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.

May 1, 2018: Elle Johnson

Cool things are happening in TV these days. Think Rectify–a literary series I love. And The Leftovers. Elle Johnson is an Executive Producer on the Amazon original series Bosch, which is based on Michael Connelly’s detective novels. At a recent Writing by Writers workshop, I heard her read this:

ICE

My father stands at the bottom of the hill, stamping his feet. Waiting. He looks like a hangry grizzly bear. He is wearing a floor length sheepskin coat, dyed a hypnotic slate-grey. Inside the coat is full of lush black curls. The lifties all turn and stare at my father—a six foot three black man with gold incisors and a toothpick defiantly sticking out the side of his mouth, and a pair of oversized oval black sunglasses that unapologetically shield his eyes day and night.  His face is permanently stamped with an expression that can only be interpreted as “kill whitey.”  If these people only knew that beneath the sheepskin coat, in a worn brown leather holster, there is a shiny snub-nosed Colt 35 Revolver and a badge. If they only knew that he made the coat himself. Bought the material, found the pattern, stayed up all night for months sewing the pieces together by hand so that he would have something fly to wear while waiting for me at the bottom of the hill.

I am wearing a smaller version of my father’s coat. The coat is not really great for skiing, but then again I am not a great skier. But I am warm. And my coat is a conversation starter, which is important to me because I am always alone, the only black kid on the slopes.

My father takes me skiing every winter, ever since I won that first gold medal off the bunny run at Killington. My father was hooked. Pretty soon this was our thing. We spend the weeks before a trip talking about the snow and the conditions. He shows me how to wax my Billy Kidd skis, but then never makes me actually do it. He adjusts the binding on my ski boots then pays to have the guys in the chalet do it right. He waits in the snow, in the sun, and the rain.  But he refuses to ski with me. My father’s family is from Bermuda and he grew up in the South Bronx. He doesn’t know from skiing. And doesn’t want to learn. Not if it means taking the toothpick out his mouth or the sunglasses away from his eyes. Not if it means he can’t wear his sheepskin coat. Not if it means falling, being the only black man on the white slope. My father is too ice for that.

In her own words…

Elle Johnson was born and raised in Queens, New York. She graduated from Harvard College where she squandered her parents’ hard earned money when she studied art history. After four years of higher education she realized she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life and embarked on a series of adventures that inspired her to start writing. She rode a bicycle from San Francisco to Boston to raise money for Save The Children and OxFam America. She worked at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She was awarded a Rotary Fellowship to study screenwriting at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.  Then–with several scripts, short stories, and a play under her belt–she returned to New York where she was promptly hired to clean apartments, paint houses, and sell tickets at a theater box office while she practiced her craft. It wasn’t until she moved to Los Angeles that she landed a job at Sony Animation–as an assistant. She stuck it out in LA but returned creatively to her roots in New York where her family had strong ties to law enforcement. Her father was a Parole Officer in Manhattan and her uncle was a Homicide Detective in the Bronx. She landed her first TV writing job thanks to a script about her uncle’s most important homicide investigation–the murder of his own 16-year old daughter, Karen.

Since then Elle has written many of her family’s crime stories into episodes of such television dramas as HOMICIDE, LAW & ORDER, and CSI: MIAMI. One of the highlights of Elle’s career came on A&E’s scripted detective series THE GLADES where she researched, wrote and produced an episode set in the world of NASCAR that featured nine actual race cars, four champion drivers (Tony Stewart, Carl Edwards, Brian Vickers, and Joey Logano), and one monkey.

In addition to police procedurals Elle has also written for a number of character driven television series such as Lifetime’s critically acclaimed civil rights drama ANYDAY NOW, CBS’s GHOST WHISPERER, TNT’s SAVING GRACE, and Freeform’s groundbreaking series THE FOSTERS.

