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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, 2025: Laura Warrell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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July 1, 2021: Melissa Cronin

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Back in June of 2003, Melissa Cronin was a critical care nurse, an athlete, and an Irish fiddler. But on July 16th of that year, she became a survivor of the Santa Monica Farmers Market crash, which killed ten people and injured sixty-three.  She suffered life-threatening injuries, including a traumatic brain injury, and was confined to a wheelchair for four months.

This July marks eighteen years since the accident, which Melissa wrote about in 2019 for USA Today. Note how the particular verbs work to make us feel the impact of the crash.

Each time I hear of yet another vehicle attack—Hancock Park synagogue in California; a bike path in New York City; a thoroughfare in Barcelona; a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—the slap of my real life nightmare comes flying back at me: my body smacking against the pavement, the impact shattering my pelvis, rupturing my spleen, jarring my brain.

Melissa’s memoir, which is based on the crash and on trauma, healing and forgiveness, is represented by D4EO Literary Agency. But you can listen to Melissa read her essay, “Tilt-A-Whirl,” now to experience what it’s like inside the head of someone with a brain injury who’s shopping at the grocery store. This essay was originally published in Tahoma Literary Review and was recognized as a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays (2019),

Melissa has also written about her relationship with her father. He suffers from Alzheimer’s and, in this piece, was at the stage where he needed to be fed. By taking a close look at this everyday, and seemingly insignificant, activity, she offers the reader a new way to view this disease.

I watch him pick up his burgundy cloth napkin, drape it over his spaghetti and meatballs, then fumble with his spoon before balancing it on top of the sealed Hoodsie cup. This isn’t unusual behavior for someone with Alzheimer’s. Still, I ask my 74-year-old father, “What are you doing?” He gives me a hollow stare, his blue eyes as dry as his memory… I feel compelled to feed him, but the aides here at the nursing home usually do that. Though I worked as a nurse for 20 years and fed lots of people, I don’t want to feed him. I consider my reluctance.

In May, for About Place Journal, Melissa wrote about the lasting effects of traumatic noise, which will make you think about the sounds you hear on a daily basis.

Since my husband and I moved to North Hero Island last November, I wake each day well-held by the still morning. Tranquility is our neighbor. With a population of a little more than eight hundred, uninvited noise is a rare occurrence. That can’t be said for the greater Burlington area, the largest population cluster in Vermont, where we lived for sixteen years before moving to this remote hamlet an hour north. For sixteen years we were city dwellers, which came with its benefits: walking, biking, or bus-distance to restaurants, grocery stores, the post office. The main drawback, at least for me, was noise pollution. Mufflerless motorcycles, sirens, the squeal of air brakes, low-flying helicopters. Then came the most traumatizing noise-maker of all—the F-35 Lightning II.

Most recently, Melissa wrote a piece on food during the time of Covid, in which she does a wonderful job at not shying away from what makes each of us a strange and beautiful human doing the best he or she or they can together with other strange and beautiful humans. You can read “Food and Covid-19: Not Enough” at Entropy Magazine. 

John knows how much I want my greens, a fall-out of my years-long struggles with anorexia: If I don’t eat at least three servings of greens each day, I worry I’ll gain weight.
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Yet his “not-enough” fear prevails over mine. “What will we have for tomorrow’s dinner then?”

Melissa is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Merit Grant and a Vermont Arts Council Development Grant. Her work has  appeared in The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post, Purple Clover Magazine, River Teeth Journal, Brevity, Saranac Review, and  Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. Melissa is also a public speaker on the topics of traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. She lives in Vermont with her husband John and is currently at work on her first novel. Melissa and I met about ten years ago while we were in graduate school together at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Come back on JULY 1st to read how MELISSA CRONIN spends her days.

When I started writing in January of 1997, I had no idea what I was doing. It would be a number of stories and three novels later before I started writing Tidal Flats in January of 2013. So there’s the story of all the people who helped make Tidal Flats a real book, but that’s only part of the story of how I kept myself going all these years as a writer without the most accepted, and most hoped for, form of validation–publishing a book.

A big part of the answer is YOU. All of you who read a post and left a comment or emailed. You have kept writing novel after novel without publication from feeling as if I were writing in a void. Particularly when I hit that low point back in December of 2014 and began the one true thing a day, so many of you came out to support me. I’m happy to be able to officially thank you in the Acknowledgments section of Tidal Flats.

