On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

MAUREEN AITKEN

I am writing every day this month. I am writing in the early morning before the heat descends, before the first stultifying 95 degrees, followed by storms, then the second set of mid-90s temperatures, then the second storm, which takes out the power for one day, then the second day, then into the third. Out comes the generator, and the culling of food gone bad in the refrigerator. I am writing, too, when smoke from the fires of Ontario bear down, cast the sun orange, and make a simple walk impossible.

As is true in all frenetic times, I am using the Pomodoro method (25-minute sessions of focused writing using a timer) for one, two, sometimes three rounds in the day. Some of that writing is note taking about our collective now. Everything happening is so colossal, so large. It’s climate change, politics, war. It’s violence. It’s dismantling education. Pick any day, I’m taking notes to start, not because I plan to use it for anything, but I have to get it out of me and on the page. We have to bear witness to the details.

Then I turn to fiction, particularly works in progress. Because I wrote yesterday, I am picking up the bones, writing within a story, and there is the beauty, not the discipline, but the creative mind space that discipline brings. It offers some relief, just before I read the headline in The Atlantic, “The End of Reading is Here,” and I am back in the dull-witted feeling of oppressive heat.

There is only one day when I almost do not write. I am at Detroit’s Eastern Market, walking toward Shed #5 at the Detroit Festival of Books. I am signing The Patron Saint of Lost Girls for forty-five minutes at the Wayne State University Press table, then walking around to look at books.

The massive Eastern Market has many sheds, and a flurry of events on the weekend. Ahead of me, it looks like a party in front of Shed #5. Hundreds of people are packed in so tightly they can barely move. I hear laughter, and the bright, snappy sound of talking. I am early, so I walk toward the laughter.  As I close in on that section, I see it is another part of the Detroit Festival of Books, with outdoor vendors. It is the self-published writers holding up books with beautiful covers, the second-hand bookstores, the record shop, the publishers, the table for bookmarks and mugs. I’m overwhelmed by the warm energy of people here who are displaying, signing, and talking about books.

I move into Shed #5 with a DJ and his powerful beats at the main entrance. Wall-to-wall tables of booksellers and writers, and library folks talking and laughing for as far as I can see. The view would break open any reader’s heart. It is so crowded I stop five times because of human traffic jams. This day brings in 20,000 readers and 300 vendors. To give you a sense of how massive this is, Pine Knob concert venue nearby only seats 15,000 people. But here, on this day, there is no major performer. Books are the band. Readers are the groupies. The crowd itself is the proof, the beauty, and the main attraction.

It contrasts with one kind of truth published in The Atlantic article. But this is the proof of what I have witnessed in twenty years of teaching writing. Yes, the readership of books has decreased across the board in this country. But a part of our population reads more than ever. Maybe it is a response to book bans. Maybe it is in defiance of “end of reading” headlines. Maybe it is a protest against defunding education. But these are guesses. Here, on this day in Detroit, Michigan, I know one thing.

These days I’m reading to escape the worst kind of noise, the noise of manipulation. If the billionaires are taking over media and forcing a cultural narrative of division and hate, I’m turning more and more to books that offer me wisdom. Reading, like writing, brings camaraderie, stillness, and wonder. Books offer beauty in what feels like an oppressive time.

I get to the WSUP table, look out to the crowd, and know I am, in my reading habits anyway, not alone. The table is hopping. Many are in groups with t-shirts about libraries, their book clubs, or the book associations they work with. Two friends from grade school–grade school!–show up to say hello. Another friend, an amazing writer I’ve known since college, shows up, too. I sign books. Another friend brings me chocolate and a bookmark she made. I meet new readers.

My book sells out, as do many books at the WSUP booth. After the signing we wander around. I buy some books. We get pretzels and lemonade from a food truck vendor and talk on the street crowded with people, bikes, and other trucks.

On this day, I write one sentence, my minimum goal. But the events of the day will give me fuel for writing for all the days that follow. I grew up in Detroit and went to college at Wayne State University. The Detroit I grew up in instilled a quiet defiance that feels right for our time. If trends are against reading, who profits from that narrative? If reading is over, what are 20,000 people doing here?

These are days of volatility, of heat and storms.

But they don’t get our spirits. They don’t get our souls.

Tomorrow, I’ll be writing.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Curious.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• Foster by Claire Keegan.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• A month ago our cat escaped, and I discovered the dedication and passion people have for finding lost animals. About 70 percent of cats are found, and I learned not to give up. It can take two years. We used advice from a YouTube video, followed every step, and our cat, who was gone for three days, was caught within hours. Now I look at the posts where animals are lost and found, and I am hitting all the hearts. 

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By MAUREEN AITKEN

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

TAYYBA KANWAL

Houston has been in full summer thunderstorm mode for weeks: flash floods, flashing lights at intersections, the day gray as steel wool except when the sun has fought through briefly only to turn the city into a mass sauna. Last night I fell asleep to the kwaking of treefrogs and tossed as the old live oak across the street snapped another branch. But I’ve woken to silver light. No sun, but no rain either. This means the slow morning walk around the block with my mother-in-law is on. Which also means, deadheading a fading rose I notice by the front door, throwing together breakfast-on-the-run for our college-going son, then one fried egg for our cats (the only way they will have it—and have it they will), shredded marigolds for our uromastyx and unloading the dishwasher to leave the kitchen pristine for this full household and the dinner to be cooked later this evening.

I share all this to say that when I was younger, I harbored a simmering resentment for everything I was obliged to do other than writing. I fancied the life of an “art monster.” It has taken me a few decades to appreciate the riches of caregiving—how it sustains by giving back love, how it shows I am only one knot in the fabric, and how it makes me more than my art. My writing is different these years, with this understanding.

It is 7:30 am. The pace in the kitchen has been slow, as will be the outdoors walk a little later. The coffee has kicked in. Off to the treadmill for forty-five minutes—today I run through Stone Town, Mozambique, and marvel at the technology and effort put in by who knows whom, that lets me dive into this fantasy. My running playlist is Billie Eilish-heavy lately. Some Collective Soul, some Manchester Orchestra.

I’m walking at a steep incline when I suddenly have an answer to a plot problem that has been tearing at me in my novel-in-progress. And I have a new insight about a character. This will change everything—now I know why he and my protagonist are together, and what she has been quietly fighting inside herself. My novel is in its very early stages. It doesn’t come to me the way my short stories do. It comes to me in scenes. I know the novel’s emotional arc. The plot feels uninteresting relative to all the moments that have been unfurling in my mind. I suppose I will have to trust the plot to fall out. I cool down by scribbling all these flashes in my notebook before the oncoming flood of emails washes them down the metaphorical drain.

A few hours now on the back end of websites and in spreadsheets and of course, email. Amidst all the logistical tasks, I never want to lose sight of what really fills my soul in my work at the journals—the writing we get to bring into the world. I make sure I read some submissions every day, even if only one. Today Submittable will be tackled over lunch. And then I will write, I promise.

