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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
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how they spend the day.

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February 1, 2024: T Kira Madden

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If you’re interested in the different selves we’ve been or in childhoods and how they turn into adulthoods or in families and truth, and you haven’t yet read Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden’s debut memoir published in 2019, add it to your list. After an author’s note and a preface, here’s the first sentence, “My mother rescued a mannequin from the J.C. Penney dump when I was two years old.” T Kira (no period) describes her mother as a “Chinese, Hawaiian, pocketknife of a woman.” Although the first piece is called “Uncle Nuke,” which is what T Kira calls the mannequin, the takeaway is that T Kira and her mother are wrapped in their own special world. Here, at the beginning, the author asks us to remember

[A]ll the reasons she [her mother] did anything–the wrong things, the strange things, the dangerous, the sublime–the reasons she does any of it, still, is to protect me.

What I love almost as much as the memoir is the story of how this book came to exist in the world–that T Kira had planned on writing a novel, but that after her father died, it was these stories that had to be told. The memoir rose up out of loss (“Just last week I had a father”). And it was written as an offering to others. As stated in the Acknowledgements, “because once, a little girl needed more stories like her own.”

When T Kira was nine years old, her grandmother gave her a typewriter and told her to write about her life. Instead, T Kira wrote about a girl named Joni Baloney who was just like her except she was “white and athletic and people tend to grope her.” After recounting a few of Joni’s exploits, T Kira added, “I can do things like that when I write–pluck any thread of want and create a whole world.” The pages of this memoir are steeped in want–in need and in desire. And each essay creates a whole world.

The writing is extraordinary–sharp sentences, descriptions that are fresh and alive, and honesty and heart in equal measure. Here’s one of those sentences. “The day stings against my arms.” And one of those descriptions, “fingers like ginger root.” Take a look at this sentence, one of my favorites for all it does.

[My father’s] eyes are wet and wide in that orange glow of night-road, that perfect combination of street lamp and moonlight that casts a terrific sadness, or wildness, on any face in its spell.

This next example shows the honesty and heart I was talking about. It comes after a middle school dance where the date turned out not to be a date, and it begins with her mother’s response, “To hell with middle school dances. We”ll have our own dance.”

The three of us dance in a circle, facing one another on the gum-bald carpet, snapping our fingers, throwing the dice. My father lets me stand on his feet as he shuffles and grooves. He holds me tight. He dips my body backward till the room tips over. He says, One day, you won’t even remember this night ever was.

A few years later, a wildly different situation but that same honesty and heart.

By nine p.m., almost a hundred people arrive at our Porn Star Party. Public and private school kids, a couple of dealers we know, the older boyfriends of girls in my grade… Harley, Nelle, and I take every shot we’re given… We lie down on my pool table and begin to kiss one another while the boys and men cheer us on.
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Cousin Cindy once asked me, What do you think love really is?
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I think it’s being able to kiss someone whenever you want, I said.
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I can kiss Nelle whenever I want. And I do.

There’s more, so much more. The memoir is also a story of addiction and trauma and family secrets…

If we’re lucky, we use our childhood and adolescence to try on different versions of our self. If we’re lucky, we get closer and closer to who we really are.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir, and is now in development as a feature film.

T Kira Māhealani Madden is a Chinese, Kānaka Maoli writer, photographer, and amateur magician. Her gorgeous wedding was profiled in The New York Times. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She’s also the founding editor of the journal No Tokens. Her debut novel, Whidbey, is forthcoming with Mariner/HarperCollins.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how T KIRA MADDEN spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
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Photo Credit: David E. Lawrence

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June 1, 2023: Marjan Kamali

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Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop opens in 2013, in New England, in Roya and Walter’s kitchen. Each is seventy-seven, and they have been married a long time. Walter eats a hard-boiled egg for breakfast almost every day. Roya tells us that’s because he’s Walter. I’m such a nut for marriage stories that I was in. Give me more dish-drying and eggs.

