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On the first of each month,
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January 1, 2025: Laura Warrell

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Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, published in September of 2022, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. It was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the CIBA Golden Poppy Book Award. It was also named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by NPR, Oprah Daily, Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Millions, and Hollywood Reporter. The novel was chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick. It is Laura Warrell‘s first book.

Circus Palmer, a single, forty-year old jazz trumpet player, is the glue that holds Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm together, but it’s the women who make it shine. Eight women. Each one has some kind of relationship with him. Each one is hurt by him. Each one has a voice in the book. In a particular chapter, or a particular moment, Circus may overshadow. But the more you read, the more you hear the voices of the women together, the less important he becomes.

The first words of the novel belong to Circus but not the last words. There are twenty chapters—six are in his point of view, five in the point of view of his daughter, Koko, and three in the point of view of her mother, Pia. We also hear from six other women–Maggie, Odessa, Peach, Angela, Raquel, and Josephine.

Maggie is awesome–strong and the most self-assured of all the women. “Love is lonely, Tip. Just you and another person, and the rest of the world falls away.” She’s a drummer, and in her chapter, which falls in the number three slot, she’s pregnant and trying to decide whether or not to keep the baby. There’s an amazing scene where she feels the early presence of a baby inside her as a rhythm to such a degree that it interferes with her drumming.

“Rhythm,” she answered over the shimmy of the high hat. “Everything is rhythm. Our bodies, time, the planet, man. It’s all moving in beats you just have to catch.”

Toward the middle of the novel, Circus says to his daughter, Koko,

“This is my house, Koko, my time, I decide how I’m going to spend this day, you hear me? I didn’t ask to see you today. I’m sorry if the time you get isn’t good enough, but I gotta do for me.”

This is just one of the many things Circus says that make us not want to like him. So it’s quite a trick what Laura does. Just like these women, we do like him. His big, sturdy shoulders and thick curly hair–and on top of that, he plays the trumpet. Here’s a flash of his magic. Koko asks him why he plays jazz, insinuating no one listens to it.

“I could give two shits who listens,” he shouted. “I play to feel joy. Maybe you can’t dig that because you’re little, but I play, and the world gets easier. You should be so lucky to find something like that in your life.”

Later on in this chapter, he tells his daughter that one day she would understand. “You’ll want to be something someday.” Her response, “I already am something.”

Lynell George wrote more about the music of the novel. “What makes Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm captivating is Warrell’s ability to write like music rather than about music, which is language in its own right. There’s a burnished precision to her prose; like a shimmering ride cymbal, it moves us from pattern to pattern, vignette to vignette, building on the theme of love.”

Laura grew up in Ohio and currently lives in California. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and The Writer. She is a fellow Vermont College of Fine Art alum, and I got to spend a little time with her this past September at a Writing by Writers’ event where she was teaching.

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Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how LAURA WARRELL spends her days.

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The Book Cellar, Chicago, 8-16-22

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May 1, 2023: Rachel Swearingen

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Rachel Swearingen’s How To Walk On Water is fresh and exciting and one of the best collections I’ve ever read. Nine brilliant gems featuring art and female bodies and terrific sentences. My favorite is “A Habit of Seeing” with this first sentence: “The energy of the baby shower reminded Julia of Twelve Angry Men.” This story alternates between the summer Julia is pregnant and the summer, three years earlier, when Julia first met Sharon. The excerpt below is from the earlier summer, and the two are walking home one night with Sharon talking to Julia about negative space.

[I]t was all she saw now–great odd shapes between buildings and tree branches, the city made up of Hitchcock stills. “It’s like everything is reversed.” … [Sharon] squinted at a row of lit storefronts, dark alleys between. “You should try it. It will freak you out. It’s just a habit of seeing. Once you do it, nothing will ever look the same.”

Julia squinted and what she saw then was the world moving on without her, the street already a street from her past.

This next excerpt is also from the summer three years earlier. Julia and Sharon are sitting and talking in the alley behind Frankie’s Piano bar.

“I’m getting out of here, Julia. I hate this place.”

“When did running away ever solve anything?” [Julia] said.

“You ran away.”

“I moved. I got married. it’s different.”

“Sure,” Sharon said. “Whatever you say.”

Amazing how this little bit of dialogue opens the story wide instead of keeping it between the pages of the book.

Here are a couple more sentences I love. From “Mitz’s Theory of Everything Series,” this line, “She practiced disaffected like Mitz practiced sane.” And from “Edith Under the Streetlight,” this slanted line full of so much feeling, “It wasn’t Edith’s fault that she had gotten old.”

Rachel is a master of compression and can tell a whole story in a paragraph. Look at this example from the title story.

