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September 1, 2026: Malia Márquez

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Malia Márquez’s magical murder mystery, City of Smoke and Sea, won the 2023 Red Hen Women’s Prose Prize. Queenie Rivers is the star of this slim novel. She’s almost thirty and because things are not going well, she moves back to her grandmother’s one-story bungalow in the Del Rey Hills of Los Angeles. 

Anke Rivers is eighty-four and smells of rose and sandalwood and cooking. She has “special knowledge of Southern California’s flora and fauna,” and “all sorts of secrets.” Her stories and myths about gods and tricksters “made non-human things like plants and animals seem important, connected…vulnerable. They made you feel like it wasn’t all about you.”

While Queenie takes Gran’s dog Daisy for a walk and Gran heats soup and rolls for dinner, something bad happens. At the end of Chapter Three, Queenie stands at the doorway.

Beyond [the first responder], out the open door, the dark curve of the street was puddled with faint yellowish light from the lamps above, I had the odd sensation that I wasn’t inside looking out, but outside looking in.

And so Queenie begins her journey to the inside.

Malia’s descriptions are one of the pleasures of this book as you can see from the passage below that details a room so that we know this is surely a place where magic lives.

The room glittered in the light of fixtures of all shapes and sizes. They hung from the ceiling and stood on the floor and were attached to the walls, shedding golden light over the poured concrete floor, walls painted the color of river clay, and the very old man who sat on a stool weaving the most enormous fishing net I’d ever seen. It flowed from his fingers like tides. Sections of it hung on random hooks on the walls and over wall lamps and it was layers and layers and layers deep, mounds upon mounds of intricate fibers. 

Later in the novel, Queenie wakes up to the sound of someone in the backyard.

The young woman was quite beautiful, with dark tangled hair to her waist and wide brown eyes. She looked as if she didn’t get a shower often. Her clothes were worn and stained. 

The woman, who introduces herself as Mo, tells Queenie that her grandmother “lived kind of like I do once. A long time ago. She was a wanderer too. For a short while.”

After Queenie has another scare, Mo says, “Your grandmother wasn’t who you think she was, and neither am I… And neither are you.”

Kirkus Reviews calls this beautiful book: “A unique multilayered story that will enchant readers with its blend of magic, mystery, and fabulist fantasy.”

Malia is also the author of the novel This Fierce Blood, and her fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in Poetry, Literary Hub, and The Georgia Review. She believes that if you’d like to be a better writer, you should observe chickens… As you will see from City of Smoke and Sea, she loves to play with stretching the bounds of conventional narrative while retaining elements of the familiar. She has taught creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at UCLAx. Born in Santa Fe, New Mexico to parents of Chicano, Native, and European descent, she now lives in Los Angeles where she teaches, writes, and wanders around in nature.

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how MALIA MÁRQUEZ spends her days.

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June 1, 2026: Joyce Hinnefeld

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The characters in Joyce Hinnefeld’s The Dime Museum love poetry and steal books. They live in Venice, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Lisbon. Together, in nine stories, they create the world of this novel, each story told from the point of view of a different character: Charlie, Maude, Liliane, Tess, Nina, Tom, Mary, Min, and Stefan.

Nothing in The Dime Museum is expected, and that is one of its pleasures. I don’t think anyone except Joyce Hinnefeld could have written this book that connects Ezra Pound, the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, a bookstore in Venice, and a vaudeville male impersonator who got stuck in Wabash, Indiana, in the middle of a snowstorm because she missed the last train.

Charlie has the first line of the book. “When I got to Venice in the fall of 2019, I was thinking about death.” Charlie loves books, poetry (Louise Bogan and Adrienne Rich), and Min. “I’m a twenty-first century white guy, I like basketball, and my name is Charlie, so I can’t get out of bed in the morning without being predictable and banal.”

In a later story, we hear from Charlie’s mom.

What can it mean in a world like this, and at a time like this, that my son Charlie wants to be a poet? Which means he spends most of his time in bars, occasionally performing but mostly drinking and getting into fights. is this what it means to be a poet now?

But it is Maude I have a soft spot for with her old stories, her books in neat stacks under the window, her love of Annie. We meet her in the second, and title, story.

Should she tell…the stories she’s never told anyone else? The truths she hid…. About what a failure she’d been at that other thing, that other life as a performer. Or about her time as a dime museum caricature. How could she explain it, the fact that the happiest time of her life was that period, starting sometime during the Great War, when people had paid to gawk at her as she sat on a stool, wearing trousers and suspenders and a monocle over her eye?