Not to be. In Chapter Two we go back to 1953, to Tehran, to the summer Roya is seventeen, and to the breakfast table where she eats not eggs, but fresh naan with feta cheese and homemade sour cherry jam. And before the chapter is over, we are in the Stationery Shop.

Roya loved running her fingers over tablets of smooth pages in that shop. She loved the boxes of pencils that smelled like lead and promised knowledge. She could spend an entire afternoon just looking at fountain pens and ink bottles or flipping through books that spoke of poetry and love and loss.

A few moments later,

Roya nodded and was reaching into her purse when the bell above the shop door chimed. The door burst open, letting in shouts from the streets and a huge gust of wind. The pages of Rumi ruffled in her hand. A boy her age entered the store in a hurry… He walked in whistling a tune that was wistful and filled with longing.

And then he’s gone. “Who was that?” Roya asks. “That is the boy who wants to change the world,” Mr. Fakhri, the owner of the shop, tells her. And the big questions become how did Roya get from this boy in Tehran to Walter in New England and how (and why) do our lives turn out the way they do.

Marjan’s writing is beautiful and full of details that place the reader in a scene—pamphlets with Prime Minister Mossadegh’s face scattered on the ground, elephant’s ear pastries, pink-cushioned chairs, green-feathered hats, the Cinema Metropole on Lalehzar Street. About a third of the way in, Roya has occasion to receive a letter from the boy who would change the world, who is called Bahman and who smells like the wind. The passage below is a perfect example of what the writer Mary Gordon calls “saturating a moment.”

She ran her fingers across the letter, willing his scent to rise from the paper, wanting part of him to sink through the pads of her fingers. She had only seen his handwriting once before, the inscription he’d written inside the notebook he’d given her as a gift for the new year. Seeing his handwriting again felt like holding a piece of him. In each stroke, with each curve and dip of the letters on the page, she could feel him. And when she read the letter over and over and over again, his voice was inside her.

I’m not going to give the story away, but I will tell you that I never thought about Walter again…

The Stationery Shop is a big, thick, love story set amidst the 1953 Iranian coup d’état. You will also meet Zari, Roya’s younger sister, and Mrs Aslan, Bahman’s mother. There will be khoresh stews. I kept my pen in the book as a bookmark so I would be ready to underline. I couldn’t wait to get back to the story each day.

Come back on JUNE 1st to read how MARJAN KAMALI spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
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Cassandra and me at Writing by Writers Boot Camp in November

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February 1, 2023: Cassandra Lane

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When she was eleven years old, Cassandra Lane told her mother she wanted to be a writer–but that she wanted to be “behind the scenes.” Well, she’s not behind the scenes anymore. Her debut memoir, We Are Bridges, was published in April of 2021 by Feminist Press. In it, she writes

Memory is a woman. Subtle, haunting, devastating. Right even when she is wrong.

We Are Bridges begins with the cover illustration by Krystal Quiles of what I imagine to be memories we hold inside us. When we open the book, we’re reading a dream and a reality. Or as Cassandra writes, “a romance and a horror, a memoir and a fiction–forged out of what is known and what is unknown.”

This is a story of family and memory—of what Cassandra remembers and of what other family members remember, and tell her. And when memory fails, imagination takes over. And yes, let it take over now before another layer is forgotten and while some facts exist to light its way.

When I dream of Mary, she is a young girl, not the old woman I once knew.

When Cassandra first felt the need to discover more about her family, she was in her early thirties attending a family reunion in her hometown. She wanted 

to erase the distance between us, the years, the laws of physics and of man—just papery things really… Scientists say we are not matter but energy. A sheet of paper turns out to be a magic carpet after all, so I hop on, riding its electric waves through time.

Here was her starting point: Her great-grandfather Burt Bridges was lynched in 1904. Her great-grandmother Mary Magdalene Magee (McGee) was pregnant with her grandfather at the time.