I’ll show you the backside of your soul. That’s what Arvel Wilkes told Nolan’s mother, Sigrid, the night of the attack. Nolan had found a manila envelope with a smeared carbon copy of the original police report inside. Sigrid had been just twenty-six when it happened, younger than Nolan now. The report didn’t note what his mother said in response to Wilkes, just that there were “minimal defensive marks on victim.” They had been living on the north side of Seattle at the time, his father away on a business trip, Nolan asleep in his crib.

In a recent interview at The Erie Reader, Rachel said she is “drawn to characters on the periphery and weird situations… I’ve always loved atmospheric stories, and genre tends to inform my work. I love mysteries, things that are a little spooky, and things that are strange and off-kilter.”

How To Walk On Water received the New American Press Fiction Prize, was a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Selection,” and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year.

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Come back on MAY 1st to read how RACHEL SWEARINGEN spends her days.

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April 1, 2023: Charlie J. Stephens

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Charlie J. Stephens’s writing feels so light, a lovely counterpoint to the truths and the weight each story carries. I loved Charlie’s story “The Owl People,” published in New World Quarterly, about a couple that moves into the apartment above the narrator. Each word slides you along to the next.

In the past I thought shoeless households were a foolish attempt to try to keep the grime of the world away.  My philosophy was more to let all the muck in and get stronger for it. I imagined their clean feet, housed in cotton, how they must skate across their polished floors and maybe even hold each other and dance sometimes.

This lightness in the face of heavy things offers the reader hope.

At the store, at restaurants, and on the street I get ma’am’d and sir’d with equal regularity. I’ve noticed that people are generally quick to categorize others, uncomfortable with ambiguity. When I was younger, starting around age five, people generally assumed I was a boy. I think it’s the aging—now that I’m middle aged—that causes people to linger with the feminine. Everything is softening. Everything. And when I speak, all bets are off… I like existing in the in-between, not quite fitting.

Charlie’s writing feels real, as if I were listening to someone tell me a story. In this excerpt from their flash piece, “Zeus’s Fear,” published in The Rappahannock Review, it’s the details that contribute to that feeling–the nickname Pops, the trouble with thumbs, that with aging we often start to care about what we can’t do anymore.

My grandson, Jesse, calls me “Pops” and practically has to be beaten with a stick to get off his video games. I infuriate him by always choosing a female character when I play with him, which is less and less often these days, even though I am committed to proving my point. My thumbs are no match for his thumbs. I guess that’s always been true but lately I’ve started to care. Things aren’t working like they used to…

And take a look at this amazing beginning to Charlie’s story, “Willamette,” published in Peculiar, a journal I’m happy to know about. It’s beautiful writing, yes, I’ve read this opening three times already, but the details make me want to know more–the mushroom canning factory and the mother who steams artichokes, smokes Camel Lights, and sees the color of a blood orange when she looks at the sky.

Dusk on the river that evening was darkly bruised, exhausted. The putrid spew from the mushroom canning factory up the road sputtered into nothingness as evening fell, and even the semitrucks that passed on their way from the fields to I-5 rumbled slowly like they too were tired. Mom was in the kitchen steaming artichokes and smoking Camel Lights out the window.

“Babe look, the sky’s the exact color of a blood orange.”

Recently, Charlie’s love of writing has overflowed into a bookstore. They are the owner of the about-to-be-open Sea Wolf Books in Port Orford, Oregon. And if you’d like to support this up-and-coming independent bookstore, you can already order a book. AND Sea Wolf Books is not only a bookstore, it’s also a Community Writing Center offering classes and workshops. So if you’re a writer interested in having an event here or teaching a class or a workshop, get in touch with Charlie or just leave a comment below.

Although I know Charlie from Writing by Writers events, something I didn’t know about Charlie is their passion for returning stolen land to Indigenous people. Charlie has turned this passion into action–they bought land in California and are returning it. You can read more about that here.

In 2016 my partner and I bought 36 acres of off-the-grid land in an area of the Sierra Foothills covered with pine, madrone, cedar and oak. We were greeted by owls, bats, deer, bobcat, and hawks, and by clear night skies and air that smelled sweeter than what we breathed in our Berkeley neighborhood.

Charlie J. Stephens is a queer, non-binary, mixed race fiction writer from the Pacific Northwest. They love animals and have lived all over the U.S. as a bike messenger, wilderness guide, book seller, high school English teacher, and seasonal shark diver (for educational purposes only). Their work has recently appeared in Electric Literature, Best Small Fictions Anthology, Hinterland, Prometheus Dreaming, Original Plumbing (Feminist Press) and The Forge Literary Magazine. Charlie is currently seeking an agent/small press to champion their full-length collection of short stories and novel AND readers to fill their bookstore.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how CHARLIE J. STEPHENS spends their days.