…

Her father’s view of her as a child had been all wrong, or mostly wrong, the product of bathtub gin and maudlin sentiment. She’d been thin, but also strong. And she sang, but not that well. For a while she’d believed him. It’s probably what led her to the fond and foolish notion that she might someday be a poet. That, and the books of her mother’s she’d carried with her since her death–Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads.

And Liliane wants to be a poet too… Another of the pleasures of The Dime Museum is discovering how the different characters are connected.

As each story adds another layer to the whole, there are questions of privilege and art and wealth and politics. And there are books—so many mentioned on these 173 pages. I started a list, but kept getting distracted by the characters. And the lines of poetry…

Joyce is also the author of the novels, In Hovering Flight and Stranger Here Below, and the short story collections, The Beauty of Their Youth (part of the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series) and Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction). She is an Emeritus Professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, director of the Moravian Writers’ Conference, and a Program Facilitator with Shining Light, an organization that provides reentry-based programming for incarcerated people throughout the US. The Dime Museum was published by the wonderful Unbridled Books.

Come back on JUNE 1st to read how JOYCE HINNEFELD spends her days.

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At the Royal Society of Medicine in London earlier this year

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January 1, 2026: Melissa Pritchard 

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Florence Nightingale all but soars right out of Melissa Pritchard’s Flight of the Wild Swan.

I may not know why I was born, but it cannot be to wage war on dust and broken crockery. It cannot be to put down in a house ledger, as I do now, meaningless columns of tweedly this, tweedly that.

Flight of the Wild Swan is a big, thick novel structured in short chapters that highlight moments, keep the story moving, and underline the urgency in Florence’s thoughts and in her life. As a child she creates journals from her parents’ old letters, each page “folded into fours, the folded pages neatly stitched down one side.” She fills any blank space.

I am compelled, despite the ache in my wrists, to write down every smidgen of life going on around me, every thought boiling up within me. Nothing is real unless I take it down, pin and straighten what I see and think into measured words, solid sentences.

Florence was born in 1820 in Florence, Italy (hence her name) to wealthy parents. She was a brilliant child, not only interested in healing but in everything. She and her father studied stones and fossils together.

I have collections of coins, seashells, wax dolls. I’ve a cemetery trove of harvest mice, a baby wren, pink-skinned and naked of feathers, a blackbird, two halves of a grass snake…

Her father was also the one who made sure she and her sister received an education, even though both her mother and her father expected the girls to marry and raise families. But Florence was desperate to be out in the world doing things.

A letter, too, from Pastor Fliedner, asking when will I be coming to Kaiserwerth to study nursing. My application has been approved. I would be there this minute! Why am I here, in this house? A seething creature, poisoned by rage, with an oversized brain.

Forced to stay at home by her parents, she does what she is supposed to until she cannot.

From the landing, William Nightingale calls upstairs. She’d not come down to dinner the previous night, complaining of a headache. She has not appeared at breakfast. Hearing no response he takes the stairs. The door is unlocked, her bed is neat, unslept in… Where is she? At that moment he spots a dark, still shape at the farthest edge of the meadow. Hurtling downstairs, flinging open the front door, shouting her name, he runs.

Flight of the Wild Swan was a finalist in the category of Literary Fiction in this year’s Georgia Author of the Year Awards. It is historical fiction and gorgeously written as you can see by these excerpts from the first part of the book. When I was a child, I loved reading about Florence as the “lady with the lamp.” Now I love her so much more, knowing how hard she had to fight to hold that lamp and how much more there is to her story.

In addition to Flight of the Wild Swan, Melissa has published ten other award-winning books. She has received the University of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor Award, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Award, Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Prize. She is a five-time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and frequently shortlisted in Best American Short Stories. WordTheatre has performed her short stories in New York and Los Angeles; two of her books were named New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and “Notable Books of the Year.” She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation in Switzerland, the Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. The Carnation Milk Palace, her fifth short story collection, will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in January 2027 and her sixth novel, Tempest: The Story of Fanny Anne Kemble, will be published by Regal House Publishing, Fall 2027. She currently lives in Columbus, Georgia.

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Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how MELISSA PRITCHARD spends her days.