Five years after that family reunion, when Cassandra became pregnant—something she’d sworn at sixteen she would never be—with a redemptive symmetry, she began to write the story of her great-grandparents. She wanted to be able to say who their family was and how it came into being. 

Reading the memoir, we learn that Cassandra’s mother had five children and not enough money, and that when Cassandra became pregnant at just shy of her seventeenth birthday, she had an abortion. One of the things I love about this book is how well language is able to capture the family ties. Take a look at this sentence where you can feel the connections in the words themselves.

And so I, her quietly obstinate firstborn, held her just-out-of-the-womb lastborn mere weeks after I had aborted what would have been her firstborn grandchild.

This memoir takes the only available facts and weaves a story that’s the closest thing to truth that exists. As Martha Anne Toll writes for NPR, “With this debut volume, Lane has written Burt Bridges into history. We Are Bridges makes a stunning contribution to what must become our collective memory.” We Are Bridges won the 2020 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize.

Cassandra was born and raised in Louisiana. In college she studied journalism, and when she told her mother she was going to be a journalist, her mother said, “How are you going to be a journalist? You don’t… talk to people.” She became the first Black and first woman editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper. In 2001, she moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles to get her MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University. After graduating, she taught journalism, literature, and composition at high schools in Highland Park and South L.A. She has also worked as a college applications advisor, senior writer for an education non-profit, and community relations manager for the Dodgers. She is currently editor in chief of L.A. Parent magazine. In 2017, her story on motherhood was chosen as part of the New York Times’s series Conception: Six Stories of Becoming a Mother.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how CASSANDRA LANE spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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January 1, 2023: Alexandra Zapruder

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Abraham Zapruder was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant and the owner of Jennifer Juniors, a Dallas company that made inexpensive copies of designer dresses. On November 22nd, 1963, the presidential motorcade would pass in front of his store. He’d thought about taking his home movie camera to work that day to record the event, but in the end he decided not to. His assistant encouraged him to go back and get it, which of course he did.

Alexandra Zapruder never knew her grandfather Abe. He died when she was only ten months old. She writes, “it occurred to me that there was an access route to my grandfather through the Zapruder film and the assassination. I understood, if vaguely, that his experience held clues about Abe Zapruder, clues no one else would notice or look for…”

On November 22, 1963, I was only six years old, but on that day, I added a whole new cluster of phrases to my vocabulary–including the Texas School Book Depository, the grassy knoll, and the Zapruder film. I was excited to read Twenty-Six Seconds–the big, thick book Alexandra Zapruder wrote about her grandfather and his film with the subtitle A Personal History of the Zapruder Film.

As the title and subtitle suggest, the book is both fact-based and family-rich. It includes documentary details and reference notes on the possession and ownership of the film as well as the feelings of the Zapruder family members for Abe and about this film that changed all their lives, including the feelings of the author as she discovers information in connection with the writing of this book–a significant undertaking that required research into the Kennedy assassination as well as the collection and review of family documents.

On that Friday in November of 1963, when Abe got back to work with the camera, to fill up the remaining minutes on side A of the reel (which was full of home movies), he filmed his assistant. He wanted the motorcade to be the first thing on side B. The film was double 8mm color film, which was difficult to process. Later that day, someone had the presence of mind to contact Kodak, who opened a lab just blocks from Love Field at approximately the same time Lyndon Johnson was being sworn in on Air Force One as the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

Twenty-Six Seconds is a fascinating read for those who were alive at the time and for those interested in history. I didn’t know until reading the book that the film showed the president was dead before arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital (also part of the vocabulary cluster of that day).

Alex started out as a member of the founding staff of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where she became interested in the ways that young people document their lives and how these records can be preserved. So it makes perfect sense that in 2020, in partnership with the Educators Institute for Human Rights, Alex launched a project called Dispatches from Quarantine, which gave teenagers a way to document their experiences during the Covid-19 Pandemic. You can visit an online gallery to see their contributions in prose, poetry, photography, art, and song.