While we are working away on something that may take years and years before it appears in the world, the single most important ingredient to keep going is to feel as if we are being seen and heard. And the way to do this is through community.

It might be a writing group, an MFA program, a group on Facebook, a writing conference that you return to over and over, a writing program where you volunteer, a residency where you work during the day but have dinner together at night.

I am so solitary and private and need so much time to myself, and yet, looking back, this is how I kept myself going–other people.

Without understanding that was what I needed, I sought communities and found them. And I have been so lucky. In 2007, I joined a writing group. Since 2008, we have had a community here at Catching Days. In 2010 I joined the community at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2012 I became a part of the community at Ragdale. And starting in 2013, I became a part of Writing by Writers.

Many thanks to all of you for being out there and responding to my writing, for bolstering my confidence as a writer, and for making me feel part of a community.

Cheers.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

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

October 1, 2017: Sophfronia Scott

It’s 1940’s Harlem–the time of Jackie Robinson and Ella Fitzgerald and clubs, like the Swan and the Diamond. And for these characters, it’s also a world of money and revenge. Sophfronia Scott’s Unforgivable Love delivers a story as big as its title and characters you won’t forget.

At twenty, Mae Malveaux doubts she’ll ever be her own woman.

Mae closed her eyes and frowned. She couldn’t remember how to relax. Everything Mae learned about her body made her straight and hard like an ironing board. Her mother never allowed any part of Mae, her hips in particular, to veer off center. She learned to walk with books on her head and her mother’s hand on her spine. The icy touch held her taut and upright.

But at thirty-three, Mae lives in the largest brownstone on Sugar Hill, employs more than one maid, and dresses in long satin Diors. With a regular table at the Swan, a usual drink, and her own special song, she’s a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. And yet,

Mae wanted more. She wanted Frank’s humiliation, to have him walk through Harlem with laughter trailing in his wake. She wanted his hypocrisy exposed, his name thoroughly ridiculed. That might be enough for her. By the time she heard the first strains of the Duke Ellington tune and Frank Washington came to claim her, Mae had made her plans.

Mae’s male equal is Valiant Jackson–Val for short.

The finely tailored piece framed his physique, squaring off his broad shoulders and tapering down to his narrow waist. He approached the full-length mirror and stared. Sometimes Val pitied the world when he looked this good. He knew once he went out that door he could have anything he wanted and any difficulty could be resolved with a ten-dollar bill. At thirty-five years old, he walked over Harlem like he walked on a fine Oriental rug.

The windows of Val’s bedroom in his top-floor apartment faced full east, as they did every place he ever lived. He didn’t want it any other way. And he never let Sebastian or any other servant close the curtains. He always let the sun come through and, on some summer mornings, practically burn him out of bed.

Then there’s upstanding Elizabeth.

She wasn’t sure if what Kyle was talking about were the words usually reserved for courtship, but she liked what he said. He had a vision for them as a couple, as a family. That was good enough for her. It gave her a place to be in the world, as though he had marked a spot on the map and said, This is where you belong. And she accepted it, grateful to be protected and loved in a place where, as she saw each time she read her father’s newspaper, there were so many, women especially, who went unprotected and unloved.

And finally, young Cecily.

The room where Cecily would sleep looked out over the backyard. By the time she had changed into her nightgown and stood by the window it was too dark for her to see anything out there. She twisted her fingers in the fabric of the light green curtains. Cecily didn’t like the dark and this dark outside her window was beyond what she thought possible. It was black like the darkness of a hole that wasn’t satisfied with just being a hole so it had to suck you in and make you part of the darkness. She was glad of the glass between her and that blackness but still she put her other hand on the window just to see. Would she feel it pulling her out?

As you can see, these characters create worlds around them, and Sophfronia shines the camera on each one at just the right moment, each change in point of view pushing the action forward. Unforgivable Love is the best kind of book–big and thick. It’s a book you want to settle into for the evening. You may even, as I did, find yourself playing a little Sarah Vaughan…

I first met Sophfronia online. Over the years, she’s been a frequent commenter here. In 2011, it was such fun to meet her in person as she was beginning her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. These days, I’m always happy to run into her in the halls of AWP. And at the moment, you can find her in the October 2, 2017 (Prince William cover) issue of People Magazine AND in an interview on NPR’s Sunday Weekend Edition.

Sophfronia’s first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published in 2004 by St. Martin’s Griffin. Unbelievably, Unforgivable Love (out tomorrow from William Morrow and already into its second printing) is only the first of three books she will publish in the next six-months. This Child of Faith, co-authored with her son Tain, will be published in December by Paraclete Press. And Love’s Long Line, a collection of essays, will be published in February by Mad Creek Books.

