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On the first of each month,
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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,
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June 1, 2025: Mary Carroll Moore

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With summer right around the corner, I’m excited to tell you about Mary Carroll Moore’s Last Bets, which takes place on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. I don’t know about you, but these days, I’m looking for books (and shows and movies) with strong female leads. And Last Bets has not just one, but two. I read it over a year ago, and Elly and Rosie are still with me.

Elly didn’t call herself a scuba diver, but she’d loved her first taste of diving on her last visit. She hadn’t imagined how silent it could be, deep in the ocean, just the sound of her own breathing…

Rosie loved to sit on the seawall and watch the line between ocean and sky blur to near invisible. As was their habit after dinner, her dad gathered his marks for the evening games, while she got herself an iced coffee and took her place on the rocky edge.

Elly comes to Bonaire from Washington, DC where her husband has recently died and her finances are nonexistent. She wants to get away but also to finish a painting and get paid for it. Rosie is sixteen and a thief, slipping into guest rooms at the resort where her father plays backgammon. If she doesn’t straighten up, she will be heading to boarding school (death) instead of the art institute (life). Freedom and art are on the line for both of them.

In the excerpt below, notice how Mary uses heat to add tension to the story.

It hadn’t been more than thirty minutes, tops, but the sun was out now, the air steaming. Elly already felt the heat building. She walked back to the apartment, inhaling the now familiar scent of hot pine and strong herbs, hoping she’d remembered to leave the window shutters open.

Throughout the book, Mary activates our senses thereby placing us in scene with the characters—from the scent of hot pine above to the waves pounding the beach below.

Outside the waves pounded the beach. The wind picked up, and it had cleared, as promised, the blue sky glaringly bright. [Elly] heard voices from the the bar, the lunchtime buffet opening; she should go get a sandwich, a salad, before they closed. Instead, she bent to lift the pastel stick from its foam nest. For a half hour, she lost herself in the simple choices of line, shape, and color.

Rosie’s sneaking around also adds tension to the story. Here she is in Elly’s room. “Behind the [bathroom] door hung a red silk kimono, the first hint of unique.” When Rosie finds the art supplies, she opens the boxes of pastels.

She hadn’t planned to do anything, just look. But suddenly her fingers were reaching for a stick of buttery yellow. She broke off a tiny chip. Again, with a carnelian pastel. She arranged the chips in a soft tissue, wrapped them gently, and stowed them in the pocket of her shorts. Then she replaced each broken pastel in its slot and turned the stick so the disfigured edge was hidden.

Elly would know. Eventually. Rosie didn’t know why she wanted that, wanted Elly even to suspect her, but she didn’t think about it. Owning something of Elly’s felt intensely important in that moment. Something they shared, like art.

Yet it wasn’t quite enough…

Backgammon gambling is the evening activity on Bonaire, but risk-taking is not limited to the stone tables. Elly and Rosie ignore the odds stacked against them, refuse to follow the rules, and set traps for each other. When we discover a hurricane is on the way (another layer of tension), it feels as if danger is everywhere, but Elly and Rosie bet on themselves.

Last Bets received a starred Kirkus review and was one of Kirkus Reviews’ Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!

Last Bets at the Atlanta airport

Mary is the author of two other novels. A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, which also features strong female characters. Kate and Red are pilots and estranged sisters from opposite sides of a fractured family. They are thrown together in a search and rescue in the Adirondack mountains of New York State when Red is framed for the brutal attack on the manager of her indie rock band. Qualities of Light, a YA queer novel, features sixteen-year-old Molly, who when tragedy strikes, must confront her own qualities of light and darkness. This novel was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards,

Since 2008, the same year I began Catching Days, Mary has sent Your Weekly Writing Exercises each Friday to subscribers around the world. She has taught at the Loft Literary Center, Grub Street, the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and has YouTube and Spotify channels. In 2011, her writing craft book, Your Book Starts Here, a product of those workshops, won the New Hampshire Literary “Reader’s Choice” award.