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On the first of each month,
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October 1, 2022: Therese Walsh

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Therese Walsh was one of the lucky ones—a major two-book deal back in 2008 with a Big Five publisher. This past January she kicked off the new year with a truth-telling. “My debut,” she wrote, The Last Will of Moira Leahy published in 2009, “the one I’d worked on for ~five years, was a sales dud.” Still, her second novel, The Moon Sisters, was published in 2014 to starred reviews, But then Random House decided not to publish it in paperback. Which, she wrote in January, “translated into “something that felt an awful lot like shame.”

When I read Therese’s essay, I recognized this feeling. It had been hitting me about the same time it hit Therese, only it was hitting me because I’d been writing for fifteen years and still didn’t have a published book. Therese wrote,

[I]t strikes me that maybe this is my first real step toward recovery–to be public here with all my broken parts glued back together, to let you see me with all of the visible battle scars that I usually hide.

Therese and I each discovered the same antidote—TRUTH. Lots of it. Therese with her January essay “Recovery From (Something That Tastes an Awful Lot Like) Shame,” and me with a yearlong project where I wrote one true thing about myself each day.

But back to Therese’s second novel, The Moon Sisters, which was named one of the Best Books of 2014 by Library Journal and Book Riot—I loved it. Loved falling into the world of Jazz and Olivia Moon who alternate telling the story. Jazz is the older sister. Olivia, who is almost eighteen, tells us about their mother.

She’d been working on a fairy tale called A Foolish Fire nearly my entire life but had yet to finish it.

And Olivia has synesthesia. Her sister Jazz describes her.

My sister’s reality had always been bizarre, though, with her ability to taste words and see sounds and smell a person on the sun…She’d never been the poster child for sense.

And here’s Olivia on Jazz.

I knew better than to bother with Jazz, especially when everything down to her clothing choice of gray shorts and a black T-shirt revealed her storm-cloud mood. She was driving us to the glades against her will and better judgment, she’d said, which meant I would get the mostly silent treatment from her for the duration…

Olivia talks about emotions in ways that we can see and smell and taste:

“[A]lthough the sky was as blue as ever, it smelled like failure.”

“I plunged my fork into the lemon meringue, then took a bite…It tasted, I thought, like second chances.”

As I read, I could see this novel happening like a movie—the colorful characters, the train, the woods, the letters… Therese tells the story of the Moon sisters with writing that makes the story alive. (The Moon Sisters would make a great movie too.)

In 2006, before any book deal, Therese co-founded Writer Unboxed—with the box being ‘literary dead-ends.” It started as a wonderful site to help writers navigate the craft and business of fiction and turned into an entire community. And Writer Unboxed is gearing up for its first online event—two weeks full of 18 sessions on the craft of writing and the writing life. The Writer Unboxed OnConference starts tomorrow with tickets still available as I write this. Therese is also the brains and primary editor of Author in Progress (Writer’s Digest, 2016), a book written by the team at Writer Unboxed about the key milestones a writer hits as they write a novel, including practical tips on how to actually reach those milestones “while clearing psychological hurdles along the way.”

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how THERESE WALSH spends her days.

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September 1, 2022: Wendy J. Fox

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Here is Wendy J. Fox in 2019 with the three books that preceded her linked story collection, What if We Were Somewhere Else, which was published last November by the Santa Fe Writers Project and which I just finished reading—this is a book that starts good and becomes amazing. I loved it. There’s so much pleasure to be had in reading it–pleasure in the different ways we get to know the characters, pleasure in the characters themselves, pleasure in discovering the structure of the book, pleasure in how the structure tells the story. Pleasure in the ways the stories speak to each other and pleasure in the many ways particular stories echo each other. Pleasure in the writing itself.

You know that thrill when you see someone you know in a place you weren’t expecting. Or that desire, when you see someone you recognize but can’t quite place, to figure out how you know them and to tell someone what you know about them. Linked collections with a number of different narrators give the reader those feelings. There’s the pleasure of talking to Kate and then talking about Kate.

Since I rarely write in detail about a book’s plot, it’s been a long time since I introduced a writer with a SPOILER ALERT. Usually, I write about sentences or paragraphs. Or how a book starts. But in this case, it’s ALL a spoiler. Everything I tell you about this book will take some pleasure away from reading it yourself. So my recommendation is that you stop reading this introduction now and head off to order this book from the independent bookstore of your choice.

