive on the page.

While Mama studied her Bible, I studied her, making scriptures from the ways she kept us afloat. Book of Sallie Carol 1:2: The only things that matter, and the order of their importance, are food and rent. Don’t pay no bill before you’ve eaten. Because how you look sitting around with all the lights on but nothing to eat?

Erika’s descriptions are substantive and pop with freshness.

Eighties food stamp money: “Oranges and pinks loud enough to be heard. Bright enough to tell everybody in line behind you that you’re on government aid and your daddy left your mama for a white woman …”
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A bus stop: “We ran across the parking lot like the roaches scattering out, heading toward a bus stop that wouldn’t make a comment on our lives.”

Love is everywhere. While her mother’s in jail for writing a bad check for a car, Erika lives in North Carolina with her aunt who has “a house phone normal kids could call.” After almost a year, Erika’s mother comes to get her.

It was spaghetti night. Mama spoke cordial at the table. I felt weird being witnessed this normal, like I lived in the house and Mama lived outside it. I wanted Mama and me to have an inside, but I also didn’t mind being on the outside with her.

In addition to love, this memoir is full of truth, and the humor in truth. Erika refers to the fact that her mother’s cancer is back as “the health reveal.” At one point, when Erika’s cell phone buzzes, she puts it under her pillow and breathes slowly as if she’s asleep, “putting on an act for a woman who’s thousands of miles away.”

Strong sentences bind this book together and add to its heft.

Mama did it wrong, the Great Migration. She went deeper south, instead of north…

The end of October was for pretending life was normal.

You can’t tell if she’s freaking out. But you can’t tell if you are either.

When trying to decide whether she can afford to go visit her mother, Erika writes, “If you wait much longer, it won’t be that you can’t but that you didn’t.”

I’m not going to tell you how the memoir ends. I want to, but I’m not. I will tell you that I loved the ending. Don’t miss this wonderful book. Imagine this is your mother.

Sallie Carol “usually comes over the hill with her suitcase and her cane looking mad as hell.”

Erika was born in North Carolina, grew up in Atlanta, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, with her partner and their black cat. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky and is the recipient of the 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction. Her essay “If You Ever Find Yourself” was published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and featured in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. She also writes fiction for the page and screen. When meeting with potential publishers for her memoir, she made sure to ask each editor for their Zodiac sign.

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Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ERIKA J. SIMPSON spends her days.

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February 1, 2026: Barbara Boyle

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Newly retired and on her honeymoon, after spending a week in the south of France, Barbara Boyle and her husband arrived in Italy, and she fell in love. With Monforte, a small town in the Piemonte region. After the honeymoon, Barbara began taking Italian lessons, and her husband Kim signed them up to receive house listings in the Piemonte region. Pinch Me is Barbara’s story of making a dream come true.

It was eighteen months before they were able to return to Italy, but when they did, they met with a real estate agent.

We wanted character and tranquility and were not afraid of a ruin… I wanted birds, grass, mature trees, sun, and shade. My husband wanted a wine cellar.

The day before they were to head home to San Francisco, the real estate agent called to say he had a property to show them, not in Monforte exactly but in nearby Roddino, which was not exactly a town, and actually the house was not exactly in Roddino. “But my husband felt it was worth a quick look, so I reluctantly agreed to go along.”

I turned and faced the empty old house and barn sitting demurely in the afternoon sun—tall, proud stone walls and rusted iron doors, broken windows and shutters, crowned with a roof of old terra-cotta tiles, logs, and twigs. There were two or three outbuildings, crammed with wood, wine barrels, old farm tools, wires, tiles, and stones. The house was situated precariously on a narrow level plain that sloped up the hill behind it and slid into the valley in front. And it looked out over the whole world—vineyards, hazelnut orchards, farms and forests, and even the little hill town of Monforte, all the way out to the craggy Alps, still brushed with just a smattering of snow on the highest peak… I touched him on the arm and said, “This is it.”

These more detailed descriptions of the walls and the roof made me feel as if I were standing in the house looking around and up.

[The walls] are a disorderly combination of Langhe stones and handmade terra-cotta bricks, held together with mud and mortar.

[The roof] was a patchwork of weathered terra-cotta tiles, coppas, interspersed with old logs and branches.

Pinch Me is a delight to read and includes recipes like the “Ravioli del Plin con Burro e Salvia.”

Plin actually means “pinch” in the Piemontese dialect, and it is in fact that characteristic little pinch that separates these raviolis from all others on Earth…. the pinch forms little pockets all around the outside that cradle the ragu or melted butter with sage and Parmesan.

Spending time in Italy was teaching me, firsthand, how something as primal as eating and as simple as shopping, as essential as being part of a small community, creates a life.