Although creatively she began as a painter, Mary’s website now tells you, “When I’m not writing, I paint. Mostly in plein air. I’m fascinated with the way light creates form, color, and luminosity.” Her paintings have been exhibited nationally since 2002, and are in permanent collections, including the Pacific Street Gallery in New London.

Mary is, or has been, a journalist, a songwriter, and a singer in a band. In the 1980s, she went from writing a food column for Sedona Life magazine, to writing cookbooks, to writing a syndicated weekly column for the Los Angeles Times, and then to writing two spirituality-self-help books. A 2007 New York Times article featuring Mary’s painting begins, “Mary Carroll Moore, a resident of Bridgewater, radiates such calm that it is hard to believe the extent of her accomplishments.” Almost twenty years later, I second that.

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Come back on JUNE 1st to read how MARY CARROLL MOORE spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
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Laurie Stone in 2022 at age 76

October 1, 2024: Laurie Stone

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Laurie Stone might be the most interesting writer I read. I like what she has paid attention to in her life and the way she allows it to mix with what she is paying attention to now and the way it all spills out of her onto the page. Oldster Magazine, which I love, introduced me to Laurie through her regular feature “Notes on Another New Life.” After that, I read her most recent book, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was published in 2022 and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Now I read her Substack, “Everything is Personal,” which is in its third year, has over 10,000 readers, and which Lit Hub recently named as one of the seven best literary publications on Substack.

In the introduction to Streaming Now, Laurie says that this book marks a shift in the way she writes.

When my sister was dying, I would walk in the city mornings and sit on a bench and write what came to mind, and I got to thinking of these exercises as ‘postcards’ …

I have been writing in this form since then. What is the form? You could see it as a series of ‘meanwhiles.’ Also, as a series of ‘yes, ands’… I have been wondering how to describe what people will read in this book, composed almost entirely of these intimate dispatches that, garnered together, form an atmosphere.

Here’s the bit I think goes straight to the heart of why I love to read her:

[T]his book invites something of the overheard of life and the caught-in-the-act of life, the dashed-off idea that can be exaggerated and raw.”

On July 22, 2020 Laurie remembers a man burning incense on Halsey Street in Brooklyn. It’s a hot day in Hudson, NY, where Laurie is physically located. Beckett’s plays pass through, she bought a pot roast, she and the man she lives with watched Roma on Netflix, and

I found postcards my mother had sent me at camp. She said, “I miss you. I can’t wait for you to come home.” And I could see her standing alone in the back of our little house in Long Beach, staring past the flagstone patio to a giant green hedge.

And, Laurie remembers that her sister died three years ago the day before.

In September 2020, she sees a friend on Zoom. In the bath, “I thought with distaste about abstract nouns such as conflict and abuse, although I like the phrase coined by Sarah Schulman that is also the title of a book she wrote, Conflict Is Not Abuse.” Laurie writes to the friend she saw on Zoom, whom she knew when they were in their thirties… Excerpts don’t do this type of writing justice. The thoughts are so intertwined and particular, and part of their beauty is the way one thing leads to another. There’s more, and then there’s this:

That’s when I slipped back to the party at the giant apartment of Nanette Ranone, how I had marveled at such a place with so many rooms and women living together with lovers and children and conflict. How could there not be conflict, and how could women not want to help each other through our beautiful, awkward lives? I missed the sense of being on the lip of things about to unfold: the large and small details of female existence, how we talk to each other, how we can’t wait to tell each other what we are doing and thinking about, how we take each other’s faces in our hands. Nothing is more interesting, not really, if you wake us suddenly in the middle of the night and say, “Who are you? What happened to you along the way?”

Click on “Everything is Personal” to take a look at Laurie’s Substack. If you’re not familiar with Substack, it’s a new way of creating and distributing literary writing. It’s also a community where readers and writers can interact with each other. If you subscribe to “Everything is Personal,” which I recommend, Laurie’s writing will arrive in your inbox. Here are my top three favorite pieces from the last year.