A novel of manners, as well as a retelling of the epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons, Unforgivable Love is, according to Kirkus,”[a] dazzlingly dark and engaging tale full of heartbreak, treachery, and surprise.” Don’t miss it.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how SOPHFRONIA SCOTT spends her days.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

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

May 1, 2017: Jericho Parms

Surprise and delight. These have to be the first words in this review of Jericho Parms’ debut collection of essays–Lost Wax. I was continually surprised and delighted. Such a rare thing. Take a look at this sentence.

A German surrealist I met years ago in a Spanish village once sent me a matchbox filled with feathers.

Reading the essays made me want to crawl inside Jericho’s head, to go along for the ride of seeing the world through her eyes.

What I want more than anything is to find words to describe the scent of Sundays: wood polish, lemon juice, sunlight. The smell of Murphy’s Oil Soap after my mother wiped down the furnishings—crouching along the baseboards, kneeling before the cedar chest with the moth-riddled linens of dead ancestors who dined on scotch and soda, hosted a weekly bridge night, and retired each day with thin mints and a nightcap after the evening news.

She takes such care with language and rhythm.

My arm flowed back and forth, wrist loose, the bow weightless between my fingers. The closest I have come to such weightlessness was when I first saw Greek and Roman statues as a girl. The museum, the one place I can stare without feeling bashful, where, during a middle-school field trip I first felt aroused by the smooth perfection of form imperfectly preserved. And then again, years later, I would fall in love in those same galleries with a sweet-talking museum security guard, a painter, whom I would eventually take home, introduce to my mother, share a bed with—the one with whom I left the city and moved to the country and bought an old house.

These essays are unpindownable. Just when you think you have it, the next paragraph takes you somewhere else. I imagine the subject matter chart of a particular essay on a graph would resemble a windy path through a woods.

If only I could write in this space forever. If only I could return to the glass coffin where p resembles q, where b becomes d, where U and I remain intact. Except maybe it’s not the secrecy or order that is saving me anymore, not so much the letters or the words but the uncharted margins, the outdated virtues of common things such as fountain pens and telegrams, fine stationery and wax seals, which are not in the least necessary but feel elegant and classy—comforts amid chaos. Like ordering cocktails in the sky from tiny bottles, sipping a macchiato in a quaint café, tossing pennies at Trevi Fountain, posting a letter from the Vatican. Maybe that is what this really is: a letter that holds a mirror to a message I want to write, seal with a kiss, and send to the strange little girl who loves subtraction, the one I know only through the voice behind my seat, and I would write How brave you are! and ask what she knows about the future, if subtraction is a long road toward solitude, if minus equals loss. The way backward feels synonymous with the most intimate of codes, the way all of life is an enchanted spell we may never come out from under. Is this—the fairest truth of all?

Other reviews describe Lost Wax as coming-of-age essays, but I say that’s too limiting, that it’s better described as coming-into-the-world essays. Objects and experiences and memories are tied to art and music and words… Nothing is of itself. It is all connected, just another curve around another bend. Jericho and I graduated in the same class from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is now the the Assistant Director of the MFA in Writing program. I was shocked to discover she’s a year younger than my daughter. I never thought of her as young. And I feel vindicated after reading these essays. These are the words of an old soul.

When I was young I thought that everything was just practice, a rehearsal for life, which at some point would simply begin. Some days I still want to believe this. There is no rehearsal for living, of course, but sometimes it does take practice: loving the fact that you were born, loving all the winters, the inevitable seduction of elsewhere or other that builds like a scale or refrain and can trail on and on like a sentence.

These eighteen essays, which appear in loose chronological order, make use of many different elements–lists, subtitles, repetition, other languages… One essay is divided into three parts and interspersed with other essays. Words are used not only as a means to an end but also as the end itself.

amenazar, amar, alzar—to threaten, to love, to rise above

Adding to the element of surprise, Jericho also made the contour drawing that became the cover, as well as the other drawings for the section breaks. The sketches were part of her process of completing the manuscript and helped her discover the book’s structure, the titles of the sections from sculpture–Degas, Bernini, and two of Rodin’s–the title of the book from a casting method used to produce metal sculptures. “I’m most drawn to the idea that something is lost in order for something else to emerge.”