Barbara’s fiction has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Star 82 Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other literary journals. In her first life, she was a global creative director in the advertising world, living in Paris, Frankfurt, New York, and San Francisco. While living in Paris, she took the Regional French Cuisine course at Le Cordon Bleu, and later in New York, she completed the professional cooking course at The Institute of Culinary Education. These days she lives in Italy, in the medieval hill towns of Roddino and Monforte, cooking, taking walks, working in her garden, in her husband’s vineyard, and on a novel.

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Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how BARBARA BOYLE spends her days.

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At the Royal Society of Medicine in London earlier this year

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January 1, 2026: Melissa Pritchard 

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Florence Nightingale all but soars right out of Melissa Pritchard’s Flight of the Wild Swan.

I may not know why I was born, but it cannot be to wage war on dust and broken crockery. It cannot be to put down in a house ledger, as I do now, meaningless columns of tweedly this, tweedly that.

Flight of the Wild Swan is a big, thick novel structured in short chapters that highlight moments, keep the story moving, and underline the urgency in Florence’s thoughts and in her life. As a child she creates journals from her parents’ old letters, each page “folded into fours, the folded pages neatly stitched down one side.” She fills any blank space.

I am compelled, despite the ache in my wrists, to write down every smidgen of life going on around me, every thought boiling up within me. Nothing is real unless I take it down, pin and straighten what I see and think into measured words, solid sentences.

Florence was born in 1820 in Florence, Italy (hence her name) to wealthy parents. She was a brilliant child, not only interested in healing but in everything. She and her father studied stones and fossils together.

I have collections of coins, seashells, wax dolls. I’ve a cemetery trove of harvest mice, a baby wren, pink-skinned and naked of feathers, a blackbird, two halves of a grass snake…

Her father was also the one who made sure she and her sister received an education, even though both her mother and her father expected the girls to marry and raise families. But Florence was desperate to be out in the world doing things.

A letter, too, from Pastor Fliedner, asking when will I be coming to Kaiserwerth to study nursing. My application has been approved. I would be there this minute! Why am I here, in this house? A seething creature, poisoned by rage, with an oversized brain.

Forced to stay at home by her parents, she does what she is supposed to until she cannot.

From the landing, William Nightingale calls upstairs. She’d not come down to dinner the previous night, complaining of a headache. She has not appeared at breakfast. Hearing no response he takes the stairs. The door is unlocked, her bed is neat, unslept in… Where is she? At that moment he spots a dark, still shape at the farthest edge of the meadow. Hurtling downstairs, flinging open the front door, shouting her name, he runs.

Flight of the Wild Swan was a finalist in the category of Literary Fiction in this year’s Georgia Author of the Year Awards. It is historical fiction and gorgeously written as you can see by these excerpts from the first part of the book. When I was a child, I loved reading about Florence as the “lady with the lamp.” Now I love her so much more, knowing how hard she had to fight to hold that lamp and how much more there is to her story.

In addition to Flight of the Wild Swan, Melissa has published ten other award-winning books. She has received the University of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor Award, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Award, Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Prize. She is a five-time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and frequently shortlisted in Best American Short Stories. WordTheatre has performed her short stories in New York and Los Angeles; two of her books were named New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and “Notable Books of the Year.” She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation in Switzerland, the Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. The Carnation Milk Palace, her fifth short story collection, will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in January 2027 and her sixth novel, Tempest: The Story of Fanny Anne Kemble, will be published by Regal House Publishing, Fall 2027. She currently lives in Columbus, Georgia.

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Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how MELISSA PRITCHARD spends her days.

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

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December 1, 2025: CMarie Fuhrman

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When CMarie Fuhrman was a child living in Colorado, her parents built a bedroom on the patio so she “would stop sleeping in the grass beneath the clothesline,” but, she writes in her first essay in Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, “I have never been so deeply wild as in Idaho.” 

I am in love with this Salmon River country. The steep slopes, wind-swept trees, the deer and elk—it’s where I feel most myself, most free. Yet the land holds a fierce beauty, a danger in its summer heat. Even those who share my love for it could crush my spirit with their conflicting desires.

The fourteen essays in Salmon Weather are personal narratives. “Walking the land, I have gotten to know who I am through what I stand for.” They are “women with nature” adventure stories. “We hike to abandoned mines, decommissioned fire lookouts, and forgotten ghost towns. We like to reimagine lives in these places.” CMarie is in conversation with the land, the river, the fish and snakes and fawns. She’s in relationship with everything that is out there.

Her stories feel alive. Describing deep snow, she writes

I almost wrote “buried instead of covered, but there is nothing dead about the scene. I like to think of the cold and white that covers the small trees as a quilt with a batting of winter that knows how to tuck a young pine in. I imagine what those saplings feel as the snow becomes their air and sky…

CMarie is not just telling us a story. As in the excerpt above, she’s allowing us to witness the making of the story, with the writer and story “ever-evolving,” shaping each other. And she invites the reader in.