What If We Were Somewhere Else is not officially divided into parts, which is to its credit. I’m afraid I would have officially divided, and that would have taken some of the pleasure away from the reader. Here’s what I discovered as I read.

The structure of these 15 stories, which as I finished the second Kate story, I thought was creating a different shape, turned out to be this:

Kate1, Heather1, Laird1, Sabine1, Melissa1, Michael1, Christian1.
Kate2, Heather2, Laird2, Sabine2, Melissa2, Michael2, Christian2.
Kate3, and in my imagination, …

Kate tells the first story, “The Book of Names, a Spreadsheet,” which is anchored at an unnamed office, and Kate, the office manager, is thinking about how things are not going well for her at home. And then, on the same day her husband serves her with divorce papers, a number of people in the office are fired. Not Heather, the risk analyst, but Laird, Sabine, Melissa, Michael, and Christian. As you can see above, these five, along with Kate and Heather, will be our seven narrators.

Most of the first stories take place at the office, but no matter where they take place, that narrator’s second story takes place somewhere else. The first Kate story begins with this sentence: “In the office there were sounds.” The second Kate story begins with this sentence: “In our home there were sounds.” There’s always some repetition of the first story on the first page of the second story. Which would lead to the conclusion that no matter where you are, there you are.

However, these second stories, when Kate finds the note that her husband has gone to his mother’s and left her, when Heather breaks her foot, and when all these other narrators are down and out, these stories lift off the page. The second round of stories are the ones that sing. Which leads to a different conclusion, actually lots of wonderful little conclusions.

Then there’s the last story in the collection, a third Kate story, which is different in so many ways.

And the writing. There’s something so real about each of these stories–the concrete physical details, the settings, and especially Wendy’s ability to get inside her characters and put their thoughts, in exactly the way each one would say something, on the page. The tone is so exactly right. Take a look at these examples.

From Kate’s second story, “Tornado Watch,” where I underlined almost everything. This is a hell of a story all by itself.

We were married to one another, and we were married to work, and we were married to our ideas, our ridiculous ideas–so caught up in the way laundry was folded or aspirational grocery lists. Most nights the produce rotted as we hit the booze.

From Heather’s second story, “The Empathy Chart,” where I also underlined almost everything. Also fabulous all by itself.

I am so, so sorry that I was short with [my mother] about the gravy tureen.

From Laird’s second story, “Wish in the Other.” I was so in this story, I forgot I was even reading. Doesn’t happen often.

Even before I lost my job, I had mentioned wanting to go back to my mom’s house to [Cale.]

“Yeah, man, it’s not a problem per se, it’s just optics. Like with girls, it doesn’t look good,” [Cale] said.

I was pretty sure I had never given a fuck about optics, whatever that even was.

I could go on and on. I’ve started my own spreadsheet… But I want to leave you with a bit of hope from the artist Sabine’s second story, “Pivot, Feather.”

The way the steam rose from the waffle iron seemed inexplicably hopeful. It seemed like the way smokestacks puffing smoke once felt like progress. It seemed like a curl of mist rising from a thawing pond. It seemed like a finger of cloud she could float on, like one of her birds in one of her bird-scapes.

If We Were Somewhere Else was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review.

In this book, Fox asks what makes a life meaningful. Each story tunes into a crisis moment when the characters are caught between their current life and a risky outward trajectory…Even while moving insightfully through the more alienating facets of office culture–networking parties, breakroom concerns–Fox invests most of all in what makes us people over workers: those closely held moments pregnant with change, when a new life could break open if we just reach for the person next to us.

Wendy’s first book, The Seven Stages of Anger & Other Stories, published by Press 53, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her debut novel, The Pull of It, published by Underground Voices, was named a top pick by Displaced Nation. Her most recent novel If The Ice Had Held, published by Santa Fe Writers Project, was a BuzzFeed recommended read and a grand prize winner from Santa Fe Writers Project. What If We Were Somewhere Else recently won the Colorado Humanities Award for Literary Fiction. Wendy writes for BuzzFeed, is a champion of independent presses, and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how WENDY J. FOX spends her days.

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July 1, 2022: Kirie Pedersen

Every day, I marvel that I get to live almost without sounds of civilization here adjoining the Olympic National Park, where I was born and still live on the same property. Instead, I sleep to the sound of waves on the cliff (May through October when I sleep in a tent right on the cliff), and eagles, seals, great blue herons, and myriad other birds in the wildlife sanctuary I left/created around my cabin built mostly of repurposed materials.

For those of you who don’t know her from the delightful comments she leaves after reading essays in this series, meet Kirie Pedersen. She’s published essays, non-fiction, and fiction in more than fifty literary and general interest magazines. More than fifty. I became aware of her writing because she read a story of mine back in 2013, came looking for me, found Catching Days, and left a comment. The excerpt above is from a letter she wrote me in 2019, when we were talking about our days.