I return from lunch to an urgent phone call with the designer for our journal’s website. And a reminder email from my press about edits due before the second print run of my short story collection (woo hoo!). And a second reminder email for a book I’m reviewing. I shouldn’t be checking emails after lunch, but the designer made me do it.

Now I’m anxious because the clock has slipped deeper into the lull of late afternoon—my prime writing time, I have learned. Being a morning person does not mean being a morning writer. My brain is too hot in the morning. That time is for checklists. The afternoons bring a quiet to my mind, take the edge off so that my creative attention can emerge from wherever it’s been cowering. I hang up, having noted all the work-related follow ups in some file to be looked at the next morning. All windows closed except for Scrivener.

Only an hour today. It’s okay—there is a scene that I know how to deepen. Finally, words on the page. You see how slowly this book will be written. But I trust that some words every day will add up. I am not worried because so much of this book is being written as my body is busy elsewhere. I will, shortly, drive my husband to the airport so we can have our first alone time together all day, and look forward to writing more in my head on the drive back. I will then make kababs for dinner for the rest of the folks at home, and again, I trust I will see something as I’m frying, some spark that will have me sneaking for a minute to my notebook as others make their way to the table.

9:00 pm, I sit down to read. Tonight, it will be a very promising submission I’d set aside to reread in the journal queue. And it will be another story in Hasan Dudar’s collection Carryout, a book that particularly thrills me because I first came across Hasan’s work when I was editing at Gulf Coast and the story we published then is in this collection. To be immersed in the rich world Hasan has built up around that story is a wonder. Serendipitously, yesterday I’d also picked up Julia Elliott’s collection Hellions at our local bookstore, seven stories of which first appeared in Conjunctions. People ask if my work at the journals interferes with my own writing. On the contrary, it completes me. It’s going to be a late night though. I have to skim Rachel Cusk’s Second Place again because tomorrow I’m seeing a friend for lunch who has, to my utter delight, fallen as much in love with this book as I have, and we have agreed to break it down together. A writer couldn’t look forward to a better conversation.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Percolation.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Cooking some elaborate multi-step multi-hour dish when I desperately need to be alone.

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By TAYYBA KANWAL
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—Other Writers in the Series—

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On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

JOYCE HINNEFELD

I’ve been thinking about how I spend my days for a lot of days now. At various points I would have sounded pretty bitter in response to this question. But this month is one of my favorites. The days are brighter, and so am I.

In late November 2023, my husband Jim, who’s a good deal older than I am (I’m 64), fell and suffered a brain bleed. He was in the hospital at the time, and he fell after taking a shower during a nursing staff change-over (7 pm—a time I’ve learned to dread in hospitals). I returned from driving home to get his things for what would be, we thought, a simple overnight stay and found him on his hospital room bathroom floor, barely conscious.

He recovered from the brain bleed, maybe. It’s still not clear what’s happened since. After a week in the hospital and two weeks in rehab he came home, and despite endless rounds of physical therapy he never walked without a walker again. Two and a half years later he has dementia, is in a wheelchair, and has been in a memory care facility since the beginning of February. I visit him most afternoons. He has a number of health issues, we still aren’t certain about the source of his dementia, and I could no longer care for him on my own, even with the help of two lovely part-time aides who were here to help me on weekday mornings.

The only other thing I want to say about this situation is that at one point, Jim’s gerontologist told us that basically, when you hit 80, it’s all going to start going downhill (Jim’s now 82). Ever since then I’ve been doing the math, calculating how many good years I have left. It’s not a bad exercise really. So if you’re within counting range of 80, you’re welcome, I guess.

*

Here’s something my friend Rita, who lost her husband to glioblastoma eight years ago, told me when Jim came home from rehab in the dead of winter two and a half years ago, and I was sleeping on a recliner next to the fold-out sofa bed I’d bought for him on the first floor of our house: Start noticing, and appreciating, really small things. I wish I could describe how she said this to me. It was more of a command than a Hallmark-style, self-care bromide. So I’ve been doing that, or trying to, ever since.

It’s our instinct as writers to notice small things, I think, but we can lose that capacity when life is crashing around us like a flood—which, of course, it basically always is now, if you read the news. These days I try to start a round of writing by reading something to slow my pulse and my racing mind, to remind myself to breathe and to notice things. Lately I’ve been reading Larry Levis’s collected poems, Swirl and Vortex. So far I would describe these poems as setting nostalgia and yearning up against loneliness and violence and seeing how everything shakes out. Yesterday I read a poem called “The Double,” and now I’m in love with these lines:

This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.
This poem so like me
it could be my double.

Another way I try to pay attention to small things is by following the advice I read on Rob Walker’s Substack The Art of Noticing: “sky before screens.” This morning I heeded that advice by taking my coffee outside and sitting on a bench and looking up at the sky, then at the blooming irises and honesty plants in the garden, and then at our lovely old ramshackle house that needs a lot of work and that I may not be able to handle for that much longer. And I remembered how very, very fortunate I’ve been.

Before the sky, and the poetry, and some time on a writing project, though, there are the pets to deal with. We have three aging pets—two cats (Frankie, age 18, and Mouse, age 15) and a dog (Rusty, age 14 and a half). They’re all rescues; the cats were chosen by our daughter Anna, who’s now 25 and living in New York, but the dog was my doing. I love them, they’re good company, but they also need care—medications; a couple slow, ambling walks a day for Rusty; endless cleaning up of pet fur and vomit and litter boxes and the like. The pets like me and my company more than they probably should, because I can be pretty cranky with them. When I’m noticing small things, though, and also reading and writing, I tend to slow down and just enjoy their purring and tail-wagging and ceaseless begging for treats.

*

Today I’ll go to visit Jim at lunchtime, because there’s a pre-Memorial Day barbecue and live music at the place where he’s living now. Usually I go after lunch, and if it’s sunny and not too hot, I take him on a couple loops around the pretty grounds, and then we sit for a while and look out at the sky and the trees. Other days we sit in his room and watch a movie or something on YouTube; lately that’s meant Architectural Digest videos about modern homes or the architectural history of New York City, which is where we were both living when we met, and a National Geographic program about desert animals. We hold hands while we sit, and I am learning to simply breathe and enjoy that too. Because I miss the Jim I used to know, the one I fell in love with, but this Jim is sweet and loving too; in that sense, he hasn’t changed.

*

Some evenings I still get myself out of the house. Last night I had a public library board meeting, tomorrow evening I’ll have dinner with some friends. But late this afternoon I’ll get Rusty out and then settle in to watch the storm that’s predicted for our area, and I’ll be glad for the rain, which we need here in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. I’ll check the news to see who will be our Democratic House of Representatives candidate come November, after yesterday’s primary. I’ll fix something simple to eat, and maybe I’ll watch an episode of Hacks or Rooster, because it feels good to laugh, even on my own.

And then, my reward after a full day: time with a book. I just finished Tana French’s The Hunter, which I enjoyed for the intrigue and the depiction of life in a small farming community in the north of Ireland, but mostly for the character of Lena, who “takes an expert’s fine-tuned satisfaction in the fact that here she could distinguish March from April blindfolded, by the quality of the damp earth in its scent . . . .” Now I’m savoring Volume II of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (with thanks to my friend and fellow writer Alix Ohlin for the recommendation), a meditation on time and a master class in the art of noticing.