Elle is currently writing a memoir about her cousin Karen’s murder titled, THE OFFICER’S DAUGHTER. She has workshopped this memoir at Sirenland with Dani Shapiro, the Cuba Writers Program with Alden Jones, and most recently Samantha Dunn at Writing by Writers Bootcamp. This memoir was  also a finalist for UCLA’s 2015 Allegra Johnson Prize in Memoir Writing.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how ELLE JOHNSON spends her days.

2010: The new year begins in the deep snow of Vermont. I stay in the dorm, wear my first pair of snow boots, and vow not to waste any more years writing novels that don’t sell. I will go shorter. And I start something new that has hold of me rather than the other way around. But every time it threatens to get bigger, I shut it down. Not only do I ferry Nan and Gay Talese from and back to the Atlanta Airport, but Gay is hot to watch a football game so they end up at our house. February brings several inches of snow to Columbus, a spa trip with Pam to Santa Fe’s Ten Thousand Waves, where I stay in an adorable little airstream trailer called Silver Moon that doesn’t exist anymore, a workshop with Robin Black on the Jersey shore, and a family visit to Jack in California, with a side trip to Disneyland. In March, Obamacare becomes law, and Cal and I go back to Sirenland–more steps, more of the brothers, and Ron Carlson’s class instead of Dani’s. On the day we talk about my piece in class, the first thing Ron says is, “Well, this is certainly a story that wants to be a novel.” I tell Dani, and she says, “Some people are just novelists.” On the way home, we spend the night in Rome, and I get violently ill, which leads to the wrong boarding pass the next day. I’m unsure whether I can fly, but I finally make it to the right plane only to have to de-plane due to mechanical difficulties. I then spend an extra night at an airport hotel. These days, Cal and I fly on separate planes, and he doesn’t know I’m still in Rome until he lands in the U.S. The iPad comes out, I take Sam to Florida for spring break, and I visit Jack again. I’m trying to get used to contacts, but I have such trouble getting the damn things in. Every month a packet is due for school. Cal and I go see James Taylor and Carole King in Atlanta on their Troubadour Reunion Tour. June 29th is our 25th wedding anniversary, but I’m in Vermont at the summer residency, where one day, I drive to Ferrisburgh to visit my old French Camp that is now a state park. When I sit still on the porch of the old infirmary, it’s like I can feel the past. My first novel places on the Short List for Finalists in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, and my second novel places as a Semi-Finalist. In September, I go back to Pam’s ranch, and Bobby goes back to St. Andrews. In October I join the staff at Contrary as Review Editor. Kathleen is pregnant! It actually snows on Christmas Day in Atlanta. 50 books this year, with the highlights being Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh and Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, which, as soon as I finish it, I start again. I email Annie and she emails me back. And then, listening to Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris sing All the Roadrunning, I’m back in Vermont where the year began.

7 days to 60

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

c

2009: Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President. After a visit to Bobby in Scotland, Cal comes with me to Sirenland. It’s the only writing conference I know that is spouse friendly. In Italy we make a daily habit of climbing all those steps and then spending several hours enjoying lunch at Il Ritrovo. Just when we think we’re done, the brothers bring out another limoncello… Robin Black is the Sirenland Fellow, and her husband is also there. Robin’s One Story #104 is one of those I kept. We no longer rent DVDs from Netflix; now we have Apple TV and the movies just appear. Pamfa meets in Point Reyes, and I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, spending a night in Sausalito to adjust to the time change and finding a purple dress for the rehearsal dinner. On the way home, I visit Jack at Chapman. The spring is filled with wedding activities–one of my favorite being filling the guest goody bags that fill our dining room table. I love my dress for the wedding–black, serious at the top with a burst of ruffles at the bottom. My favorite part of the wedding is the arrival of the gospel choir singing “Oh Happy Day.” Michael Jackson dies. Sam gets his driver’s license. In Provincetown, I’m shocked when I cycle out to visit the little cottages at the top of this blog and discover they’re called The Days Cottages. I had taken the header photo in 2006 without knowing their name. In August I switch from a PC to a Mac. Huge. This month also marks the debut of the How We Spend Our Days series, with Pam kicking things off. The fall brings another trip to Pam’s ranch with a stop-over to visit Bobby on his birthday in Denver, where he’s taking time off from St. Andrews to go to cooking school. “The Empty Armchair,” loosely based on my first novel, is accepted at Contrary–and they feature it on the front page of the journal. I start writing reviews for Contrary, specializing in debut novels by women. “Frosting” is published in Contrary‘s Winter Issue. And right after Christmas, I start grad school at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Yes, I’m back in school–in New England! 42 books this year with the highlight being Infinite Jest. Jackson Browne comes to Columbus, and I break the rules, record a few of his songs, and put them on YouTube. During a dramatic pause, you can hear Cal sneeze in “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate.” Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder where the years have gone…