“Two Mistakes,” from March 17, 2024, begins like this: “I’m thinking about two mistakes I made that seem related. The first is getting married in 1966, when I was nineteen. The second is not finishing my dissertation.” If you got married at nineteen (or twenty like I did), this essay will likely give you back a thought or two you’ve forgotten, as well as some thoughts you’ve never had, and at the least, another chance to look back at your young self with curiosity and compassion. There were so many of us doing the same damn thing.

“Anatomy of a Fall,” March 27, 2024, is about the 2023 French film directed by Justine Triet from a screenplay she co-wrote with Arthur Harari. I’m not even going to try to excerpt anything. Especially if you’re a woman, you just need to click over and read it all.

“The Grandstand and the Arena,” from June 25, 2024, I think about all the time. The subtitle is “Where do you live?” Here are the first two sentences: “In my twenties, I knew a woman who said to me, “You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life.” We were in graduate school at Columbia.” I love the way this essay winds around, all its twists and turns, and again, to appreciate it fully you will have to read it for yourself. But in the excerpt below, you will see, I started to say what Laurie does best, but she does so many things best… In any event, you will see.

That insight or prediction [“You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life”] has been the shadow hanging over my life ever since. Not really and yet maybe really. I just said it. It just came to me, the way everything I write just comes to me unplanned, as the keys click along, as if guided by spirits the way a ouija board is guided, or by some collective unconscious or dybbuk.

Laurie Stone was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, a theater critic for The Nation, and a critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian Prize in Excellence in Criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She also writes for The Paris Review, Evergreen Review, and n + 1 and is the author of six books.

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Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how LAURIE STONE spends her days.

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May 1, 2024: Anjali Enjeti

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For many of us, going from writer to author is a long and winding road. Although The Parted Earth is Anjali Enjeti’s debut novel, it’s not the first book she wrote. In fact, she wrote five before it. But after breaking up with her second agent, she submitted #6 to the wonderful Hub City Press, and they published it in 2021. (“Going Solo: Selling Your Book Without an Agent,” Michael Bourne, Poets & Writers 2022, July-August.)

In the world Anjali created in The Parted Earth, it’s June of 1947, Britain has just announced that after three hundred years in India, they will be leaving and the country will be divided into a mainly Hindu India and a mainly Muslim Pakistan. Trouble is everywhere as sixteen-year-old Deepa, a Hindu, makes her way from school to the medical clinic in New Delhi where her parents work.

Smoke clouded the air. People blanketed the intersection. They carried small sacks and children on their backs. They appeared to be Hindu and Sikh refugees. Delhi’s population was swelling with them. Sri’s rickshaw came to a halt. He hopped off the seat, guided the bars to the side, searched for an opening between them to slip through.

As Hindus fill the town, Muslims flee. They’re no longer safe here and neither are Hindus who help Muslims, like Deepa’s parents. To keep their daughter safe, they send her home, where in her father’s garden, enclosed by a concrete half-wall, everyday life is still peaceful.

Pink and purple streaked the sky. Clouds layered like reams of cotton. The air smelled of freshly laundered clothes, hot oil from vendors selling chaat. On the street, men in trousers and stiff shirts swung briefcases. Stray dogs lapped at puddles. Chickens cornered an empty food stand, pecked at the crumbs on the ground.

But just as trouble made its way into the city, it finds its way into the garden–in the form of a boy who gives Deepa an origami gondola, a Muslim boy named Amir.

He had a strong jaw, a toothy smile, a chest that filled out the creases of his school uniform shirt. Deep noticed him for the first time a few months ago, found herself staring a little too long at his profile in the courtyard the two schools shared.

In Part Two, we catapult to the year 2016, where in Atlanta, Georgia, we meet Shan, Deepa’s granddaughter, who is also in the middle of trouble–a miscarriage and a divorce. And we can’t turn the page to Part Three and the last half of the novel fast enough.

As you’ve already seen above, one of the things Anjali does so well is description. Here we are in Part One at the market.

Deepa and Bala [the cook] navigated through cyclists, small children tugging on their mothers’ saris, carts dripping with yellow, white, red flower garlands. The acidic aroma of chilies infused the air. Food vendors stood in the shade, fanned themselves with newspapers.