*

These days I feel lonely and nostalgic, and also lucky and still in love. I’m like those blinking amber streetlights in the Levis poem—getting ready for nightfall and thinking about time in a new way, like the character Tara Selter in On the Calculation of Volume. I’m giving all the articles and videos and algorithmic brouhaha in my Instagram feed about longevity and looking youthful only the quickest glance before I put my phone away, then head for the garden bench or my favorite reading chair. Which is what I’ll do later today, once the storm is over and I’ve opened the windows to the cooler night air.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Necessary.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• There isn’t a single book that I read repeatedly, but I often go back to W.G. Sebald, especially his book The Emigrants. Sebald’s novels move me deeply, maybe because there’s a sense of dislocation and strangeness in his work—something that’s not uncomfortable or unhappy, but instead quite beautiful—that I’ve always found relatable.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• These days I think it’s probably a little strange that I look forward to bringing in the print edition of my local newspaper, The Morning Call, every morning, then scanning the headlines and reading a bit of local news while I have breakfast. It’s actually pretty expensive to subscribe to the print edition, but I like reading a newspaper this way. I also think it’s important to know what’s happening in your local community and region, and I’m grateful that we still have a good, functioning local paper.

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By JOYCE HINNEFELDA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

YAEL VALENCIA ALDANA

In the morning
I have been waking up about seven thirty. I could go back to sleep, but this morning I decide to get up. Miss Spicy, my small black cat, is mewing determinedly on the other side of the door. I open it, and she rushes over my feet and onto my bed, followed by her brother, a larger tabby.

Beyond the open door, the remaining council of cats stares at me, disgruntled. A still larger gray and white tabby, an orange tabby, and the distinguished Russian Blue mix. They only gather like this when my son hasn’t fed them the night before.

I wander out to the kitchen to feed them. I didn’t mean to have five cats. I was content with one. Then my son brought home an orange kitten he found at his high school. Then after my sister died, I inherited the Russian Blue. Then a family of cats appeared in the back yard, led by a frisky black kitten I named Miss Spicy.

Next is fresh espresso, an egg over easy, and toast. The previous day still lingers. I was driving to work when I saw a small brindle dog, alone, limping down the road, one of his hind legs tucked tightly against his stomach.

I wanted to stop and scoop up that dog. Take him to the vet if he needed it. But I couldn’t, I was heading to my new job, and I had to be on time. As I drove, I thought, what has happened to my life. A main life goal was always to stop and help if some animal needed it. And I couldn’t do that. I was heading to work to be a small cog in a larger corporation’s wheel. That isn’t what I wanted or thought I would be doing at this middle age.

Leaning against my kitchen counter, sipping my coffee, I am still frustrated, but a new idea is working through my mind. A year and a half ago, I lost my partner in crime, my son’s father, Geoff. If he were still here, I would have stopped, called him, and told him he had to meet me and get the dog. He would have groaned but come. I would have continued to work, and he would call to let me know what was happening with the dog. Did he go to the vet? Was he putting up lost dog flyers? Now there is no Geoff, and the dog and I are on our own.

I sit down on my couch and survey the living room. It’s like Geoff never left. The room is full of his collectibles accumulated over decades: African masks carved for ceremony, a stylized Aboriginal painting of a turtle, a lacquered mother-of-pearl screen, and a standing world globe he got from who knows where.

My life feels like a wind chime for the dead. Two years ago, we lost my older sister, then Geoff, then early this year, another close friend passed. I stopped asking what was happening. I was numb. Every day, I focused on dealing with what was in front of me. The goal was just to make it through the day.

On my writing desk
Percy, my sister’s former cat, is sitting, resting against a pile of poetry books. I rub his soft head and open Julie Marie Wade’s collection Skirted and read the poem “Ekphrasis.” A beautiful, layered work that is both simple yet knotted with ideas and meaning.

I pick my pen with turquoise ink. I will work on some poems from my new collection, Cruel Childhood, for a while. Until my Zoom meeting in the early afternoon, to talk about my brand-new idea with a friend. I work on a well-deserved poem about Miss Spicy.

Noon
I watch the sun’s shadows shifting into noon sharpness across my desk. I glance at my phone, and it’s twelve minutes after. I’ll make a quick lunch before my Zoom call at twelve thirty. I throw some creamy dill sauce on chicken and udon noodles, my new obsession. (Why didn’t anyone tell me they were this good?)

My friend
Erik pops up on my computer screen with fake Hawaii beach waves rolling behind him.

“Hey, hey, hey.” He smooths his long hair over his shoulder. He looks like a misplaced hippie from the sixties, but here he is in 2026, not looking a day over thirty-five.

He squints at the screen. I can tell he’s reviewing the email I sent him. “I think this could work.” He pauses. “Yeah, an animal shelter that’s also a writers’ retreat. I think people can get into that.”

He’s the friend I trust with my most crazed ideas.

I say, “I mean, writers are always posting about their pets, right? There is built-in love there.”

He says, “I see it. We need to work on a plan to bring this thing together step by step.”

Miss Spicy jumps up on the desk and peeks at the screen as if she approves. I flick my pen between my fingers. “I thought we could start a newsletter about writers and their pets, start gathering a community. Maybe work in some fundraising?”

Erik nods. “It won’t just be you contributing, will it?”

“I talked to a few of my friends. They are willing to write about their cats.”

He says, “Damn girl, you are moving fast.”

“When I have something on my mind, I get moving. What do you think about the name Pens and Pets?

“Sounds good, sounds good,” he replies.

I scratch out some notes in my journal. We talk about next steps, and we end the meeting.

Miss Spicy is now prancing behind my laptop screen.

“What do you think, Miss Spicy? Do you want to work at a writing retreat?” At the sound of her name, she zips into my lap for a cuddle.

In the evening
San Diego is cooler than expected in April. The temperature is hovering in the sixties and cloudy. I throw on a flannel jacket and venture out the door for a walk. I feel like I am just emerging from the shell of grief. I am finally able to think and make plans outside of survival mode.

People are coming home from work, and the street is choked with parked cars. In some places, the road is just wide enough for one car to pass.

I take a deep inhale and finger the face mask in my pocket. Are my allergies acting up? No. I walk on.  Is Pens and Pets really a good name for the sanctuary? Maybe just Geoff’s House? We were all safe at Geoff’s house.

As I walk by the house on the corner where a small tan Chihuahua constantly escapes, I think, What makes you think you can make this work? I repeat a mantra that has served me well: I don’t know how it’s going to work, but it’s going to work. After all, Erik and I started a press from nothing that is still going strong.

I stride past a fifties-era stove with a sign that says “free.” What should I write about for the newsletter? Maybe about the first time I saw Miss Spicy in my backyard by the shed.  Her mother and her two littermates stared at me warily. Miss Spicy was tiny, maybe two and a half months old, the runt of the litter. She held my gaze unafraid as she skipped and strutted in front of her mother. She was supposed to be a tiny stray cat with no hope, but she didn’t know that and didn’t care. She was too brave to notice.