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Daniel Tam-Claiborne discusses his debut novel ‘Transplants’ at Hugo House on May 14th, 2025, in Seattle. Media: Zoe Gordon

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November 1, 2025: Daniel Tam-Claiborne

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Transplants, the debut novel by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, begins on a college campus in China in 2019. First we meet Lin, a Chinese student who is better with pets than people and excels in English, and then Liz, a Chinese American teacher who is “too Chinese for America, not Chinese enough here.” Lin doesn’t feel as if she belongs in China. Liz doesn’t feel as if she belongs anywhere.

Liz has arrived on campus from the suburbs of Ohio where her parents landed after they emigrated from China. At some point, her father left the family, and her mother died before she graduated.

Growing up, Liz knew she was different. She and her brother, Phil, were the only Asians at her high school in Akron. She got her eyes pulled, got called ugly names. She was told more than once to go back to a country she’d never been to, like the one she was born into somehow wasn’t hers to claim.

Lin, on the other hand, has arrived on campus from the next town over, which is where she grew up. Her father died in a mining accident when she was three. At the age of six, she could watch fish for hours but would run screaming from a knock on the door. “While her mother had always attributed Lin’s difference to something she was born with, Lin knew it was more circumstantial than anything else.”

Lin and Liz long to know who they are and where in the world they belong. Early in the novel, while Liz is teaching at the college, her ex-boyfriend asks if he can visit. She resists. “She didn’t want him to take away any more of what was hers.” Lin and Liz. Each a three letter name that begin with “Li.” Intentional, Daniel explains. He wanted them to be surrogates, which foreshadows the story to come.

Daniel’s prose is lovely. Take a look at this description of the college town. Notice the strong nouns and verbs and adjectives, the unusual “blistering scent.” It’s a description that is alive with smells and textures.

The air outside was acrid and still. Qixian was the heart of vinegar country where the dark liquid, pungent and thick, was bottled and shipped to every other province and exported abroad. But the factories had to compete with the coal mines, which operated from daybreak to dusk. It was only in the dead of night that the sky opened up, blooming with the blistering scent of tonic and salt.

Transplants takes place over a year that includes the late winter of 2020, which we reach about midway through the novel. At that point, Liz is in a Shanghai apartment staying with her friend Stephen. After lockdown, only essential trips are allowed: “grocery stores, factories, hospitals.”

[W]ithin days, other freedoms started to disappear. A man in the building across the street from Stephen’s had tested positive and, almost immediately, the whole complex was partitioned off like a construction site. Tall cranes came in to blanket the building in a fine mesh netting before wrapping it in plastic. Crews dressed in bio-hazard suits delivered shrink-wrapped food and water to the apartments’ occupants. Ambulances were parked outside, their sirens splitting the air.

Transplants was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. It was published by Regalo Press, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster. Regalo is a super cool publisher that with every deal makes a donation to the charity of the author’s choice.

Daniel was born and raised in Brooklyn with Chinese on his mother’s side and Anglo and Jewish on his father’s. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has spent over five years living and working in Greater China. He currently serves as Deputy Director at The Serica Initiative, a nonprofit organization that amplifies the impact of the Asian diaspora in America. He is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the U.S. Fulbright Program. He is also the author of the story collection What Never Leaves, and he lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle.

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Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how DANIEL TAM-CLAIBORNE spends his days.

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July 1, 2025: Megan Staffel

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After spending the night with a fellow art student, Rachel witnesses his dive off a cliff and the nothingness that comes after—no man, no body, nothing except a red scarf and sneakers. Megan Staffel’s The Causative Factor, a novel about art, and living as an artist, and attempting to make meaning out of life, moves forward from that moment.

The Causative Factor is filled with interesting characters and told in multiple points of view. The writing is sharp and visual. Take a look at these descriptions: pupils as “levels of darkness,” names as “four-legged tables,” and people as a “bit spinning of the wheels in the snow sort of thing.”

Early in the novel, Rachel describes an artist as “one who mixes things us, who lives by intuition and feeling, who is impractical, arbitrary, and tirelessly demanding.” She is committed to being an artist.

The chapters begin with strong sentences. Sometimes Megan grounds the reader by continuing a storyline we’re familiar with, but if we’re hearing about something for the first time, like at the beginning of Chapter 5, Megan grounds the reader in the physical, in place.

The Spanish Language Institute is on a busy shopping street in Queens, New York.

The writing is also spare. Words are important. I loved the scenes at the SLI with Rachel teaching English as a second language, which she does to earn money to support herself and her art.

