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I knew Shakespeare was born in April, but on his birthday, I was focused on revising my novel…

I’m really good at focusing–that’s how I made it through law school despite having a baby my first year. I’m really good at shutting everything out to get something done, often to the detriment of seeing what’s around me. It’s like some kind of reverse ADD.

April 23rd was Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. Back on July 1 when I began my Shakespeare days, I didn’t know that 2014 would mark such a milestone for the Bard. But once I did know, I had planned to write about it. So far this year, I’ve seen three plays and will see two more before the end of May. I’m reading my ninth play.

Forgetting Shakespeare’s birthday is a small, unimportant example, but it has started me thinking… I need to remember to look up.

Every month, I was there. Usually for a week–one month for more, two months for less. Writing, reading, walking, cycling, eating, drinking, visiting…living. I stayed in five different places. I made friends. I had visitors. In March, my writing group was there.

2013 was a wonderful year.

2013: 80 days

Happy New Year!

Act 2, scene 5 is a miniature masterpiece–its first 124 lines anyway. It begins with King Henry going to sit by himself on a hill, after his wife has sent him away from the battle. There he thinks over his unhappy life, wishing he were a shepherd.

Thereby to see the minutes how they run:
How many makes the hour full complete,
How many hours brings about the day
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest…

Ah, what a life were this! How sweet, how lovely!

Then, at one door, a son comes in carrying a body.

Who’s this? O God! It is my father’s face,
Whom in this conflict I unawares have killed…

And I, who at his hands received my life,
Have by my hands of life bereaved him.

Then, at another door, a father comes in carrying a body.

But let me see: is this our foeman’s face
Ah, no, no, no, it is mine only son!

O, boy, thy father gave thee life too soon [readily],
And hath bereft thee of thy life too late [recently]!

Henry alone upon a hill. To one side, a son has unknowingly killed his father; to the other, a father has unknowingly killed his son.

Was ever son so rued a father’s death?

Was ever father so bemoaned his son?

Was ever king so grieved for subjects’ woe?

Henry VI, Part Three is (at least approximately) the third play Shakespeare wrote. Genius.

The Literary Death Match was hilarious–Adrian Todd Zuniga as host. Roxana Robinson read against Rigoberto Gonzales , while Pam Houston read against Christopher Castellani. And it was the women, with the help of squirrels, who advanced to the final round–which turned out to be a spelling bee, not of words but of authors’ last names. Pam phoned a friend–me (ha)–for help with the spelling of Achebe. But she lost points on Ondaatje and Solzhenitsyn. Roxana won on Eugenides. Steve Yarbrough judged on literary merit , Carmelita Tropicana (in snakeskin) on performance, and Tom Bodett (in a fedora) on Intangibles (or as he put it, on Je ne sais quoi). I haven’t laughed that much in a long time. Already looking forward to next year.

Our panel on Building Communities of Readers and Writers, with Jodi Paloni as moderator, was lots of fun. David Abrams talked about his blog, The Quivering Pen, and World Book Night. Erika Anderson, who teaches at Sackett Street Writers Workshop in NYC, talked about how she uses Twitter, and I talked about Catching Days, sprinkling in a quote from Apollo 13: “You never know what events are to transpire to get you home.” Figure that one out : ) Questions from the audience led to a discussion about MFA programs and their pre-made communities.

Readings took place all day Saturday and Sunday–Christine Schutt, Chris Bohjalian, Alexis Smith, Kris Jansma, Sophie Cabot Black, Howard Norman–with books flying off the tables and writers being stopped on the streets for signatures. Matthew Limpede, editor in chief of Carve Magazine, and Leah Miller, an editor at Random House’s Crown Publishing Group, held an informal talk on the editing process. The rain only seemed to make the weekend cozier and the leaves more colorful.

The Author Dinner Saturday night took place at The Gleanery in Putney, where the food was freshly grown just down the way. I wish I had taken some photos. Still tasting the delicious beet salad and the squash.

What Books (be honest) Are On Your Nightstand/Bedside Table, Dede Cummings’ Facebook Book Group, created a series of fantastic posters that decorated the walls of the Gibson River Garden.

Many thanks to Sandy Rouse, the director of the BLF, who, due to a last minute injury, missed it all! Thanks also to the many volunteers, including Jodi Paloni, Cynthia Larsen, and Suzanne Kingsbury. It’s not too late to donate. And be sure to mark your calendar for next year–October 3-5, 2014!