8 days to 60

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

c

2008: I start the year excited about returning to Italy–this time to the Sirenland Writers Conference. It’s the perfect storm of writing conferences: Dani Shapiro plus Hannah Tinti of One Story plus Le Sirenuse–where Cal and I went on our honeymoon and where we returned on our 10th Anniversary and on our 15th. Dani’s husband Michael persuades me to join Facebook for access to the Sirenland group there, and just like that, I fall into Facebook. In February I begin my career as chauffeur to the stars by driving Richard Russo from Columbus, where he was speaking at the Library Foundation Dinner, to the Atlanta Airport. Then it’s off to Zion National Park in Utah for Pamfa–Pam’s writing group. In March my first novel is one of ten finalists in the Emory Goes Novel contest. I’m in Dani’s workshop at Sirenland, and I submit a section of novel #2. One day, as we climb 1700 old stone stairs to lunch, a sudden rain sends torrents of water cascading down beside us. And I’m not a foodie but oh, the food… Kathleen gets engaged–we will be adding another Sam to the family! Jack graduates. Cal and I see Allison Kraus and Robert Plant in concert at the outdoor amphitheater at Chastain Park in Atlanta. In August I go back to Pam’s ranch in Colorado. In the fall we settle Jack into Chapman University in Orange, CA, where he will study digital arts so he can create video games. And… we are down to one. Sam begins high school dreading four years of individual scrutiny. He continues the football thread as a backup quarterback. I start the countdown to no children at home. I also begin a conversation with Cal. I’m tired of living in Columbus. And I want to spend more time near water, at the beach I think. I write all the time–working on the new novel and on stories too. And I decide to start a blog. Within 24 hours of making the decision, it’s up and running. Which is unlike me. On September 29th, the stock market crashes–falling 777 points. I sit in my car at Publix listening to NPR as one bank after another fails. Amandah and I and the husbands hike the 23 miles of the Pine Mountain Trail not knowing it will be the last time. 51 books this year with so many highlights: Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, Light in August by William Faulkner, and The Gathering by Anne Enright. In December “Into the Woods” is published in Storyglossia. When Coldplay sings Viva la Vida, I want to bounce up and down.

9 days to 60

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

c

2005: In January I attend the San Diego State Agent Conference. Ten minutes with each agent. Speed dating. Bobby’s a junior and thinks he wants to go to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. We plan a visit for spring break–all of us except Kathleen, 24, who has a job and her own apartment here in Columbus. St. Andrews is old and full of stones and charm. And it’s right on the ocean. We all love it. We spend time in London and Stonehenge. And I can’t get this close to France without a visit. So day trip to Paris via the Chunnel. In May I commute to a workshop at Emory in Atlanta–Jim Grimsley’s “Novel Writing: Living Through the First Draft.” In June Cal and I celebrate 20 years with a trip to Zihuatanejo, Mexico. When I tell the travel agent, I’ve never heard of it, she tells me it’s where they filmed the last scene in The Shawshank Redemption. In July it’s back to Tin House for a workshop with Charlie D’Ambrosio where I learn how to see what my character sees. Hurricane Katrina heads straight for New Orleans, hits it, and for a moment, it looks as if it will be okay. A few weeks later, with Hurricane Rita on the way, Kathleen drives 13 hours to move to Fort Worth. Because of the people displaced by Katrina and evacuating ahead of Rita, there are no rooms within an hour of the interstate all the way to Texas. I spread maps on the kitchen counter as I chart her progress. A new issue of One Story arrives every 3 weeks. I love this journal and renew my subscription. At first I save them all but quickly save only my favorites. I reread Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years–one of my top 16 of all-time. 74 books this year with the highlights being Dani Shapiro’s Family History and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