In class she introduces gerunds. Building, singing, speaking. Active verbs are easy to demonstrate. Each person mimes an action and she supplies the word. “You are hopping. You are turning. I am laughing. But what is she doing? She is living in New York, going to shows and museums, getting to know the gallery world, and feeling hopeless and confused about her life as an artist.”

In Chapter 18, Rachel makes her way to a restaurant at the back of the sixth floor of a department store, which she describes as “bedding, big puffy quilts on model beds that stand under harsh lights, wholesome, colorful patterns suggesting happy lives.” She is meeting the mother of the art student who dove off the cliff for lunch. In a fabulous scene where Rachel sings—literarily and figuratively—she asks the mother if music is important to her.

“Oh yes, in my family we listen to Italian opera. Rubiat was raised on opera, you see.”

And [Rachel] can see. Right away, she understands how such exaggerated drama and passion has formed him. And in that context, maybe the dive makes more sense. And then she says, “You should choose me for your son.” It is the word choose that initiates it, and then impulse takes over, and just like him, she chooses not to edit it… she opens her mouth and then, with a startled heart beating under her dress, she sings their song in full-throated abandon…

The Causative Factor won the 2022 Petrichor Prize for finely crafted fiction, which carries with it a cash award of $1000 and an offer of publication by Regal House Publishing.

Megan is also the author of three collections of short fiction, The Exit Coach, Lessons In Another Language, and A Length of Wire and Other Stories, as well as two other novels, The Notebook of Lost Things and She Wanted Something Else. She has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Vermont College, among other places. Each month in her Substack Page and Story, she focuses on a recently published novel or story she loves and shows how the craft elements make it a compelling read. Megan splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and a farm in a small town in western New York State.

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Come back on JULY 1st to read how MEGAN STAFFEL spends her days.

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June 1, 2025: Mary Carroll Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet it wasn’t quite enough…

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

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

Last Bets at the Atlanta airport

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

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

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

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

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

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April 1, 2025: Michele M. Feeney

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During the pandemic, living with grown children back at their Phoenix home, Michele Feeney remembered a story her grandmother had told her about the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. At the same time, I imagine Michele was also thinking wistfully of her Christmas tree farm in Michigan, where her ancestors homesteaded in 1850 and where she liked to retreat for time to herself. With all of that swirling in the air, her first novel, Like Family, was born.

Like Family is historical fiction and takes place in a rural Michigan town in 1918. Chapter One begins in June, on the first day of seven-year-old Cecilia Pokorski’s summer break. After she and her mother clean the kitchen, her mother moves the framed photo of her oldest brother, Josef, from the mantle to the table. Then her mother climbs on a stool and takes a flour sack down from “behind the heavy pots on the highest panty shelf.”

Cecilia knew the flour sack did not hold flour. Instead, the sack, weighted with a few rocks from the stream that ran behind the house, and bulked up with dried-out corn husks, was where Mamusia kept her private things–hair ribbons for Cecilia to wear to school, a savings passbook Mamusia took to the bank from time to time, and a packet of sunflower seeds like those they’d planted early last spring… ‘Foolishness,’ Father had said, when he noticed the bright blossoms nodding among the cornstalks. ‘A waste of good money.’

Cecilia’s mother pulls out something Cecilia has never seen before–a map of the United States. Her mother shows her the state of Kansas, where Josef is recuperating after being injured in the war.

At the end of August, on Cecilia’s eighth birthday, the family hitches up the horses and heads to the station to meet Josef’s train. We are now only four pages into the novel, with things happening fast but also slowly–Michele is a master at pacing. Actually, I’ll stop here so I don’t spoil the rest of the first chapter for you.

But I do want to tell you about the other main character, the town’s teacher Mollie Crowley, who is independent and spunky, as you will see as the story unfurls.

When Mollie got back to the farm after putting up her signs, she pulled her Model T up to the front path of the farmhouse rather than into the barn. On a normal Saturday, she would have put the car in its designated spot, wiped it down from stem to stern, and then sat down for a late lunch with her mother. Mollie was the only woman in the township who owned her own car. She was proud–and unashamed of being proud–to own the spunky little machine.

Michele is also a natural storyteller. I fell into this book on the first page when the sack of flour did not hold flour. And each day, I could not wait to get back to the story. Like Family is well-written and easy to read. No bells and whistles, just a wonderful story about the many different ways there are to make a family and that what’s right is worth standing up for.