But this bridge is not on the road that this story is interested in.
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And I keep coming back to the coyote because I work in metaphor. Symbol. I see patterns. I find story.
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I cross out what I have written…
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Stop for a moment and wonder at what you see.

In addition to an essayist, CMarie is a poet, and she brings a poet’s sensibility to the words she chooses and the rhythm of the sentences.

The trail, like the river, like the fish, pre-date white settlement, yet it was formed by human feet. It is kept up now by hooves and paws and on a day in late May, the tread of my own soles, following the tread of my partner, who has promised me wonder.

Salmon Weather is the second title in The Nature Series at DLJ Books published by Columbus State University Press. It was chosen as a Library of Congress “Great Reads from Great Places.”

CMarie is host of Colorado Public Radio’s “Terra Firma,” an award-winning columnist for the Inlander, the Associate Director of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, the founder of the Confluence Writing Community, and a former Idaho Writer in Residence. In addition to Salmon Weather, she is also the author of the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam and the co-editor of two anthologies: the multi-award-winning Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She is of Acoma Pueblo descent and a mix of European blood, and she lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho. This January she will teach at the Writing By Writers workshop, “Get the Lead Out.”

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Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how CMARIE FURHMAN spends her days.

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

Daniel Tam-Claiborne discusses his debut novel ‘Transplants’ at Hugo House on May 14th, 2025, in Seattle. Media: Zoe Gordon

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November 1, 2025: Daniel Tam-Claiborne

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Transplants, the debut novel by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, begins on a college campus in China in 2019. First we meet Lin, a Chinese student who is better with pets than people and excels in English, and then Liz, a Chinese American teacher who is “too Chinese for America, not Chinese enough here.” Lin doesn’t feel as if she belongs in China. Liz doesn’t feel as if she belongs anywhere.

Liz has arrived on campus from the suburbs of Ohio where her parents landed after they emigrated from China. At some point, her father left the family, and her mother died before she graduated.

Growing up, Liz knew she was different. She and her brother, Phil, were the only Asians at her high school in Akron. She got her eyes pulled, got called ugly names. She was told more than once to go back to a country she’d never been to, like the one she was born into somehow wasn’t hers to claim.

Lin, on the other hand, has arrived on campus from the next town over, which is where she grew up. Her father died in a mining accident when she was three. At the age of six, she could watch fish for hours but would run screaming from a knock on the door. “While her mother had always attributed Lin’s difference to something she was born with, Lin knew it was more circumstantial than anything else.”

Lin and Liz long to know who they are and where in the world they belong. Early in the novel, while Liz is teaching at the college, her ex-boyfriend asks if he can visit. She resists. “She didn’t want him to take away any more of what was hers.” Lin and Liz. Each a three letter name that begin with “Li.” Intentional, Daniel explains. He wanted them to be surrogates, which foreshadows the story to come.

Daniel’s prose is lovely. Take a look at this description of the college town. Notice the strong nouns and verbs and adjectives, the unusual “blistering scent.” It’s a description that is alive with smells and textures.

The air outside was acrid and still. Qixian was the heart of vinegar country where the dark liquid, pungent and thick, was bottled and shipped to every other province and exported abroad. But the factories had to compete with the coal mines, which operated from daybreak to dusk. It was only in the dead of night that the sky opened up, blooming with the blistering scent of tonic and salt.

Transplants takes place over a year that includes the late winter of 2020, which we reach about midway through the novel. At that point, Liz is in a Shanghai apartment staying with her friend Stephen. After lockdown, only essential trips are allowed: “grocery stores, factories, hospitals.”

[W]ithin days, other freedoms started to disappear. A man in the building across the street from Stephen’s had tested positive and, almost immediately, the whole complex was partitioned off like a construction site. Tall cranes came in to blanket the building in a fine mesh netting before wrapping it in plastic. Crews dressed in bio-hazard suits delivered shrink-wrapped food and water to the apartments’ occupants. Ambulances were parked outside, their sirens splitting the air.

Transplants was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. It was published by Regalo Press, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster. Regalo is a super cool publisher that with every deal makes a donation to the charity of the author’s choice.

Daniel was born and raised in Brooklyn with Chinese on his mother’s side and Anglo and Jewish on his father’s. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has spent over five years living and working in Greater China. He currently serves as Deputy Director at The Serica Initiative, a nonprofit organization that amplifies the impact of the Asian diaspora in America. He is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the U.S. Fulbright Program. He is also the author of the story collection What Never Leaves, and he lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle.

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Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how DANIEL TAM-CLAIBORNE spends his days.