Alex’s first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, published in 2002 and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, is a collection of diaries written by young people during the Holocaust. After its publication, she wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on the book, which aired on MTV in May 2005 and was nominated for two Emmy awards. She has also been published in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian, and The New York Times.

Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
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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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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.

Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.
–David Bowie

This is sixty.

60 is more freedom than I’ve ever had. Really. It’s awesome.

60 is not just feeling the same but feeling better than I have in years.

60 is thinner skin–actually not metaphorically.

60 is loving my new MacBook Pro with touchbar a little too much.

60 is not yet having used age as a reason I can’t do something.

60 is wanting to do just as many things as I wanted to do at 15.

60 is wondering why, still, I’m preoccupied with freedom.

60 is starting to think hashtag before pound.

60 is having lived 21,900 days. Which doesn’t seem like so many. If anyone had asked me I would have guessed a person lived hundreds of thousands of days. But then math is not my strong suit.

60 is my own small house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the very tip of Cape Cod, as far as you can go without falling into the sea.

60 is wearing peace sign earrings and a nevertheless she resisted bracelet.

60 is having not as many days as I have lived still to live.

60 is googling life expectancy. Did you know the longer you live the more years they give you?

60 is 4 adult children—all off on their own—plus a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, and girlfriends. And liking them ALL.

60 is four grandchildren. But we are not your mothers’ grandmothers; we are grandmothers who facetime from airplanes.

60 is, as Cal says, one day older than I was yesterday.

60 is walking in the women’s march.

60 is finally liking yoga.

60 is liking socks.

60 is contributing to the ACLU on a monthly basis.

60 is taking 3 prescriptions–for blood pressure, for eyes, and  for hypothyroidism.

60 is still loving to travel–all the movement and that moment the wheels lift off the ground.

60 is strength training twice a week.

60 is feeling happy.

60 is resisting.

60 is still wanting adventure.

60 is almost never wearing makeup.

60 is finally, finally finding clothes that are comfortable, that look good on me, and that look like me–black leggings, a short little black skirt, a long top, and these kick-ass black ankle boots. That is, when I wear something other than black exercise pants.

60 is more adverbs.

60 is 32 years of marriage and still liking each other. He still makes me laugh. 

60 is being born in 1957, the same year as Caroline Kennedy and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

60 is remembering each of the years and understanding that they add up to 60, that they add up to me.

60 is listening to my body instead of telling my body what to do. It’s resting instead of pushing. It’s eating more vegetables, doing qigong energy movements, and having my body say finally. It’s being amazed as, after a year of trying, the weight just falls off.

60 is listening to Sarah Jaffe’s Clementine, The Killer’s Human, the Branches Darlin’, and Roo Panes’ I Was Here…

60 is preparing to do one last revision on novel #4.

60 is knowing the correct form is to put the names of songs in quotes but liking the way they look in italics better.

60 is adding coconut oil, cinnamon, and turmeric to my coffee.

60 is using the word still a lot.

60 is 6 decades on this planet.

60 is gratitude for each of those days in each of those years.

60 is not yet 70 or 80 or 90. It’s not yet 100.

60 is spending a month in my small house on the water.

60 is being excited about the year ahead and the rest of the journey.

~

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

–Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

THIS IS 60

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this was 58

this was 57

Continued appreciation to Lindsey Mead for the inspiration.

Here are a few I remembered after the fact–being a Brownie leader, spending every New Year’s Eve until graduate school cooking a fancy meal with friends, sending Bobby to Harlem when I was trying to send him to the Threepenny Opera, a conversation with Peyton Manning that let me know the charm of my youth was gone, watching Heroes on Monday nights from 2006-2010, Friday Night Lights on Tuesday nights from 2006-2011, Glee on Tuesdays/Sundays from 2009-2015, Parenthood from 2010-2015, binge watching House of Cards in 2013.