Michele Feeney wrote for twenty years before she earned an MFA from Bennington College in 2022 in the genres of fiction and nonfiction. She’s also a good literary citizen–serving as an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine since 2017 and hosting other writers (like me) at her home. She’s currently working on a book of essays about a young man incarcerated in the Arizona Department of Corrections system and the second volume of Like Family, which will be a series. In addition to all this, Michele still practices law in Arizona and makes time for herself at the family farm in Michigan.

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Come back on APRIL 1st to read how MICHELE M. FEENEY spends her days.

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March 1, 2025: Ellen Birkett Morris

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Ellen Birkett Morris’s first novel, Beware the Tall Grass, was chosen by Lan Samantha Chang as the winner of the 2023 Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence, which carries a $10,000 prize and an offer of publication by Columbus State University Press, located just a few miles from where I live in Columbus, Georgia.

Beware the Tall Grass is told in two points of view. Eve starts us off in the first chapter. It’s the year 2000, and her son Charlie has just been born. Eve thinks Charlie, who arrived with a birthmark and a gaze full of depth, looks like he’s “already seen things worth talking about.” When her husband Dan waves the baby back and forth through the air, it soothes him. Eve and Dan joke that maybe he was a pilot or a bird in his past life.

In the second chapter, it’s 1955, and we hear from Thomas who’s just been given a horse for his eighth birthday. Thomas, who lives in Montana, names his new horse Beau “not knowing where the name came from, only that it felt right.” He grows to a high school senior, and while out riding in the tall grass, an eastern racer slides in front of them, causing Beau to rear, Thomas to be thrown, and Beau to fall and break his foreleg. “Beware the tall grass, nothing good ever happens there.”

Although these two narratives appear to have no link between them, it’s a novel. We know they’ll connect in some way, and curiosity propels the reader forward. The slow pace of the narration, with the chapters continuing to alternate between Eve and Thomas, also heightens the tension.

Eve is a ceramicist and makes little clay animals–this metaphor filters into her thoughts on parenting.

Before Charlie, I had come to expect that my work and my life could be made perfect with practice. I had a fantasy that I could give him an ideal childhood, one that would make up for my own crazy upbringing, as if I could somehow fix the past. As if he were made of clay and ready for molding instead of a mysterious mix of blood, bones and psyche.

Thomas’s response to Beau’s death is to enlist in the army, and only after he enlists does his longtime friendship with Carrie turn into something more. Take a look at this beautiful passage that shows, as the writer Bobbie Ann Mason described it, Ellen’s “gentle and graceful writing.”

I knew from losing Beau that sadness and joy can occupy the same space in a person. That they could stand side by side together, yet distinct. That was what I felt, appreciation for what I had now and grief at the thought of losing it.

Those three sentences also show the dichotomy present throughout the novel, alluded to by Judge Lan Samantha Chang. “In this beautiful novel, two stories separated by half a century intertwine to create an indelible narrative of peace and war.”

Ellen is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award and finalist for the Clara Johnson, IAN, and Best Book awards. She is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council. Ellen is also a poet and the author of two poetry chapbooks, Abide and Surrender. She won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poem “Abide” was featured on NPR’s “A Way with Words.” Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader magazine, and on National Public Radio, which is where she heard a story that gave her the idea for Beware the Tall Grass. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ELLEN BIRKETT MORRIS spends her days.

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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 they spend the day.

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December 1, 2024: Karen Nelson

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The Sunken Town, the first novel by Writing by Writers co-founder Karen Nelson, will be published this December by Sibylline Press, an independent press located in California. I met Karen in a writing group, back in 2007, when she was working on a first draft of this novel. I’ve read several iterations since that first one, and I’m here to tell you, when I read the final version last month, I could not put it down. The Sunken Town just sings.

It’s literary fiction and a page turner and half the story takes place on a college campus, so if you liked Rebecca Makkai‘s I Have Some Questions For You, pre-order this right away. In The Sunken Town, there are two narrators, both young women. The novel begins in Claire’s point of view. She’s a junior in 1993 at a small New England college.

Karen grew up in California, went cross country to Colby College where she studied with Richard Russo, then she worked in Boston for a number of years before returning to California’s San Francisco Bay Area. During her long career in nonprofits she has protected open space, funded cancer research, trained people to complete endurance events, and helped writers bring their work into the world. When not organizing writing workshops (or cookbooks), she can be found hiking with her dog (often plus husband), reading, traveling (often writing about it), experimenting in the kitchen, hosting dinner parties, or hanging out with me. Look for her second novel in 2026!

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Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how KAREN NELSON spends her days.