That afternoon, glancing at our bows moving in sync, listening to our strings piercing through Suzuki variations, with only the occasional squeak out of tune, I realized that I can move inconspicuously between worlds: black and white, urban and rural, between privilege and lack thereof. I would spend many of the next formative years feeling out of place yet managing to belong.

Lost Wax was published in September of 2016 by the University of Georgia Press, as a part of Crux, their series in literary nonfiction established in 2015. It received the silver medal in the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the category of Essay/Creative Non-fiction and was also a 2016 Foreward INDIES finalist for Book of the Year in the Essay category. Jericho grew up in the Bronx, studied journalism, political science, and history in college, later worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she is always traveling–whether she is moving or still.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how JERICHO PARMS spends her days.

2012: After I give my lecture and reading, I start making the changes to my first novel that my agent (late addition to yesterday’s post) has requested, Tori Amos’ Silent All These Years and Regina Spector’s Us on repeat.  Cal comes to Vermont for graduation. When I get back home, I put my feet up and breathe. I’m exhausted. Burned out. And I’m getting headaches and visual migraines. I need to stop doing so much. At AWP in Chicago, I go to a book launch party for Cheryl Strayed. She wrote the January 1 essay in the How We Spend Our Days series. For my birthday Cal and I go to Seaside and stay in a honeymoon cottage. I resign from Contrary. In May Cal and I go to Fort Worth for Mack’s first birthday, and Jack and Sam graduate within hours of each other on opposite coasts. We split up so both have a group to cheer as they walk across the stage. Wedding emails and texts are flying. In June I stop submitting to the writing group but will still read the other submissions, and I head to Provincetown to finally stay in one of the Days Cottages at the top of this blog. I fall in love–their retro feel, the screen doors, the line of roofs that never seems to end, the way I can look out at PT. In July I make my first trip to Maine. August is a wedding party for Bobby and Claire in Birmingham. Sam has chosen Davidson, so in the fall I get to head back to North Carolina to my alma mater. And just like that—a f t e r  3 2  y e a r s—no lights leak from under doors of children’s rooms. I have made it to Part Five. The first week and the last week of September I go back to Provincetown, staying in the Days Cottages both times. In October I clean out the attic, have lunch in NY with my agent, and see Crosby, Stills, and Nash at the Beacon Theater with Cal. In November I do a two-week residency at Ragdale. The rectangular Playroom, which is my room, has a round window and stairs to a cupola, where I work. When I’m done with a page, I launch it down the stairs. President Obama is re-elected. I resign from Hunger Mountain. After Christmas Bobby and Claire get married in a very cool brewery with little white lights strung across the ceiling and a CD wedding favor with a playlist of their favorite songs, some of which become mine. The Alabama Shakes’ I Found You, Ingrid Michaelson’s You and I… 48 books this year–back to back reads of Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations topping the charts. My agent sends my first novel to 18 editors, and some love it but no one enough. My parents begin to need help with things. I listen to so many wonderful but random songs this year–Yael Meyer’s Shed Their Fear, Amos Lee’s Windows Are Rolled Down, and Lucy Schwartz’s I Don’t Know a Thing…

5 days to 60

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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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2011: In January, I finish up winter residency and fall under the spell of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. February is AWP in Washington, DC, where I spot Josh Ritter in the bar and actually talk to him. In March, Contrary reviews are due to me, I go to Fort Worth for Kathleen’s baby shower, and Cal and I go to New York. I apply for the position of Assistant Fiction Editor at Hunger Mountain, VCFA’s literary journal. I don’t get it, but they ask me to join the staff as Art + Life Co-Editor with Claire Guyton. Together we revitalize this section of the journal and give it a new name–The Writing Life. We spend so much time on Hunger Mountain, it’s crazy. In April, Sam and I go to Florida for his spring break, and a week later Jack comes home for his. In May, Mack is born and technically speaking that makes me a grandmother, but it will be years before I’m able to use that word about myself. I’m blown away by Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water. Bobby graduates from St. Andrews and moves to Birmingham to be with his girlfriend. In June it’s more reviews to edit, another residency, and another anniversary (#26). During my grad school years, Cal and I are apart for three new year’s eves and two anniversaries. The fall brings another writing group trip to Pam’s ranch, more reviews, the beginning of Jack’s senior year of college, and the beginning of Sam’s senior year of high school. I can almost see the end. On September 12th, my to do list includes reading over 5 pages of my novel–every day, 5 pages. In October, “Mackenzie,” a short short, is published in Gargoyle, Pam and I take a trip to Napa, and Steve Jobs dies. I’m now in the thick of preparing for my graduating residency–working on my lecture and my reading, which will be from the opening of my novel, Love Like This. In December I sign with an agent who finds me by way of my blog and who loves my first novel! Bobby and Claire get engaged! 34 books this year–20 novels, 3 books on the craft of writing, 3 story collections, 3 essay collections, 2 poetry, 2 nonfiction, and 1 memoir. I start using Spotify and listen to U2’s One, Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, and The Band Perry’s All Your Life.