I’m obsessed with where Kirie lives and where she writes. In a wonderful 2017 interview over at The Magnolia Review, Kirie describes her writing spot.

I work in a 10×12 foot hut I call Eagle Cottage because bald eagles nest nearby, and they cackle as I write. Eagle Cottage was repurposed from a 1924 schoolhouse that was being demolished… [It] is lined with journals, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and books on writing craft. Close beside me are jars of colored pencils and fountain pens.

In that interview, you’ll find more lovely details about her process and her materials, and her Artist Chicken!

Kirie has lived a fascinating life. Earlier this year, I read a piece by her, entitled “Finding Pulali,” which was published in Sunspot Literary Journal. This piece is about where and how she grew up. Before I read it, I didn’t know what Pulali was.

Pulali Point sits pretty much in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula and is itself a small peninsula jutting into Dabob Bay, Hood Canal, and Jackson Cove. The geological formation itself dates from the Eocene Era and is about forty million years old.

I could spend this entire introduction talking about this one piece that is alive with form. Here’s the beginning.

For a graduate workshop, I entitled this “Essay in Twelve Genres.” Feedback: The word genre is phony, unnecessary, and insufficiently ironic, a pretension by someone fancying herself intellectual. I was, they suggested, using genre to seal myself up and be safe.
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I too was concerned by the word, but it is the idea that disturbs me. When I try to write about Pulali, I grope for a form that captures my birthplace, my home. I attempt essay, dream, play, story. Word made manifest. Word made flesh.

Kirie had a hard time when each of her parents died in a two-year period while she was living across the country, far away from this world, on the opposite coast in Manhattan. In “In a Dark Time,” she wrote about the despair and depression she suffered and how she brought herself back from it. This essay was snapped up by The Magnolia Review, prompting the interview mentioned above. “In a Dark Time” received the Ink Award, for being the piece that unified the entire issue. It also received a Pushcart nomination. The excerpt below shows the mind/body connection in a number of ways.

My previous despair returned full-force, and perhaps due to the depleted immune response grief can cause, a tooth abscessed, and I developed debilitating back pain. I’d tried my list of non-drug cures that final year of my mother’s life, but my practice was desultory. Now, flattened by physical and emotional pain, I became determined to survive.

If you’re looking for a peak into Kirie’s fiction, check out “Liberating Life,” a flash piece from Glossalalia, with an ending that just keeps echoing out… Here’s an excerpt from the middle.

In Buddhism, Paul said, there was a ceremony called Liberating Life. The monks gathered animals scheduled for slaughter, and they freed them. When the Mormons purchased a live turkey for Thanksgiving, the turkey wandered around the yard. Melissa asked Paul if they could purchase the turkey and talk the Mormons into buying one already killed.
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The Mormons agreed, and the turkey moved to the Buddhist side of the fence.

This essay, “Getting a Life–Coming of Age with Killers,” which was published in Under the Sun and which received a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays 2018, is a personal look at growing up in the same place in which Ted Bundy was murdering women. It’s also a solid piece of journalism about what was actually happening, as well as the realities of the death penalty. Here’s the first sentence, which starts with the personal.

“Ted got Brenda,” my sister said.

And here’s one more excerpt from the beginning so you can get a sense of how the journalistic voice mixes with the personal.

In my early twenties, every three or four weeks a peer in her late teens or early twenties disappeared. Brenda, a year behind me at Mt. Ranier High School, was number six. The women vanished from streets I’d walked that same day, from beaches where my friends and I sat to tan, from beds just blocks from my own, and from the campuses of the universities my sisters, friends, and I attended.

Kirie’s essay “Saving Paradise,” published in the beautiful Still Point Artists Quarterly in 2017, will be of special interest to those who love places that are disappearing.

The last thing on earth I wanted was to walk to the front of that room, but if I didn’t say something, I would forever lose my chance. “I propose preservation of Meadowdale as a wilderness,” I murmured into the microphone, voice thin and shaking. “A walking-only park where children can learn about the environment.”

Kirie earned an M.A. in fiction writing from Western Washington University, where Annie Dillard (!) was her thesis chair. Kirie also loves the writing of Ellen Gilchrist, another favorite of mine. She’s taught writing for gifted and talented inner-city students, elders, and others. Washington State commissioned and published her Writing Handbook for Teachers and Tutors (published in Spanish and English) and Teaching Creative Writing Using Native American Songs and Myths. Please check out her website–I love how she introduces each new publication with a few words about the piece and about the journal where it’s published. P.S. Click on the little white lines in the upper right to subscribe to her publication updates!