These details slow us down, insisting we see the colorful carts, smell the chilies, feel the heat, pay attention to what’s happening. Now take a look at the details in this next paragraph from Part Two, which, without using the word sadness, plop us right down beside it.

The two days after the miscarriage had been a fog. A comforter of used tissues. Half-frunk mugs of herbal tea. The cotton of an Ibuprofen bottle. Plates with peanut butter crackers, slightly burnt grilled cheese, just how she liked it. Except she no longer had an appetite. Her bedsheets stank of tears and sweat. Her hair knotted like a nest against the pillow.

For The Parted Earth, Anjali was the recipient of the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel. Also published in 2021, by the University of Georgia Press, was Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, for which she was the winner of the the gold medal for Best Regional Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Anjali is a fellow Georgian, a fellow former attorney, and a journalist based near Atlanta. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how ANJALI ENJETI spends her days.

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March 1, 2024: Joan Frank

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Juniper Street, Joan Frank’s most recent novel, brings us a time and a place. The narrator’s childhood, a childhood that comes with its own weather system and mood—heavy heat and melancholy. “We dashed from house to car on Juniper Street because the heat closed around you, a kind of paste.” Like the heat, this story, the narrator tells us, “has hung over me—haunting, hounding… I warn you: memory won’t finally sweeten out like a piece of ironed ribbon. I tell it to loosen its grip.”

And like an Anita Brookner character, this narrator doesn’t want anyone to look at her. Nothing to see here. This story is about Mary, she insists, my childhood best friend. And to prove it, she will not even bother us with her name. The novel opens with a letter addressed only to “Dear ___.” But every story about Mary works to loosen a story about the narrator, and most importantly the story of her mother’s death at a young age, the narrator and her younger sister being the ones who could not wake her. “It is possible your mother just wanted some sleep.”

Juniper Street will take you back to childhood days when best friends trailed sisters and brothers and parents and their houses and their rules, which you knew as well as your own. In Mary’s family, there were four children, and their house was loud and chaotic. “When your parents are crazy, you’ve neither time nor emotional capital to ponder it at length…You act to survive… ” In the chapter following details of Mary’s father’s morning-after rants, our narrator, who remains unnamed, tells us, “In my family’s Juniper Street house, by contrast, we did not demonstrate rage.”

Even the food they ate on Juniper Street has something to tell us. About Mary’s family,

All their food thrilled me. Real, unapologetic food. The dense, rich, truck-driver kind advertised by family restaurants and casinos, the kind people with no second thoughts about eating demanded and devoured. It wasn’t that I was not fed at home, but my parents’ relationship to food was complicated, furtive, embattled. My stepmother was grim and controlling about what we ate.

This novel, slim as a book of poetry, was published by the wonderful C&R Press after winning their Fiction Award. Its stunning cover is the painting by John Willis, “Franklin Street Bay Window.”

In her book Because you have to: A Writing Life, which won the ForeWord Reviews Silver Book of the Year Award, Joan makes an interesting point.

Writers can never ignore the perpetual, imbued irony: needing to be left alone so that we can make work which, fundamentally, strives to connect.

Perhaps like the Juniper Street narrator, we can only connect by telling someone else’s story.

Joan also reviews literary fiction and nonfiction for The Washington Post and Boston Globe. Here’s the beginning of her most recent review.

Roxana Robinson’s stunning new novel, “Leaving,” cost me some sleep, and continues to reverberate. A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, it is a tour de force and arguably her finest work yet.

Joan Frank is the author of twelve books published by a myriad of wonderful independent presses. Where You’re All Going: Four Novellas won the Gold Medal, 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. And Joan’s 2017 novel, All the News I Need, won the Juniper Prize for the Novel. Joan is a MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Ragdale Fellow. She lives with her husband in California’s North Bay Area.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how JOAN FRANK spends her days.