Last night I discovered this line in Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time–Life Beyond Sixty:
What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.

2016: Exhausted from the holidays, I arrive in Provincetown in a drenching rain storm. By the time I unload my suitcase and the groceries from the rental into the house behind the wharf house (which is closed for January and February), I’m drenched and standing in a puddle. The next day I wake up with fever. In a few days, the #1truething project is not only over but has worked its magic. At the end of 365 days, I’m now out of whatever hole I’d gotten myself into. I’ve recovered who I was and who I am. And more enormous good news–after months of looking for a house in Provincetown that I love as much as the wharf house, I’ve persuaded the owner of the wharf house to sell it. You just rent it, I said. I love it. But lots of potential road blocks–including a mortgage. My new Massachusetts lawyer and I become best friends. Still, I stay sick for weeks and weeks. I gain 10 pounds. At my six months’ endocrinology checkup in late March, my blood work shows hypothyroidism. Finally an answer. Mid-April I start taking a pill every morning and begin to feel better. I spend my birthday at AWP in LA. The week after that is Writing by Writers in Boulder. And the week after that, I close on the house. In May we add a new WxW event in the Methow Valley of Washington State. At the Seattle airport I pick up Ron Carlson and Andre Dubus, great teachers and WxW regulars, and we start the 5-hour drive west. Sam graduates from college, and even Jack flies in from LA for the weekend event. I rent my little house to pay the mortgage. Family vacation in Florida. Visits to and from the kids, who are now 35, 29, 27, 23–and living in Texas, Alabama, California, and North Carolina. I put a Stronger Together bumper sticker on my Prius. In NY, Cal and I stay at the Park Lane, where they upgrade us to a huge suite on the 46th floor with a mirror-lined dressing room and a living room and a dining room and a piano and so many closets I can’t count, and stairs to the outside, where we can walk all the way around the building. A once-in-a-lifetime experience. Amidst woodland creatures, Ro turns one and we go to Birmingham for the party. I hang a Hillary flag on my house. October is Tomales Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a major clean-out of my closet. After months of worry and posting and talking, it looks as if Hillary will win. I vote and settle in to watch the first woman elected president. But the results come in with too much red. I don’t leave the TV. When she concedes, I burst into tears. The next morning I pack up the Hillary dolls I’d bought for each of the little ones, but thankfully Kathleen persuades me to give them out anyway. The resistance begins. A few days later, WxW is in Lake Tahoe for boot camp. In December, my mother falls, and my parents, now 83, need even more help. After five years, my agent and I decide to part ways. 34 books this year–my favorite is easy, Patti Smith’s M Train. My playlist for the year includes 51 songs–Anthem Lights’ Wildest Dreams, Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine, Natalie Taylor’s Latch, Emily Barker’s Nostalgia, Ryn Weaver’s Traveling Song…And 107 days in Provincetown, with a record stay in the fall of 19 days. It goes so fast.