12 days to 60

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

c

Dani writes,

It is impossible to spend your days writing and not begin to know your own mind.

Writing is just about the only thing that’s ever allowed me more than a passing moment with what was going on inside me. Apparently I did a heck of a job locking all that up, probably starting way back in third grade. Which is why writing does not come easily to me. In fact, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

From Beginnings, a beautiful description of writing:

So what is it about writing that makes it–for some of us–as necessary as breathing? It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. Time slips away. The body becomes irrelevant. We are as close to consciousness itself as we will ever be. This begins in the darkness. Beneath the frozen ground, buried deep below anything we can see, something may be taking root. Stay there, if you can. Don’t resist. Don’t force it, but don’t run away. Endure… This is the best part.

From Middles, a new way to think about words you find yourself repeating:

Repeated words. Familiar phrases. Consider them clues. When you discover them, slow down. In fact, stop. Become willing to press against the bruise–it’s there anyway–and see what it yields.

From Ends, a description of how I feel when life keeps me from writing for too long, a feeling that is intensified if I am in the middle of a project:

But the only remedy–the only cure–for the writer is writing. It isn’t about the project, it’s about the practice… Most of us can’t tolerate extended breaks. We are reminded how lousy, how out of touch we feel when we’re away from the page.

I read this book a while back but am just now finding/making the time to write about it here. I made notes. Thank heavens. And these bits below I wrote under Someone out there like me : )

We spend our days searching for the perfect turn of phrase. And we consider this a good time… Who else would need the silence, the uninterrupted stretches of time, the special mug, the favorite pen? We ponder each word, aim high, strive for both music and meaning. We know that one is nothing without the other.

Doesn’t it always happen that as soon as you’ve sent it, suddenly you notice something you want to change? … [Now you’re] rereading your work as the person to whom you’ve just sent it.

It’s the middle of the day and I have barely stepped outside except to pick up a couple of envelopes of books and manuscripts that FedEx left on the porch. I have spoken to no one since seven o’clock this morning. I’m wearing the ratty T-shirt I slept in last night… These solitary days are my lifeline. They are the lifeline of every writer I know. We hold on to our solitude, fiercely protect these empty days.

Still writing? Yes.

Let me interrupt this logical sequence to say I just now realized yet another possible reason why this post came back to me this morning as I was crossing the border between asleep and awake (as I was leaving my sleep–still playing these CDs constantly). One of the things the novel I finished a year ago (and that I have not sent to very many agents yet and that I keep telling myself I need to make time to do so) is about is the impact the news has on one woman.

Nabokov, in an interview for Playboy in 1964, wrote that in the winter, he would wake up to an Alpine chough (which I thought was a typo for church until I just googled it) alarm clock around seven and then that he would lie “in bed mentally revising and planning things.”

Dani Shapiro wrote, in one of the How We Spend Our Days posts, that as she gets her son off on his morning, she tries to “reserve just a bit of myself in that quiet, dreamy state of just-waking, so that once my family is out the door, I can turn to my work.”