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October 1, 2023: Minda Honey

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Of all the cool places where you can find Minda Honey’s writing, my favorite might be her now retired advice column at LEO Weekly, which publishes Louisville, Kentucky’s arts and entertainment news. For three and a half years, you could ask Minda Honey anything. For example, “How can I be a better me after a break-up?” Minda recommended books, podcasts, and distractions. For example, listen to “‘Big Magic’ by Elizabeth Gilbert. This podcast is all about getting unstuck creatively. When you’re serving your most creative self, you really don’t have time for any nonsense in your life.”

Minda’s relationship expertise was hard-earned as is evident in her debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years, which will be published on October 1st, the same day as her essay on how she spends her days. When the memoir opens, Minda is twenty-three and still dating her high school boyfriend. Together they set off from Louisville, where they’d grown up, to Orange County, California to house-sit for her boyfriend’s grandparents.

In May, we loaded up my little red Jetta for our road trip. I decided to leave my socks behind. I wouldn’t need them where we were headed. We didn’t own a GPS unit–they were still a luxury–and neither one of us could read a road atlas. So, we printed directions from MapQuest.com and followed each numbered turn and exit carefully from state to state, pitching crumpled-up sheets of paper into the back seat as we went.

Minda grew up reading Harlequin romances and memorized the formula that led to love. When she was twelve, her parents divorced.

Witnessing the end of my parents’ marriage deepened my subconscious belief that if I wanted happiness, if I wanted stability. If I wanted more than misery in the morning and arguing in the evening, then I needed to live my life by the rules of a love story.

The Heartbreak Years, with its beautiful cover, is the story of a young woman just out of college as she lives through her twenties, date by date and bar by bar, and how she manages to break free of her childhood fantasies in order to become an independent, resilient Black woman in a big world.

…I was never meant to be linear… [M]y progress in life wouldn’t come in a series of checkboxes. I grow like an ocean, swelling with energy. Understanding comes in waves. Then, recedes and returns. Always bringing me back to myself…

As far as family and race, Minda is the daughter of a Black veteran and a Filipino immigrant. “I am a Black woman,” she writes. “Yes, I am Filipino because my mother is Filipino.” But she’s never been to the Phillipines and didn’t grow up in that culture. “I grew up in the South in an all-white neighborhood, and I was the only Black kid in my class until I switched schools in fourth grade.”

Minda always wanted to be a writer, and although Orange County did not provide a permanent love interest, it was here that she first took herself seriously as a writer and joined a writing group. And it was not far from here, at the University of California, Riverside, that she received her MFA in non-fiction creative writing.

For more from Minda, check out her series of essays at Longreads on dating and politics. Her writing has also been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, and Teen Vogue. Essays by Minda can be found in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger” by Seal Press and in the Hub City Press collection, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South.” She is the former director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University and the current editor of Black Joy at Reckon News.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how MINDA HONEY spends her days.

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September 1, 2023: Sari Botton

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Sari Botton was born in 1965 and is Gen-X. I was born in 1957 and am a baby boomer. In her memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself… she writes about family dinners and mean girls and apartment therapy and living in NYC, and while the details of her life differ dramatically from mine, the takeaway is the same. She “came of age at the intersection of two conflicting attitudes: ‘should’ and ‘whatever.'” I did too. And she writes that “she was sidetracked away from” herself and only began to discover and own who she really was in her forties. Yeah, me too.

No one had coerced me into the life I was living. Far from it. I chose almost every detail–had desperately longed for, even campaigned for, many of then, including the genius idea of marrying almost criminally young… As I was embarking on adulthood, I somehow couldn’t see beyond the confining parameters of my little world, or find the courage to consider other possibilities beyond it.

So much of what Sari writes resonates with me. Like this section, from the foreward: “I remembered how little I know about the lives of my grandmothers…I remembered how much I relish reading books by women abut their lives. I remembered that my voice matters. I’m using it now, to take up space, to say, ‘I was here.'”

In the introduction to the memoir, Sari writes that she became a writer because she “felt like a weirdo.” And in fact, the subtitle of this, her first book as author, is Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. And a lot of this memoir does read like confessions, but the confessions of someone who is saying it to claim it, in order to put herself back together.