Come back on JULY 1st to read how KIRIE PEDERSEN spends her days.

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Lee at home in November of 2020 holding her Advance Review Copy!

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March 1, 2022: Lee Zacharias

When Lee Zacharias’s sixth and most recent book, the novel What a Wonderful World This Could Be, begins, it’s 1982. The main character Alex is thirty-six, and she’s swimming laps in a pool, thinking of one of her students. It’s a short chapter at six pages, at the end of which Alex receives some startling news. But no spoilers here.

I loved this somewhat disorienting first chapter, which serves to underscore Alex’s state of mind, and then I loved the second chapter that takes place in 1960, and then I loved the whole book. If you’re looking for a thick novel to curl up with, one that will take you back to the sixties and cause you to forgo your current Netflix series, this is it. The story is told in three different timelines: Alex’s 1960’s childhood spent, instead of with mom and dad, with a twenty-seven-year-old photography professor; her young adulthood in 1964 with Civil Rights activist Ted Neal; and the current 1982 thread, which connects the other two from that very first chapter.

I was taken by the story and equally by the writing. So much happens in each sentence, between the sentences, and between the paragraphs. And Lee Zacharias expects you to keep up. On page twenty-eight, I wrote that the opening pages had a jagged feel, and I mean that in the best way.

Circling back to the sentences, I loved them. They involved me in the story. Back in 2013, I wrote an essay for Brevity on ways to take a sentence from boring to good. I could use only this novel and teach a whole class on how to write interesting sentences. Let’s look at some.

The writer Pam Houston is always saying the power is in the nouns. Here, in addition to making the sentence more concrete, choosing the noun over the adjective evokes other collective names for animals, for example, an unkindness of ravens.

Only kids used the pool and an irrelevance of young mothers…

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but the words have the wrong size in her mouth.

“It was the first time Ted brought her home, and she’d been nervous, a nineteen-year-old fiancee, a bastard daughter who’d already married one man and lived with another, surely not the bride his parents had imagined.

She had forgotten the most staggering thing about grief–that the acts it inhabits are so ordinary…

They are still standing beside the car, their awkwardness lit up for each other by the small lamp on the ceiling.

“I’m sorry.” She puts her face down on the steering wheel. What she means is that she doesn’t want to know anything about his life.

She had a laugh that ran through her voice like a silver ribbon.

What a Wonderful World This Could Be was a Finalist in the category of Literary Fiction for the 2021 American Fiction Awards from American Book Fest. It was a Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction at the 2021 NYC Big Book Awards. And it was included in Best Historical Fiction of 2021 at Hungry for Good Books.

Lee is in fact a swimmer and a photographer. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night; three other novels, Across the Great Lake, Lessons, and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is a two-time recipient of North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award and has won the Southern Humanities Review‘s Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, Prairie Schooner‘s Glenna Luschei Award, and two Silver Medals from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs). She lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how LEE ZACHARIAS spends her days.

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January 1, 2022: Alice Elliott Dark

When I was trying to figure out how to become a writer,  Alice Elliott Dark’s “In the Gloaming,” published in The New Yorker in May of 1993, was one of the first stories I ever read. If you haven’t read it, click away now to The New Yorker archives. You can also find it in the collection of the same name or in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century. It was adapted into two films.

In the story, a mother sits with her dying son. “He wanted to talk again, suddenly,” is how the story begins. Laird wants to talk after dinner, at dusk, and Janet wants to listen. “She found it hard work to keep up with him, but it was the work she had pined for all her life.” It’s a beautiful story of small moments and how they “add up to something of importance.”

And this coming July, Alice’s first book in almost twenty years will be published–a novel called Fellowship Point. About it, author Christina Baker Kline writes,

Fellowship Point is a marvel. Intricately constructed, utterly unique, this novel set on the coast of Maine is filled with insights about writing, about the perils and freedoms of aging, about the great mysteries, as well as the pleasures, of life. The story about the relationships between three women unfolds, as life does, through joys and losses, confrontations and confessions, with twists along the way that change your perception of all that came before.

You can pre-order Fellowship Point–I already have. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, you can read Alice’s first novel, Think of England, which begins in 1964, when Jane is nine. The evening after it opens, the Beatles first appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, but Jane will remember this night for another reason.

Think of England takes place mostly in 1979, with Jane off by herself in England. “[S]he needed to put thousands of miles, a whole gray ocean, between her and her family, so she could figure out who she was apart from them…” But the novel is bookended by time spent at home with family in Pennsylvania–a few moments in 1964 and an evening in 2000.