I reach the end of the block and turn toward home, pulling my collar closed. I should make a poster, “Be like Miss Spicy.”

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Erratic. I have tried for years to have a writing routine, aka waking up at five am with a steaming cup of coffee and writing for a few hours. Invariably, I wander off schedule without noticing. I tend to write to deadlines, even if I have to make one up.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• I read Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye almost yearly. It’s the first book I read that inspired me to be a writer. It’s still one of the best books I have ever read. Her writing is poetic, and she breaks many rules. Her protagonist is annoying, complicated, and passive, but it works. Her audacity inspires my own.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• I eat salads without salad dressing, which seems to drive people crazy, especially servers.

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By YAEL VALENCIA ALDANAA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLO

What is This?
I read an article recently about a man who spent years as a monk sitting in front of a blank wall asking himself, “What is this?” The article said this question could change your life. When I tried asking myself, I felt a surprising rush of rapture, reminiscent of being a child let out for recess after the rain, the promise of puddles and a good stomping, and for about ten seconds the thrill swelled inside my chest. Then a deep abyss opened, overwhelming darkness, and I backed away from both the ecstasy and the terror. I returned to the middle, the connective tissue of daily life, and tried not to be fooled by the mundane.

A Different View
I wake and scrawl fragments in my notebook, catching what I can before they dissipate like fog and the dream state is gone. It amazes me how our brains create elaborate narratives while we sleep.

If I were home, I’d lift the shade—to check the weather? Confirm the sun has risen? Reorient myself to the day?

But this morning, my hotel room windows are cloaked with heavy blackout curtains. I heft back a corner to look outside, to witness morning walkers…but my view faces the hotel’s innards. A spiraling rotunda six floors high, carpeted in multi-patterned prints. The only people are those painted on wallpaper stretched along the empty halls. Metallic light fixtures hover like spaceships casting everything a yellowish hue. A shorted bulb three floors down flickers.

Nothing about today is how I usually spend my days; but how I spend my days has brought me here today.

A Debut
I’m in Baltimore for AWP, the national conference that brings together over 10,000 people each year. Four days packed with panels on writing, publishing, teaching, and a massive bookfair with hundreds of exhibitors, literary magazines, and presses, along with author events, readings and receptions throughout the days and nights. It is as nourishing and invigorating as it is overstimulating and draining.

I’ve come to do a panel with four other writers; a group off-site reading; and my first ever book signing at UGA Press’s booth. It feels both exciting and daunting.

Worker Bees
The metallic light fixtures are sculpted like honeycombs. This feels appropriate. Almost spring, I imagine worker bees emerging from hives, flying toward the source of nectar, hoping for—reconnection? Community? A secret key to the enigmatic publishing industry?

Over the past two decades I’ve attended AWP a handful of times in various cities—Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia. But this is my first time as a “published author.” My debut story collection is being released at the conference, and this feels like a small miracle, a constellation of many steadfast years.

The panel’s called “Debuting After Fifty.” It’s scheduled for 9 a.m.

Folders
If I were home, I’d be at my desk in a small walk-in closet turned writing office.

On the left side of my desk, a printed draft of my novel manuscript is covered with notes for revision. On the right side, a vertical file holder separates a dozen current projects in earth-toned folders—sienna, charcoal, caramel, moss; a system I recently created to manage the sprawling overwhelm. The colors, I read, were grounding.

The moss green folder, labeled AWP Panel, I’ve brought with me today.

Nectar
Baltimore Convention Center buzzes and swarms. It’s 8:30 a.m. and the energy is frenetic, lanyard-clad crowds ready to feed and absorb and commune.

A mass clusters in the hall where tactical officers guard the doors. Our assigned room is already packed. They’ve cleared the aisles. A Fire hazard. They have to turn away many who are waiting to attend a panel about debuting after fifty.

Panel—Room 321-322
We talk about the long journeys on our various paths to publication, perseverance, the ups and downs, failures along the way, how with age comes perspective…

During the Q+A, hands shoot up. What we shared seems to have resonated and it feels good to connect.

Poetry on the Steets
If I were home, I’d finish working on novel edits, then head outside to talk to strangers. I’d bring the honey-colored folder labeled Transit Stories with my postcards to hand out at bus stops.

Later, I’d work on the charcoal folder—The Community Poem Project and update entries.

Book Signing
Instead, I ride the crowded escalators down to the bookfair, wander the enormous aisles, browsing literary magazines and books displayed among candy, pens, stickers. I find University of Georgia’s booth where they’ve set up my book signing. A few gracious and generous friends stop by, and I gratefully sign their copies. I sell only one to someone I don’t know. She introduces herself and tells me she read my essay last year in Electric Lit. This feels like magic—how words from my walk-in closet have traveled across time and space and somehow connected us here. Everything swells with meaning, and it feels like this is the point.

Commitment
We have little control over whether our work will slip through the gates. But we do have control over the dedication to the practice, the belief in creating alternate realities by putting words on a page, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. This focus and attention, stepping outside of yourself to inhabit another point of view, imagine another way of being, is a powerful and worthy practice in and of itself. I say something about this during the panel.

3:00 Author Headshot—Room 313
I’m annoyed at myself for thinking it was a good idea to try the sample-sized hair gel. I’ve never worn hair gel before. Everything feels sticky and weird.

This is definitely not how I spend my days.

I bookmark a panel to attend tomorrow—”Sustaining a Private Life in a Public Vocation.”

Dinner
If I were home, I’d be making dinner for my family, helping with homework, loading dishes.

Instead, I commune with writer friends at a restaurant nearby the convention center. One friend is considering rewriting her novel manuscript from the beginning. We all cringe, it’s painful, brave, and yes, we agree, a good idea.

Maybe this is why we gather. This is the nectar. This is what we carry home, sustaining us when we return to the work. That we understand each other and are not alone.

Return
In my hotel room, I Facetime my family, my touchstone. I feel ready to go home, return to my base, my hive, the work, the page.

I read a little before bed. My mind slips off the words, and I let it drift, wandering toward the dream state, readying to create its own story, hoping that when I rise, I’ll catch fragments before they dissolve again into day.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Committed.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• Not a book, but a poem. “Stepping Backward,” by Adrienne Rich. It hangs on my office wall, so I look at it daily. Lines from the poem serve as different epigraphs in three of my novel manuscripts!

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Talking to strangers at bus stops (Transit Stories!) Or asking strangers on the street to write a poem (Poetry on the Streets!)

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By MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLOA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

ERIKA J. SIMPSON

My tarot card for the month is Knight of Swords, reversed. Which represents being restless, unfocused, impulsive, and burnt out. I wish I could say it wasn’t true, but:

Unfocused

It is 8 am on the second day of “Super Fun Spring Break Earth Quake Auntie Niece Week.” I’ve flown in from Denver to babysit my five-year-old niece during her snow-covered spring break while my sister and her husband are at work. The air mattress I’m sleeping on in the basement has deflated a bit beneath me, and the Massachusetts chill is seeping in. My niece will come for me soon, as she’s drawn up a schedule for us that includes starting the day with “love talk” and playing barbies.