In “Leaving the Land of Make-Believe,” Sari writes about her parents’ divorce in the 70’s. “I felt split in two, one version of me only able to fit in with my friends on Long Island, the other specifically engineered to fit in in Westchester.”

In “Mean Girls,” she recounts falling out with girls in junior high in the 80’s and not having any friends, which led to her being wary of friendships with girls and women, which she’s still trying to get over in her fifties so she doesn’t have to deal with it in assisted living…

In “Confessions of a Closet Vocalist,” she writes about skipping gym class to sneak home and sing. “Connecting the dots between the creative weirdo I was as a kid and who I honestly am as an adult has been my great project of mid-life.”

In addition to this memoir, Sari is the mastermind behind Oldster Magazine, published over on Substack. Its tagline is “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life.” If you’re fascinated by aging, as I am, then you’ll love reading Oldster. One of its many features is a questionnaire that Sari created–a fixed set of questions that contributors respond to from the vantage point of different ages. Here are a few of the questions: Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind? What has aging given you? Taken away from you? How has getting older affected your sense of yourself, or your identity?

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how SARI BOTTON 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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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

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May 1, 2022: Heath Hardage Lee

Vietnam was the war of my childhood. We watched it on the CBS Evening News. I wore MIA and POW bracelets. In sixth grade, I read a POW autobiography. But I never heard anything about the League of Wives, a group of women whose military husbands were prisoners during the war.

Huge thanks to fellow Davidson College graduate Heath Hardage Lee for telling this story. Her narrative nonfiction book, The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took On the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home, is now out in paperback, and Reese Witherspoon and her production company Hello Sunshine, in partnership with Sony 3000, have optioned the book for a feature film with Heath as executive producer and historical consultant!

During the course of the book, we meet many amazing women. Sybil Stockdale, the founder of the League of Wives, was born in 1924, an era when women had few rights. And, she was a Navy wife, schooled to stay home and stay quiet. Before her husband was shot down in the fall of 1965, she had “found her role as a mother and wife fulfilling.” Jane Denton was not only born in the twenties but also southern. When her husband was shot down in 1965, she was thirty-nine and the mother of seven. She “was determined to follow the U.S. government rules to the letter…terrified of deviating from protocol in any way.” These women, and Louise and Phyllis and Andrea and Helene and Kathleen and more, were led to believe they might endanger the lives of their husbands by speaking out.

To make matters worse, most of the wives needed their missing and imprisoned husbands’ signatures to cash the paychecks the military was writing. And because it was the early sixties, “[m]any could not buy or register a car, create and manage a mortgage, refinance, rent an apartment, or buy a house.” Not only were the women filled with worry for their husbands, but they had major practical problems at home. Sybil urged “the Navy to make the wives a priority, not an afterthought.”

These women played nice until they couldn’t stand it any longer. Then they flew to Washington, over and over again. They organized (with wine!) and, with the military’s help, wrote coded letters to their husbands. The end result was better treatment for the men while they were in prisons in Vietnam and better treatment for the women while they managed houses and children at home.

It’s a fascinating story. The details will amaze you–many of these women kept diaries. And Heath’s writing style is a pleasure to read.

What would later be called “mansplaining” was almost always how men in power communicated with women. It would not even have been remarked upon or noticed.

The truth was, when confronted with the Vietnam POW/MIA scenario and the women the men had left behind, neither Whiz Kids nor Wise Men knew what the hell to do.

This next excerpt begins with President Nixon’s words during a press conference.

“I have the very great honor to present in this room today five of the most courageous women I have had the privilege to meet in my life.” Sybil stood next to him, nodding in approval, dressed again in her favorite bright-pink wool suit. There was no doubt in her mind that she had gotten her money’s worth out of that outfit.

I had no idea that the POW/MIA bracelet fund drive was started in 1969 by two college students, who sold more than five million bracelets and raised tens of thousands of dollars for POW/MIA awareness-building programs. While you wait for the movie, read the book!