1 day to 60

 ~

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

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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2015: Back in Provincetown, I sit still and stare at the water. The last couple of years, all my writing efforts have poured into this current novel and apparently all my self-worth as well. When I see people, they ask if they can buy one of my books yet. I lose my voice. I slip further away from me. The true me. What matters. I come up with a plan to recover myself. I will post #1truething about me every day for a year. When I’m in Georgia, I spend Wednesdays in Atlanta visiting and helping my parents. I begin to revise my novel again, but the one true thing project takes precedence and that feels right. In March I wake up one morning not believing my eyes–huge pieces of sea ice/ice floes/icebergs cover the Provincetown harbor. My hair is thinning and my nails are breaking. My endocrinologist says my numbers are fine. I cut my hair short and turn it red. Columbus is coming into its own with the longest urban whitewater course in the U.S. and a zipline across the Chattahoochee. For my birthday I step off the platform into nothingness and slide across a cable form Georgia to Alabama. Hillary Clinton will run for president. Bobby and Claire are expecting a baby! A couple of years ago I started going through our photos and digitalizing them. No real progress until now when I decide to tackle a year at a time and to finish by December. In addition to the generative workshop in Boulder in the spring and the Tomales Bay workshop in the fall, Writing by Writers adds a boot camp for completed manuscripts. We take our family beach trip to Sarasota for Memorial Day week. For our 30th anniversary, Cal and I take our first trip to the Caribbean, to Petit St. Vincent, where we raise and lower a flag outside our oceanside cottage if we need anything. Until now I’ve shelved every book I read. I begin to cull. I don’t feel that great. I don’t have my normal amount of energy, and when I get sick, it takes forever to get well. Perhaps it’s because I eat too much sugar and cheese and not enough vegetables. Cal and I go back to Canyon Ranch in July. I do a whole 30 but feel terrible the whole time. Throughout the year, there are visits from family, visits to family. In September, Baby Ro is born! And the nights become magical again–filled with little peeps and scratches, little fingers and toes. Only 34 books this year but so many that rise to the top: Niall Williams’ History of the Rain, Joy Castro’s Island of Bones, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping, Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (736 pages), Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby. 72 songs on my Spotify playlist–Joshua Radin’s Worlds Apart, Lucius’s Wildewoman, O.A.R.’s Peace, The National’s Gospel, LP’s Into the Wild, Distant Cousins’ Fly Away, Andra Day’s Rise Up, and Nate Ruess’ Nothing Without Love… My agent sends my novel out to 4 more editors, and either something’s missing or it’s too literary or it’s too commercial or just nothing. 92 days in Provincetown.

2 days to 60

 ~

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

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

c

2014: My agent sends me a note: “I’m so excited about your new novel, and I have a very good feeling that THIS ONE IS IT!” On the first trip of the year, Cal and I get snowed in in Provincetown. In February, one night I’m in Seattle at a VIDA party at Hugo House as part of AWP; the next, I’m in Columbus at a Mardi Gras debutant party where Jack is an escort to one of the Queen’s maids. Back in PT,  a neighbor brings me a plate of sausages and peppers. In March we have our second Writing by Writers event–a 3-day workshop at the Colorado Chautauqua in Boulder–with Pam, BK Loren, and Ben Percy. It’s in March that for the first time I stay in the wharf house, where at high tide the water swooshes under the house, and I know I don’t want to stay anywhere else. From the outskirts of PT in The Days Cottages, I’ve slowly moved further and further in. But the wharf house is already booked for most of the year. While Dani Shapiro reads my manuscript, I take a break from the novel to revise an old story. I trade in my Lexus for a black Prius–the first car I’ve bought thinking only of myself since my twenties. Family trip to the beach for Memorial Day, and family can rain down upon me because I have my week a month to myself. “Hidden Tracks” is published in the summer edition of Contrary. Kathleen has another baby. Wynn is born in September–more little fingers and toes, more tiny murmurs, more magical nights. In the fall Sam heads to France for a semester–the Davidson program now takes place in Tours, where I lived for a year. In October it’s WxW at Tomales Bay again. At SFO, I pick up Andre Dubus and Kwame Dawes, who sings a stunning No Woman, No Cry… And Pam finally makes it to Columbus and meets Cal. In November he and I fly to France to see Sam. All of us visit the apartment building where I lived 34 years before, the school where I taught, the market where I shopped. Cal asks me not to go to Provincetown in December so I try that. It will be the only month I’m not there out of 51 and still counting. My agent sends my fourth novel to 10 editors, and it’s not a match, or it’s too slow, or it doesn’t pull together. 36 books for the year. Bon Iver’s Beth/Rest (the Rare Book Room version), Passenger’s Let Her Go, lots of Jasmine Thompson, and Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic… Last year I stayed in 5 different places in Provincetown–this year it’s 3–the penthouse, the wharf house, and the boathouse. 82 days.

3 days to 60

 ~

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

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

c