Thank you to each and every one of you who looks at the photos I’ve taken.

Thank you to each and every one of you who takes the time to join in the conversation by leaving even one word in the comment section. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

Catching Days would be a lonely place without you.

And a very special thank you to champion commenter Darrelyn Saloom–who first commented here on July 22, 2009, and since then has left 276 more comments. Hugs, my friend. Darrelyn also wrote one of the essays in the How We Spend Our Days series, in case you missed that. But here are her first words at Catching Days, back on that July day in 2009, in response to Mark Strand’s the continuous life:

So beautiful! And so true that we fear “slipping away with nothing completed, nothing / To prove you existed.” It is at the root of why I write, which is good, I believe.

I am thrilled to have found your blog Cynthia. Your writing is beautiful and inspires my attempts to do the same. “That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;” reading sublime poetry and prose leads to good writing and on and on.

Thank you 

No. Thank YOU.

Thank you ALL.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

April 1, 2013: Alexis Smith

Alexis Smith is the author of the alluring new book, Glaciers, published in January by Tin House New Voice. I wish I could give you details and quotes that would make you rush from your computer to the bookstore or cause you to abruptly click away from this page to hit buy, but for the time being you’re going to have to trust me on this one.

I had to leave for AWP in a bit of a hurry and left my copy of Glaciers–with all my notes–sitting on my desk. So I had Glaciers–along with some clothes I also forgot–sent to me in Provincetown, where I am now for a retreat with my writing group. When I arrived last night, the package was not waiting for me as it should have been. But the tracking showed the package as delivered…

The upside of the possible theft will be that I will have yet another good reason to reread Glaciers. Until then, please trust me. You will love this book about Isabel and how she spends her days. Among other things, it will make you long to search for and write postcards.

And I agree with Dianah at Powells: Alexis Smith’s diminutive novella lies somewhere between poetry and prose. So lyrical and so delicate, Glaciers slowly unspools as we follow Isabel on a routine day.

Come back on April 1st to read how Alexis Smith spends her days.

The next writer in the series is announced on the 8th of each month so you can read ahead!

*The photo of Alexis by Megan Mayhew Bergman, of Glaciers by Monica Drake.

I’ve been staying in the Barnhouse, in the rectangular-shaped Playroom with a circular window and stairs to a little square room with windows on all sides (a cupola). I lugged a small table up there and have been working like crazy to finish my novel–reading pages aloud and tossing them over the rail as I was done with them. One last quick read and off it goes.

We help ourselves to a stocked kitchen whenever it bests suits our schedule, and an amazing dinner is served family-style every night at 6:30.

I’ve taken breaks to walk–in the fifty acres of prairie and through town to Lake Michigan. (Of course, I took a break to watch the election–way to go, America!) I’ve met wonderful writers, musicians, visual artists. And I keep my windows open at night so I can hear the trains–their rumbles and whistles.

In each of the rooms is a stack of notebooks with messages from past residents written the night before departure–tomorrow night I’ll add my own.

*More photos of Ragdale from when I visited last March.

1

On Monday night I finished Dawn Tripp’s wonderful novel, Game of Secrets, and wasn’t ready to start a new book or go to sleep. Mindless TV seemed the solution, and I found The Kennedys (some sort of mini-series) on Netflix. I watched a few episodes–through the courtship, the inauguration, and the Bay of Pigs invasion.

2

Thursday morning I was sitting at a cafe reading, and having coffee and a muffin, when a man, as he walked by, asked me if my book (Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things) was good. I said it was. Then he came back to chat. At one point he said he hadn’t finished college the first time around. “Well, that was the sixties,” he said. “I was too busy trying to stop a war.”

3

Now Friday afternoon, I’m reading another book, Thomas Merton’s 1965 Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (recommended by someone who left a comment here), and I came across this passage: “January 22, 1961: President Kennedy’s inauguration speech has just been read in the refectory.”

As the sun sets here, so does this series and the summer.

Other posts in the series:

• journal + photos + summer + preview
• cottage fixtures
• cottage writing room
• different ways of seeing: the cottage
• light-from the cottage

watching the storm

and then

watching the light

Other posts in the series:

• journal + photos + summer + preview
• cottage fixtures
• cottage writing room
• different ways of seeing: the cottage
• the day the sun came out: at the cottage