In addition to being a historian, Heath is a biographer and a curator. Her first book, Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause, was published in 2014. In 2017, Heath was the Robert J. Dole Curatorial Fellow, and her exhibition entitled The League of Wives: Vietnam POW MIA Advocates & Allies about Vietnam POW MIA wives traveled to museum venues all over the United States. She is currently at work on a biography of Pat Nixon that is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in 2024.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how HEATH HARDAGE LEE spends her days.

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

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December 1, 2021: J. Drew Lanham

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In The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal, Drew writes, “My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” One of the reasons I loved this book was the pleasure of being inside Drew’s head. “What is wildness?” he asks. “To be wild is to be colorful…”

The place J. Drew Lanham writes from is a childhood in Edgefield, South Carolina,

where Cheves Creek snaked foamy and quick and where Daddy taught us to fish. Wetting a line, hoping for a bream to take a wormy hook, calling the cows in from evening pasture; picking butter beans on a sweaty summer’s eve…the belly-filling satisfaction of homegrown food and thirst-slaking coolness of spring water; the awe of a whitetail leaping the blacktop road in a single bound; the wonder of finding an ancient arrowhead in a newly plowed field; the breathtaking beauty of the bluest jay against golden hickory leaves.

His writing lights up the brain with imagery and alliteration.

My memory continues to run like a rabbit around the times spent in the small piedmont place I call home. It weaves and winds through woods and wetlands to reconnect me to my nature-loving roots. That pleasant wandering is reason enough for remembering–and returning–home.

His love of nature gives him a strong sense of the order present in the world.

My heart has moved on to love other people, places, and things like I never thought I could. But that first place I knew as home will always be locked within.

He describes the chapters as “patchwork pieces stitched together by memory,” the book as “the story of an ecosystem–of some land, the lives lived on it, and the dreams that unfolded there.”

To listen to Drew read a short excerpt from the book via Krista Tippett’s On Being, click over to The Home Place.

In 2019, Drew’s essay, “Forever Gone: How bird lives and black lives intertwine under the long shadow of history,” was published in Orion Magazine and then chosen for the The Best American Essays 2019, as one of the twenty best essays of that year.

My office walls are covered with portraits of birds gone past existence. At a glance I can see ivory-billed woodpeckers, Bachman’s warblers, passenger pigeons, heath hens, great auks, and Labrador ducks. It’s an ornithological pantheon of loss. Some Gone Birds, as I call them, especially the ones that would’ve inhabited my southern home place, have cast spells that I can’t shake.

Today, when I lead others out to birdwatch in the remaining fragments of wild places, I cannot help but bring the history of the enslaved, and the landscape we tread upon, into the same head-heart space. I cannot tell stories of birds and of the cypress swamps and old rice fields I frequent in low-country South Carolina without telling the story of those who moved forests, soil, and water through force and greed. There are stories in the soil that have to be plowed up.

Back in 2013, before The Home Place and before “Forever Gone,” Orion Magazine also published his enumeration piece, “9 Rules for the Black Birder.” In lightening speed and with such simplicity and so few words, Drew turns me into the Black birder and I feel the fear. Rule number three:

Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.

In May of 2020, in Vanity Fair, Drew was asked about the “9 Rules.”

I don’t even know why nine rules, why not 10, 13, there could’ve been more. But I got to nine and I sort of exhaled…There are times in writing litany that you feel like you’re not breathing, and you feel like if you take a breath, you’ll lose the thought, you’ll lose the words, you’ll lose the flow. That’s what happened there: I didn’t want to lose the flow. I’ve been asked before about that nine—was there something magical you were thinking, something numerological? No. There were nine. And I didn’t need any more. I wanted in that process to then be able to exhale. And that’s when I did.

You can find Drew’s poetry, along with the “9 Rules,” in his most recent book, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. And while you’re waiting for the book to arrive, click over to listen to Drew read “Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.”

J. Drew Lanham is a poet, essayist, and memoirist who loves birds. He has a PhD in Forest Resources and teaches at Clemson University, where he’s an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher and Certified Wildlife Biologist. This January, he will be teaching a course online for Writing by Writers.

Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how J. DREW LANHAM spends his days.