Here are two excerpts from early in the book, from 1964. In both, Jane’s father, Emlin, is trying to leave. In the first, Jane is telling her father goodnight, but notice how the moment is bigger than that, how it expands out.

He began to pull away, but she reached out and circled his neck with her arms and he stayed, patting her back. Somehow it was like summer. His breathing like waves. She wanted him to stay all night. It was a sacrifice to let go, and she felt holy when she made herself do it.

In the second, the phone rings, and Emlin, who’s a doctor, lunges for it. Jane’s mom, Via, yells not to get it. “She reached to grab him, but he was too far away.”  “Don’t!” she yells. But Emlin stands and says, “I have to, Olivia. You know that.” Via responds, “But you just came back from the hospital! You can’t go in again.” And then comes the paragraph below, anchored on that ringing phone but taking us way beyond the phone, this paragraph that is only possible because of the limited omniscient point of view, allowing the narrator to be in the heads of the husband and the wife at the same time.

They stared at each other across a chasm of diverging logic, all the misunderstandings between them crammed between rings of the phone. They stared and wondered how she could possibly mistake life and death for a stubborn whim, how he could care more about strangers than his own family. They knew they had a guest, and that one of their children was watching them anxiously, but they were locked in a brute tug-of-war, beyond the reach of knowledge or other people. They were desperate.

Alice Elliott Dark is also the author of the collection Naked to the Waist and a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She’s an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program.

Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how ALICE ELLIOTT DARK spends her days.

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.

August 1, 2019: Andre Dubus III

no
Don’t read any reviews of Andre Dubus III’s new novel, Gone So Long. Not because they’re bad but because all the ones I found include spoilers. And it’s not that they would ruin the big picture, but they will ruin the lovely, slow way we begin, the way we meet Susan and Daniel as who they are now and only gradually learn about their past. Meeting them this way first adds so much depth to the hard questions the novel asks.

Andre is a master at building a story, brick by brick, moment by moment. I always have such trouble with where and how to begin. It feels as if there is so much that needs to be said all at once. But reading these opening pages calms the writer in me at the same time that the reader in me has turned 7 pages without realizing it. In 7 pages I was hooked on two different characters.

Here’s Susan.

One afternoon it was so hot she could smell the rot in the dead branches on the banks. She could smell the wet sand and clay and the tiny crayfish. She could smell gator shit and Spanish moss and her own sweat. But what she never smelled were the brown and gold scales of the cottonmouth snake coiled a foot from her bare feet and legs. When she looked down and saw it, she’d just taken a deep drag of her cigarette and now she nearly coughed but did not move…How could she have been so stupid? How could she have allowed herself to be so exposed? …She slowly exhaled smoke through her nose, and maybe she made a noise of some kind, for the snake lifted its head and opened its white mouth and Susan was sprinting back through the trees and this is the moment that came to her as she watched the shadowed entryway of her father’s parole officer’s office.

Here’s Daniel.

Today he notices his hands. They’re his old man’s–thick fingers, chipped and yellowed nails, though his father’s always had carnival paint in his cuticles that never came out. Daniel reaches for the nail file he uses to weave the cane under and over itself. A warm wind kicks up from the east and brings with it beach sounds, or maybe it’s just Daniel’s memory of them–the creaking gears of the Ferris wheel and the popping water balloons and the cries of the gulls.

Andre Dubus III is a force of nature. He is always all in. His books are beautifully written and real. And he can quote a gazillion writers on whatever craft issue needs addressing or whatever seemingly unreachable goals he wants you to strive for. But it was what he shared about his own rejections that have meant the most to me and that I have copied and pasted and sent to friends and even to my agent way back when.

He says his first book, the fiction collection The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, was submitted to 38 publishers over five years before it found a home. His second, the novel Bluesman, was turned down by more than 30. His third, House of Sand and Fog, collected 24 rejections over two years.

I first met Andre in the fall of 2014 when I picked him up from SFO to drive him to Tomales Bay for a Writing by Writers workshop. He railed for an hour and a half against smart phones, proudly displaying his flip phone. He also put me on that phone with his wife, although at this moment, I can’t remember why. I took the above photo in Chamonix, France, last year. Andre was reading to us from Gone So Long.

I first read his work over twenty years ago. After somehow missing his debut collection, The Cage-Keeper and Other Stories, I started with Bluesman, his first novel structured in 40 short chapters, and after that came House of Sand and Fog (an Oprah pick and movie), then The Garden of Last Days, Townie (his memoir–get the audible and listen to him read it), Dirty Love (4 linked novellas), and now Gone So Long.