Internally, I’m panicking about work.

Bold font emails antagonize my inbox. I need to choose a date to pitch my television show to a potential network. Problem is, I haven’t finished writing the beats of the pilot because my brain keeps freezing. My editor is waiting for me to approve the paperback cover of my memoir. She is using the word imminent. I’m hesitating because the quotes from more successful authors are starting to get bigger than my name and I’m not sure how to give such a vain critique. There’s a notification that my students have turned in their writing assignments for the short story class I teach remotely, so it’s time to grade. And it’s my turn to respond to my agent, who told me to do some revision before we move forward on pitching my short stories for a collection about fatherless girls. Of course I have to spiral out about my writing capabilities instead.

The tarot card said I was full of energy and ideas but unable to actualize any of it. That I want to be involved with everything but am succeeding at nothing… Felt.

I close my laptop without responding to anything.

Restless

Saraya and I write a book in crayon on printer paper. She’s named it “Jane and the Loose of the Ice Cream.” I make her write the title words herself while I spell them slowly out loud between sips of English breakfast tea. While she colors, I respond to an email on my phone. I choose the latest date in March that they offer for the TV pitch and hit send. Anxiety levels fluctuate. I will simply have to finish writing. My niece demands the phone be put down and that I write her story as she tells it to me. I’m inspired by her. But after four sentences, she declares she’s tired of writing, and I find comfort that it’s tough for everyone.

At 11 am we do experiments with snow from the backyard. In a plastic salad container, we add red and blue food coloring and make purple. We sprinkle cocoa puffs on top, and call it casserole. Afterwards we soak our fingers in warm soapy water to get the red stains off and call it Hand Bath. Wet bubbly hands can’t email or write, and I’m thankful for that.

By 2 pm we’re feeling cagey in the house. My sister Samantha suggested earlier that we go to the library. It’s a 30-degree day, which feels like summer after it’s been cold, so we walk the three blocks down thin slivers of sidewalk caged in snow.

On the children’s floor, we pick out a book called Grumpy New Year, since Lunar New Year was yesterday, plus nine other colorful books about fairies and bullies, and family wrestling matches. We venture to adult fiction, and I point out books I own on the Black History Month table. My Sister the Serial Killer. Parable of the Sower. Chain-Gang All-Stars.

I am curious. The minute the librarian at the desk finishes helping someone, I swoop in to ask if they carry This Is Your Mother and try to say my name like it’s a stranger’s. They do! I gasp out loud when I see my yellow spine under library laminate. I admit I’m the author, and the librarian declares, You’re famous! To which my niece immediately responds, “No she’s not.” Girl!!

Maybe not Kpop Demon Hunters famous, but I’m trying, I whisper back.

Burnt out

Tonight I’m doing a reading for San Diego University on zoom, and I didn’t realize that 7 pm PST would equate to 10 pm EST, so I focus some anxious energy on that. My eyelids are already heavy from playing make-believe even after Sister got home from work at 4:30.

It’s 7:30 now. My sister orders Indian food for dinner. I try not to overeat chicken tikki masala. We watch “Mermaid Magic” with my niece while we eat. Samantha and I get up in arms that the mermaids are about to let a Mama whale die to save the baby. But at the last minute, Merlinda the leader (We joke about naming a baby BlackLinda) uses her missing mother’s memory to summon more power from within and raises Mama Whale up to the surface for air. She lives. My sister and I are totally not thinking of our deceased mother and moved emotionally by this children’s show. Totally not.

My niece chooses me for the bedtime story and Sister smiles gleefully. I can’t stop looking at the time. Saraya bounces on her bed while I read. Still bursting with energy while I fight to drum some up for my speaking engagement. After she goes down for bed, (which here means, reads books hidden in the covers by flashlight), I rush downstairs to put on a nice top over comfy leggings and move my air mattress out of camera view.

Impulsive

There are thirty people at the zoom reading. One student has my memoir cover as his background image, and I giggle in delight. Maybe my niece will consider me famous now. The moderator mentions my love of astrology and that we’re both Cancers! I say I wouldn’t mind if they all told me their signs, and they type zodiacs in the chat enthusiastically. My cheeks are warm.

I rap Eat me Out! like my 15-year-old self while reading one chapter then preach in the rhythm of a southern Black Baptist pastor as I read from another. Bringing it home emotionally, I beg God for the cancer not to take my mother’s life. My eyes are red from fighting back tears. The moderator makes everyone go off mute to clap for me, and then the chat lights up with questions.

The water signs (Pisces, Cancer, Scorpio) ask about happy memories of my mother, dealing with emotions while writing. The air signs (Libra, Gemini, Aquarius) ask about process. My favorite question is what character I relate to the most from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” (Little sister Dawn! Hungry for validation, attention, and love.) We end on a high note, everyone waving from their digital boxes.

I’m left grinning in front of a dark laptop screen at 11:40 pm. I might really be a writer, I think to myself, changing into my night shirt and lowering the air mattress back down. I snap a selfie with the vampire teddy my niece lent me to sleep with and vow to answer my editor’s email the next day. Maybe even write.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Frantic. I battle imposter syndrome too often. Then hop from one half-written page to another from a different project. Working on focus every day.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• There’s a tattered copy of Practical Magic on my bookshelf. The dark blue paperback version with the moon and a black cat on the cover. I could exist forever in a world centered around sisters where magic is real in the softest way.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Would my incessant trips to Goodwill count? I go two to four times a week and my main obsession is finding my childhood on the shelves. It’s all about the books. We lost so much to evictions growing up that one original Goosebumps book can lead me to tears. I’ve repurchased paperback X-files books I owned at thirteen, all the media tie-in novels for Angel, Bruce Coville books about six-grade aliens, some Babysitter Little Sister books and even Kicks by Janet Fitch, which got me in trouble in 5th grade for reading the sex scenes to my friends. All these books are nostalgic little time machines. Where Mama is alive and Sister hasn’t gone to college and when things are difficult, I can disappear into adventure. The thrift store brings it all back. I’m owning myself again.

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By ERIKA J. SIMPSONA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

BARBARA BOYLE

Morning…

I am on a treadmill.

No, really. I am in a hotel gym.

Far from the home I left behind in Italy, no longer at home here in San Francisco, in that awkward place between home and not home. I am running, pounding on and on, going nowhere, breathless.

It is a rainy morning, deep in January, with thoughts of faraway Italy tucked away in my heart. It snowed there today, said the neighbors, and I can picture the steady, pristine silence. Faded scenes of my childhood in San Francisco occupy other corners of my heart, comforting and innocent.

On I run.

Out the window, I watch a family trying to take selfies while holding umbrellas in the wind and rain. A cable car comes click click clicking past them, ringing the bell as it crosses the intersection. I admire their determination. A helpful passerby takes the camera from the young family with their umbrellas and takes the photo for them, the old school way. It is a great shot. The little girl is laughing and so are her parents.