6 days to 60

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

7 days to 60

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

8 days to 60

~

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

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

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

October 1, 2016: Jon Davis

He’d been thinking of her and reading Human Wishes, thinking
that what he wanted from poetry was a species of rigorous tenderness,
unsentimental, maybe even brutal. Brutal in its failures–the attempted
(the fumbled) touching and the long aftermath of gazing.

You can find these wonderful lines about what we want from poetry in “Pinon & Moon” from Jon Davis’s most recent book of poetry, Preliminary Report, published in 2010 by Copper Canyon Press.

It’s been way too long since we’ve had a poet here, since we’ve sprinkled these pages with stars. I’m not comfortable writing about poetry or introducing a poet. But I’m diving in to that which I cannot see. The pleasures of art. The dangers.

In my own writing, I want the language to be interesting. I want the words to speak to each other. Words like notes sung through a saxophone, soft-edged and thick with feeling, gestures toward openness, loneliness blowing its little riffs through the voices. I want my sentences to sound good to the ear. But in poetry, isn’t it more the line? Jon wrote in an interview that using the sentence as the line is a favorite procedure of his. 

And sadness flames up from somewhere in the chest.
And burns there, fading and flaring, almost unbearable.
Until the earth tilts.
Until sunlight brings color to roses, and birds begin to stir.

Pam Houston describes Jon as “A poet who recalls Levis in all the best ways, but is very much his own man,” and in May, at the Writing by Writers‘ Methow Valley farewell dinner, she read every word of Jon’s two-page poem “Loving Horses.” Yellow aspen. Quaking leaf. Metal barn creaking./Dust like rain against the roof. I returned home, pulled the collection, which I had bought at Pam’s suggestion back in 2012 but never read, off the shelf. Since then, I’ve been carrying the book with me–from Columbus to Provincetown, to Florida, and back to Provincetown, to New York, to North Carolina, and back to Provincetown. I wanted to give you an excerpt from “Loving Horses,” but after reading the poem yet another time, I can’t excerpt it. Its power and beauty come from the whole, from the way it’s built by repetition and metaphor and detail and movement from general to personal to

Just              look at him

In his own words, Jon has an “intense focus on minutiae.” He writes about mothers and fathers and about child versions and adult versions. He writes about ordinary moments and about the sirens. He writes about his daughter and horses. He writes about the present moment and why. He writes about the sadness soaking into the words like hand cream and about the sudden shocked song of the living. But he also writes about the possibility of our miraculous reach. His is a poetry anchored by the markers of our time.

Because I was nineteen & had heard Janis howl,
heard Jimi slipping the guitar’s needles under the skin of the world,
heard him conjure a panic of fiery spears that he hurled into the Woodstock sky.
Because that’s what you do when you’re nineteen.

He was the co-translator, along with the author, Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan, of Dayplaces. He wrote, “The translation work has made me see how every poem is an imperfect translation from experience both real and imagined.”

From “Against Structuralism,”

The shadows we cast

are insufficient
& mark our passage here.

But in the midst of our insufficiency, we have choices. From “The Modern Condition,”

Where to go from here?
Into the darkness, child. Darkness of oblivions. Of worry and disharmony. Of
     chatter by the watercooler. Airports and cell phones. Scotch and soda.
     The comforting prison of a schedule.
Into the light, child. Light that whitens every page. That illuminates the
     daily chores.

In addition to being a poet, Jon is also the Director of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts where’s he’s taught since 1990. He has served as Writing Program Coordinator for The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and as the Sante Fe Poet Laureate. He is the author of six chapbooks, a limited-edition letterpress collaboration with the artist Jameson Chas Banks, and two other full-length collections of poetry in addition to Preliminary Report—Scrimmage of Appetite, for which he received a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and Dangerous Amusements, for which he received a G.E. Younger Writers Award and the Lavan Prize. We in our horse natures, galloping on, Susan said, galloping on.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how JON DAVIS spends his days.