More than what happens, I remember his characters. In Bluesman, it’s Jim playing guitar and his son Leo watching his face, how soft it gets. From Dirty Love, it’s un-cool Marla and cool Devon. Read these lines from “Marla.”

Sometimes after dressing for work, Marla would stand at the kitchen sink with the last of her coffee and feel as if her small apartment and everything in it were props for a movie she wasn’t even in, as if she were working for all this for somebody else. She was twenty-nine years old and had been a teller at Providential Bank for eight years.

Soon the condoms were in a bag in Marla’s hand, and as she stepped out onto the sunlit sidewalk she felt part of the bigger picture somehow, more of a citizen of the world she lived in.

The ending is just perfect. But my favorite line from Dirty Love comes from the title novella. We’re in Devon’s point of view.

With no music in her head, there’s too much in her head…

Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how ANDRE DUBUS III spends his days.

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.

February 1, 2018: Debra Spark

The Writer’s Chronicle introduced me to Debra Spark. The old Writer’s Chronicle–oversized and newsprinty, remember? Debra’s essays told stories about her, were visual, and used examples from books I had actually read. I underlined and underlined and then tore them out and added them to my ever-growing stack on how to write.

Then, late in 2016, I was in a bookstore and noticed Unknown Caller. A new novel by Debra Spark. Why, I wondered, hadn’t I read any of her fiction?

I opened the book to the first sentence:

It is two in the morning when the phone rings.

I kept reading of course. But then, three short paragraphs later, Debra undercuts the drama that trails middle-of-the-night phone calls–and surprises me by making the novel all the more interesting.

In normal families, a late-night call means only one thing: tragedy. A drunken mishap. A car crash. A heart finally giving out. Maybe a decapitation or a roadside bomb, the twenty-first-century offering, as it does, an escalating range of horrors.

But the Pearlmans are not a normal family.

Debra’s writing is alive with details so attached to our lives, I often wonder how she’s able to extricate them and get them on the page.

Oh, Daniella is a child of her generation, as who is not? Ever ready with a therapeutic pop lyric to help her understand the events of the moment, then ready to critique her own shallowness. Is there nothing more going on in her head than the Rolling Stones? Apparently not, for while she waits for Joel to return with the girl, she sings (in her head, her inner voice is perfect, her outer reliably out of tune), “You can’t always get what you wa-aaant. You can’t always get what you wa-aant.”

And notice the tone–that ability to be outside the narrator but also inside in the same moment, so that the writing doesn’t feel judgmental or superior and also allows room for breath. We are Daniella and we can see her.

After Unknown Caller, I read Good for the Jews, which begins with a prologue. I’m not a fan of prologues. But I scanned ahead, and this one was short. Four sentences in, I’d forgotten I was reading a prologue.

Smoke at the horizon. A lone tendril corkscrewing up. Probably a brush fire. That’s what Alex Decker usually thought, when he saw smoke.

Chapter One delivers an outstanding first sentence, which, as you continue reading, works to cohere and unify the novel.

As far back as Ellen could remember, she’d been told there were two categories of things in the world: what was good for the Jews and what wasn’t.

Debra’s mother makes frequent appearances in Debra’s writing. I won’t go into the fiction, but you will find her in the craft essays and also in Debra’s articles on homes.

At some point during the planning of my wedding, about the time when dresses and hairstyles and such were being discussed, I balked. All this to-do. It wasn’t my thing. I said to my mother, “I don’t really want to be the focus of attention.”

“But you’re the bride,” she observed.

Well, true enough.
Given my own way of thinking, I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I called up real-estate developer Tim Harrington to arrange an interview. My task: write a profile of this man responsible for beautiful residences, upscale restaurants, a major health and fitness center, and multiple luxury-hotel properties in the Kennebunks.

“The thing is,” Harrington said, amiably enough, “I don’t want this article to be all about me.”
But, I thought, and flashed on my mother, it’s a profile of you.

Debra lives in Maine and is the author of five books of fiction–so I still have more to discover–including her recently reissued first novel, Coconuts for the Saint, which was the winner of the John Zacharis/Ploughshares first book award. You can find some of her craft essays  in her collection, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Her short work has appeared in all the cool places, and she is a senior writer for Maine Home+Design. I don’t know how she finds the time, but she is also a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

When Debra was only twenty-three, she edited the anthology 20 Under 30, featuring stories by Ann Patchett and Lorrie Moore, among others. At the end of her introduction she wrote that with the anthology finished, she was left without a project.

So, 60 Over 70? It’s something to consider. It will be a hefty collection, I imagine–all those stories in one volume, after all; so much life to weigh in.

Perhaps Debra could find time for this too.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how DEBRA SPARK spends her days.