The San Francisco I know from my childhood, my city by the bay, is famously grey and foggy and beautiful. But this wet, rainy town with a whipping wind throws me. I am happy that the tourists don’t seem to mind. Downtown is coming back, they say, though homeless still wander 6th street, bent over in fentanyl-fueled gyrations, talking animatedly to the air.

It has a ways to go.

My little town in Italy, Roddino, has no homeless people. No one sleeps on the cobblestone streets. No one goes hungry. Osteria da Gemma routinely serves a hot meal to neighbors who may be in need of one, for whatever reason. Gemma says there is always enough to go around.

I hit the down arrow on the treadmill, slow to a walk and begin to recover. Scribbled notes and pieces of paper are waiting for me in my room, strewn across the unmade bed. It is time to focus on them.

Midday…

Back in room 328, I am propped on the bed, half-packed suitcases piled to one side, computer on my lap. I need to create something, some sketches, a timeline, or perhaps a back story. It is hard to write in the limbo of my room. Colorless. Temporary.

But writing is like that. I cannot always put life aside and focus purely on the craft, or escape to an ideal setting without interruption, the need to prepare dinner, or look after someone besides the characters in my head.

My first book was a memoir, and it was a thrill to write, to see it accepted, published, and sent out into the world. I took my time with it. Writing it felt almost too easy. But in the end, all I had to do was tell what happened. I did not focus on arcs, plots, character development, and all those technical aspects of a novel that I will need in the story before me now.

Now it is daunting. I keep looking at my notebooks, the yellow sticky notes, the messy phrases on scraps of paper and on the backs of envelopes, and hope, trust, that it will all come together at some point. I hope, trust that those scraps of paper are pieces of a puzzle yet to reveal itself.

Probably not today, however.

What I do have is a character I love; the woman who was born in my house in Italy, and died there ninety-eight years later, having never married. Emma was her name.I am fascinated by her. Who was she? What did she experience in her long life? Did she ever fall in love?  Where did her enormous strength and will to survive through two wars come from?

I feel her spirit in the walls and halls of my three-hundred-year-old home and want to imagine the story of her life. If I were there, I could simply put a log on the fire, lie on the couch, and study the stones in our thirty-foot walls, their echoes and whispers revealing tales they have heard for over three hundred years. I know the setting well, because it is where I live. I know how noisy the birds are at dawn in April, where the sun sets in winter and in summer, and how the autumn mists curl over the valleys below.

Before I left, I was able to write the first chapter, or at least a draft of it. How and when this will become a novel keeps me up at night.  Sometimes, as I toss and turn, an entire scene comes to me, almost like a memory, or a piece of film, and I know what my heroine will do and how. In the morning, sometimes, it becomes a paragraph or more. Those are good days. But the road ahead is long.

Finally, sitting quietly in my stark beige room, some thoughts and half-finished phrases come to me. I scrawl them by hand, in blue or red ink:

“Emma adores the power of the tractor she drives and tunes the engine like a skilled mechanic.”

“early one morning in May, she comes into the barn and witnesses the bloody and beautiful birth of a baby goat.”

“an American paratrooper lands in the gully below the house, and her cousin protects him from the enemy; after she tends to his wounds, they fall in love, he goes back to the front, leaving her carrying his child.’

My back begins to ache. I find myself hoping that the rain will let up so I can take a walk outside, away from the scattered scraps and notebooks.

Paragraphs are for another day, I suppose.

Later in the day…

I stride past the hotel bar, football games blaring, glasses clinking, and venture outside to breathe in the cool air.

The rain has become more of a heavy mist, and the sun is just beginning to set as I head up the hill towards Grace Cathedral. The lights from the Nob Hill hotels twinkle reassuringly in the dusk.

Entering the cathedral, I am welcomed by the warmth, the majesty, the hushed beauty. There is a positivity to its architecture and the soaring grandeur of its stained-glass windows. It is an icon in the city that has always stood for equality and unity and love. Amidst the candles and plants in the vestibule, I find origami birds with handwritten messages of hope and kindness. “No more racism.” “No more poverty.” “Peace.”

My heart is in Italy, but my life today is here.

I can only imagine what lies ahead for me, for my book, and for our world in these next few months. I do not know how far along I will be with my story of Emma, or where she will take me. But I do know that while I am here, I need to keep my eyes open, making notes of my journey, all that is around me, and hope to make some sense of it all.

To keep going. To keep writing. To keep running.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Purpose.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• The book I have been keeping by my bed and reading and rereading this past year is Guidance from the Universe by Jill Amy Sager. Aside from that, I love reading and rereading Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and anything by Jane Austen. Old school. (English Lit major!)  

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• My strangest habit might be always counting stairs anytime I go up and down. A therapist would have a field day with that one.

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By BARBARA BOYLEA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

MELISSA PRITCHARD

Since May, I have been my husband’s caregiver. In two days’ time, on December 10th, he will be ninety-three years old. A small family dinner has been planned, gifts and cards bought.

But last night he began to feel ill; by this morning he has a full blown something. A winter cold? RSV? Flu? Covid? Death? He picks death. “I’m not going to the hospital, I’m going to die right here in my bed,” he informs me. In the dim bedroom light, he looks and sounds terrible. For months, we have exchanged morbid jokes about his needing to stay alive not only until his ninety-third birthday, but to live past mine as well. My birthday is the12th. I’ll kill you if you croak on my birthday, I tease.

Since my husband’s hospitalization and ongoing recovery, since last May, my identity as a writer has been hollowed out. I have written nothing in seven months, the longest I have gone without a daily writing practice. Without the rich, alternate life of imagination, I feel increasingly to the side of myself, a soul floating, alien, in space.

To bring the dormant writer back to life, I decide to start from scratch. On the morning before my husband fell ill, I woke at five a.m., made strong coffee, returned to bed, cracked open William Trevor’s Collected Stories and began reverentially, slowly, to read. The blood of recognition, of literary admiration, began to seep back into my limbs. My brain winked, lit up a little. I put down Trevor and opened my oldest writing journal, dated 1985, a compendium of vocabulary words. So many words, their primary and secondary meanings written down. And the handwriting—messy, slanting this way and that, but so thorough and clearly ambitious! Who was this young Midwestern mother, an autodidact aspiring, scholar-like, to a writer’s life?

I opened another of my journals, one in which I had diligently copied quotes, followed by the names of books, even page numbers the quotes had been harvested from. Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Marcel Proust, John Banville, Bachelard, others. “Style!” I scribbled in the margins, “great use of olfactory senses!” or “repetition, interrupted repetition!”  I was clearly committed to the art of writing well.