For a little more than a year, my black, rectangular alarm clock has been waking me up at 6:30. I get right on the treadmill and watch Morning Joe for thirty minutes before getting my son off to school. This morning, I lay in bed for that thirty minutes and a thousand things entered my mind and they’re still coming. Maybe, as Chee wrote, “It is time for me to adapt again.”

I was here for 2 1/2 days before I had a second to log in to the internet, which is the longest I’ve been offline in over a year. And that was just to check email.

I mean, breakfasts, workshops, hikes up the mountain and lingering over lunch and the view. Evening readings.

I’m in Ron Carlson’s workshop. Dani Shapiro is here. Also Jim Shepard, Hannah Tinti, Nam Le and Bruce Machart. And writers, writers everywhere.

And there’s the view.

So much to show and tell. More very soon.

The first one not surprisingly has to do with memory. She writes:

“Why do we remember the particular things we do? …why random, ordinary moments?”

So many moments from my past, I feel as if I can actually see: sitting in French class in third grade with my French name (which I can’t remember) written on a piece of construction paper and folded tent-style on my desk, sneaking out of a window at the Latin Convention, what I wore to the Cat Stevens concert in ninth grade.

And then there are all those forgotten moments. Someone recently mentioned a Rita Coolidge/Kris Kristofferson concert I apparently attended.

The second subject is related to the first yet strikes off in its own direction. It has to do with what Mary Gordon calls “the wick,” what Tim O’Brien describes as “a blade tracing loops on ice,” and what Virginia Woolf writes about in this passage from Mrs. Dalloway. It’s the russian doll aspect of life–that I am in fact now, still, the little girl that sat in that desk with the French name. It’s the through line Dani writes about here:

“I understood feeling like a completely different person…and when I thought back to my teenage self, my twenty-something self, I had a hard time understanding how I had gotten from there to here…Was there–surely there must be–a through line connecting the disparate parts of ourselves?…I knew that each part of me…is linked one to the next, like a fragile chain of paper dolls….These layers of ourselves are always there, waiting for the right moment to emerge…A jumble, perhaps, but nothing is ever missing. Just hidden from view.”

In this section Dani wonders what rises to the surface and why. I wonder about that too. This idea of the surface fascinates me. One of the reasons I love writing is that it pushes all these things to the surface.

“Yogis use a beautiful Sanskrit word samskara, to describe the knots of energy that are locked in the hips, the heart, the jaw, the lungs. Each knot tells a story–a narrative rich with emotional detail. Release a samskara and you release the story. Release your stories, and suddenly there is more room to breathe, to feel, to experience the world.”

Devotion, Dani Shapiro’s new memoir, is a beautiful book both inside and out. Her son Jacob is “the beating heart” of this journey, yet there is something about this book that felt necessary to me, that I’m guessing will feel necessary to each of us.

“To pause. To be still–not leaning forward, not falling back. Steady in the present–not even waiting. Just being.”

And with the stillness, she writes, “I was starting to see what was there.”

In the best book trailer I’ve seen, Dani talks about Devotion:

Dani has described the form of this book as “puzzle-like.” In Devotion, she quotes Virginia Woolf, “Arrange the pieces as they come,” a quote I also have on my desk. “Is there any other way to live than arranging the pieces as they come?” Dani writes. Some of those pieces: her search for meaning, her son’s illness, their post 9/11 move from New York City to Connecticut, her relationship with her mother and her ties to her father.

Yesterday I asked Dani why 102 pieces: “The book ended on 102 simply because that’s where the story ended–and I did like the number, and the roundness, the symmetry, the evenness of it–but really the arc of the story had come to an end.” The story of Devotion may be complete, but on her new website, Dani recently began a Devotion blog, where she continues beyond the book, a concrete manifestation that the journey is never over.

As I read Devotion, it was as Mary Oliver wrote in her poem, “I Want to Write Something So Simply“:

…by the end

you will think–

no, you will realize–

that it was all the while

yourself arranging the words,

that it was all the time

words that you yourself,

out of your own heart

had been saying.