But this morning, two days before my husband’s ninety-third birthday, I am fixing ginger tea with lemon and honey, taking his temperature with a funny little thermometer I bought years ago in Rome when I was sick with flu. I drag out another blanket from the linen closet, root around for warmer socks, portion out acetaminophen, Vick’s, his daily medicines, turn up the thermostat…

In a day gone worrisome and haywire, I drive to the grocery store to buy ingredients for homemade chicken noodle soup, a bouquet of winter flowers for the birthday (family and dinner plans canceled,) and by the time I get home—surprise! Lazarus, as I sometimes call my husband, is upright, nattily dressed, feeling better, and yes, he would love some soup. I feel a crazy mix of relief (thank God, not dying, saved again!) and exhaustion (more work!) William Trevor’s stories must wait, and my writing life, once so disciplined as to provoke envy in other writers—recedes into the shadows. I wield the Italian thermometer, not a pen, put on glasses to read the fine print on a bottle of saline nasal spray, and chop onions, garlic, carrots and celery, feeling brief sorrow for the poor hen, gone into the pot, chief ingredient for a bland but curative soup.

It has been a slow, insidious identity crisis, born of love for my husband. An invisible, guilty sickness, abandoning my art to care for another. Is tension between art and marriage inevitable? Tension between the artist, driven to create, and the obligations of relationship? Married four times, I used to joke that with the publication of each new book another marriage ended. A joke that never failed to make people laugh, until one day I no longer saw the humor. This fourth husband, my last, somehow broke that awful pattern. His love seems unassailable, subject only to time. Time—his aging—our antagonist.

In some sense, writing fiction is an exercise in self-absorption. I pay trance-like attention to language, become obsessed with story, all of it underwritten with competition, unease, envy, insecurity and sometimes exaltation, the bliss of getting a paragraph, sentence or even the exact word, right. Real joy lies there, not in the world’s validation or lack of it.

Yet any writer requires time and solitude to alchemize experience, memory and imagination into story. Since my husband’s hospitalization and his long, uneven recovery, I have spent much of the past year in doctor’s offices, sitting, waiting, listening to instructions, shopping in grocery stores and pharmacies. I have met wonderful people working in healthcare, nurses, doctors, physical therapists, whose lives are dedicated to helping others. I chat with grocery store and pharmacy clerks, many of whom know me by now. I ask nurses about their families, their challenges, their dreams. I listen to the stories of the electrician or the handyman who comes by to repair broken things in my home. I learn astonishing things every day.

I no longer have the luxury of observing life in a detached manner, storing up details to describe in some story or other. Instead, I am planted deep in the everyday, one, small voice in a choir of humble, remarkable souls. My plumage feels beige; often, I don’t have the energy to write down what I have seen and heard that day. So much of the human life going on around me is quietly courageous and kind, some of it unspeakably sad.

In the early days of feeling I had lost my identity as a writer, I panicked. Who was I, of what use, if I wasn’t writing, keeping to a strict, orderly schedule? If I wasn’t producing and publishing, persistent in my anxious ambition? This year, this month, this morning, I have had to surrender the private ordering of my days, give in to the exigencies of the moment. What I have found is someone who has always been there. Without pen or laptop, without books beside me or a journal open in front of me, with no story in progress, I am still of worth. I am even interesting.

In my office, a black artist’s sketchbook sits on the desk, its pages filled with images, thematic ideas, facts, diagrams, detailed scenes for a novel I’ve been gathering courage to write for over thirty years.

My husband, diagnosed with RSV, will recover. My birthday is in five days. To celebrate, I’ll wake at dawn, carry that black sketchbook and a cup of strong coffee back to bed, go over my notes, turn to the first blank page and find myself again.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Intense. I have no sense of time, feel no physical body when I write.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• There are a few. War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way, Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, anything by Mavis Gallant and Elizabeth Bowen. Rilke. Rumi. Gluck. Shakespeare. Les Miserables.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• A lifelong obsession with spiritualists, mediums and psychics—with what is called “the other side.” My writing sometimes feels channeled or “received,” especially the historical pieces. The relationship between sensuality, sexuality and the mystical expressions of spirit has always obsessed me.

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By MELISSA PRITCHARDA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

CMARIE FUHRMAN

Early Morning

and I rise, dog and man
still asleep beneath heavy covers. It’s early

and late, we’ve fallen back in time,
the body may be grateful for the sleep
but the mind is feeling behind.

There were dreams. Only one
I recall, sitting across from our dead
fathers, my friend and I watched them,
as they watched coming rain.

I write this

as I always have, dream journaling
since I was eight. I start the day in words.

I prioritize. Personal journal, then poetry
read and written and then, a subtle shift
almost imperceptible, into fiction. For it is

November, and still NaNoWriMo
for a few friends and me. Time passes

almost magically
when I am writing.

(The coming and goings of the young pup
–outside, eat, back to bed– and the furloughed
partner shuttered out

by music cushioning my ears.)
Then I walk,
brief, but Oh, fall! I need my eyes to feed
on your colors as much as my feet to swish
leaves and ideas and dusty thoughts from other, darker days.

If I am not moving, if I am not reading: I am not writing or thriving or happy.

Late morning

And there are
the errands of
any day.

This one is to
swap

summer tires
for winter studded.

The Salmon River
Mountains know snow,

snow aplenty.

Though today
the ground is
bare, save

for leaves

in which stand
two fawns
and one, this
year’s buck,
trailing a thin

wire.

Its tightening
roughs
the thick fur
of his lean neck.

I call Idaho
fish and
game,

and hope.

Hope being
the leash

which pulls
me, too,

through days
of calling

and seeking

and giving

help.

(Toni Morrison wrote about a space in town
where she could do her writing. I, too,
need space and have a rented office for work.
And there I do, looking out into fir, into pine,
an occasional Chickadee pair flitting between
limbs and just beyond, Aspen, and just beyond,
A mercury thick, slate gray lake, quiet now
with summer past and summer sojourners
having moved on, too.)

I admit my favorite weather: gray.
Summer’s skies open to a mayhem,
human and greater than—buzzing and flapping,
slithering and swimming, scurrying and loud—
now the clouds tuck this small town in.
Now we feel again like a community again, us
and Deer and flitting, staying Chickadee.
Migrations of Kokanee and tourists made,
even the church in the center of town seems possible.
Its spire nearly touching the foundation
of the promises made therein.

Midday

After the EMAILS and snail mails, virtual MEETINGS and TEAMS-ing and
course building and occasional fretting, fear for the future of liberal arts,
opportunities for students who now I offer my experience to in replies and love
for their craft and as, too, I was given, as if I am passing on

grandfathers
china

or grandmothers
.410—

objects for survival

and beauty

and then again

I walk
into

Late Afternoon

Coffee (it is the PNW, but they misspell my name.
No, there is no dash or space or apostrophe
nor “e”, no “ce”, and I take a picture of this graffiti
by another)

Thrift Store (I volunteer here often, inspired
by the work and donations and real
of my friends who labor here for dogs
and cats and people. Living here is hard
for even the middle)

Library (I have a book for them, a novel in verse
and there are, “See you Thursday’s” from librarians
and I will return then, for community)

More Deer (they blend best in autumn, their hides
hiding them, their antlers the bare branches
of Aspen and Alder and yet, even lying
prone, they are mountain sure, awe inspiring
a little unbelievable and never boring.)

More of the work that pays
insurance: emailmeetingsTeamchatsemailwebsiteemailpostingreplying
s o m a n y w o r d s g i v e n t o t h e e t h e r! !

Evening

Home
dog smiles
dog kisses
warm fire
partner squeezes
crockpot taco soup
silly vampire show
a little sewing
tug toy
tending for the morrow
tending to body
reading

Night

and before I reach to extinguish the light, so the light
from the big Beaver Moon can come in
I think again of the young buck trailing wire, my hand
strokes my neck, my throat, and feeling nothing feels something
still, and I suppose, (before I slip into the seam of a river
that will dream me another rain or my father again,)
that the bucks and does, and the church and the low
clouds, and the thrift store backdoor, and the sound
of friends voices therein, and again, at the library and the way
the gray held all of us together, held our smiles and frets,
our fears and dreams within arm’s reach—and made brighter
golden Larch, golden Aspen, orange willow, brown grass—
made brighter, too, the sound of my footsteps in drying
leaves, and imprinted the eyes of the young buck in me
perked my ears to listen for the conservation officer’s rifle, hoping
for a dart gun and knowing that all of them: buck and doe and friends and trees
and even the steeple of the church, where only once
have I gone, and only then to sing christmas songs,
will find their way into an office in my memory, and hold
themselves there and become part of the strange name
scribbled upon a cup that I’ve taken as my own and will
on a day, when clouds again tuck low, rise again
and with hope, trail wire not from soft necks
but through them
through story,
like the gentle
single-threaded
embroidery
of a day.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Living.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• Goodbye to a River by John Graves.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• It’s only strange to someone else, no? I love all my habits, chief among them, however, is my habit of writing down my dreams and analyzing them. It’s not strange, but unique that I have 43 years of dream journals.

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By CMARIE FUHRMAN

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—Other Writers in the Series—

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

DANIEL TAM-CLAIBORNE

For nearly a year, the only appreciable writing I’ve been able to muster has been in the form of emails. Work emails, certainly, but in the months leading up to my debut novel’s publication in May and since, an ever-expanding litany of personal emails. Emails to friends, acquaintances, booksellers, influencers—all bearing the same beseeching plea for promotion. Today, then, felt like its natural outgrowth. I’d been asked—or perhaps, more accurately, I’d goaded my former colleague into inviting me—to give a reading to a group of current students at my alma mater.

My day technically began in New York, where, at midnight, I was piqued by the smell of street tacos and momos on the way back to my hotel in Long Island City. The streets were bustling, full of as much noise and activity as I could expect from Seattle during rush hour. Though I was born in New York and lived there my whole life until I left for college, the feeling of “returning” to the city over the last near-decade that I’ve been living on the West Coast has been one of bafflement. Who were all these people out at midnight on a Sunday? Didn’t they have somewhere else to be? And, invariably, why was I not one of them?

As a grad student at Yale in the 2010s, there was a sense of anticipation every weekend I took the train into Grand Central. New York was a retreat, a place to escape the affectations and provincialities of New Haven. But it was also deeply familiar. Pulling into Grand Central on Friday night felt like baptism, like rediscovering myself. As long as I visited enough, I could indulge in the fantasy that I was still a part of the city, and that life ceased to exist there without me in it.

This morning I found myself on the Metro North yet again. I stared out the window at the small bodies of water and derelict industrial sites, the suburban outcroppings that formed around each metro station. Had they always been there or had I never paid attention before? My seatmate was assiduously checking email while simultaneously answering work Slacks for the entire two-hour journey. She wore pleated pants, a burgundy scarf, and a scent I could only describe as New England WASP.

When I landed at New Haven’s Union Station, I took a familiar, if circuitous route up to campus, each street corner and storefront seemingly imbued with a different memory. My old apartment building. The Asian grocery store. The IKEA where I sometimes biked just for a cinnamon roll. The arcade bar where I threw up three times on a single New Year’s Eve (each, mind you, in the perfect center of the toilet), and still rallied enough to have a glass of champagne at midnight.

It was also, naturally, the site of many promising but ultimately failed romances. As I stood facing a restaurant where I’d had the talk, I began to think about of all the missed connections, the people I’d never have the chance to see again. The pervasive feeling that this city was a part of me, and then, the fear that there would come a time, months or years from now—had it happened already?—where I could no longer claim it as my own.

It had been years since K and I had so much as exchanged a message, but I snapped a photo of the repertory theater where we had once seen a play together—she was a drama major—with a short note: “Just landed in New Haven and thought of you. Hope you’re well!”

To my surprise, she responded immediately. Yes, she still lived in the area, about a thirty-minute drive away. And: was I free for coffee?

K and I dated briefly, the kind of romance that was precipitated by leaving notes under each other’s doors. As a budding poet, I had tried to regale her with lines from Rumi and Lee and Vuong. The night I first worked up the courage to kiss her, we had been watching Little Nemo on her extra-long twin mattress. When we decided to part ways, it was amicable, a reflection I attributed to wanting different things in life more than any shared enmity.

The café where we met sold baklava and date cookies, tiny bird’s nests spackled with pistachio. K entered with a stroller, her three-and-a-half-month-old daughter in tow.

“Surprise,” she said, ringing her arms around my neck. Her hair was still as wild and beautiful as I remembered, though—like mine—now flecked with gray. Her laugh was piercing and bright. There was still the same endearing gap between two of her lower teeth.

She’d met her husband during the pandemic, she explained. He’s eight years older and so they had to make up for lost time. And didn’t she see somewhere that I had a daughter too? I showed her a photo of my three-and-a-half-year-old grinning from the top of a mountain.

“Are you still in Seattle?” she asked. For all my griping about no longer living in New Haven, the irony, of course, is that you appreciate somewhere most only once you’ve left.

We talked for an hour and, afterwards, K accompanied me to the book talk. She managed to make it through the reading and conversation and Q&A, her daughter intermittently napping and nursing. When it was over, I walked with her to her car.

If there was a silver lining about moving to Seattle it was this: live somewhere long enough, and everything gets imbued with meaning. In New Haven, every place, every experience, and every moment had become its own memory. Seattle was a blank slate of stories where nothing yet had been written. I appreciate now the uncertainty of having to start out somewhere new, the challenge of making a place your own. I thought about the breakup with K and how, months later, I met the woman I would later marry. Sometimes we need to write our own endings, if only so that new beginnings are possible.

It was late and the wind had picked up. I stood, unmoving, on the corner, trying to take in every last detail: crooked sidewalks, tall oaks in metal planters, the streetlamps that framed the block like a noir film.

“Let’s not let another eight years pass next time,” K said, as she buckled her daughter into the car seat.

“I won’t,” I said, wanting to believe that this part of my life could remain with me too.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Erratic. 

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• I usually can’t bear the thought of re-reading a book because there are so many in my TBR, but I do watch the movie Love Actually with my wife every December.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• I don’t drink coffee or tea! But I love hot water in the winter.

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By DANIEL TAM-CLAIBORNE

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—Other Writers in the Series—