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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

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.

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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

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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.

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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

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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.

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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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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.

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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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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.

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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

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Sanderia and me April 2023 Interabang Books Dallas

July 1, 2024: Sanderia Faye

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Sanderia Faye’s Mourner’s Bench, which won a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit for fiction, and an Arkansas Library Association Arkansiana Award, is another wonderful debut novel. Last year during my 50 State Book Tour, a friend said, for Texas you have to read Mourner’s Bench. I did and I loved it. And in April of 2023, Sanderia and I had an event together in Dallas at Interabang Books.

Mourner’s Bench is a coming-of-age story set in the Arkansas Delta during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of 1964, Sarah is eight years old. What she wants most in the world, even though she’s not yet old enough, is to sit on the Mourner’s Bench during the upcoming revival so she can be baptized and take responsibility for her own sins. Her mother, whom she calls Esther, left town when she was four, and her grandmother whom she calls Muhdea (short for Mother Dear) and her great-grandmother whom she calls Granny are raising her.

The following scene from Chapter Five shows you two sides of Sarah. In addition to the studious little girl who wants to sit on the Mourner’s Bench, we also see the Sarah who can get mad and fired up. And we get a little peak of Granny too. Sarah is our narrator and protagonist. Here Esther has just come back to town for a visit.

Esther had been home most of the day. If I hadn’t been getting ready to sit on the Mourner’s Bench, I would’ve lost my patience with her.
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“Sarah, let me wash your hair. Sarah, come help me wash the dishes. Sarah…” she said.
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Finally, I crawled behind the bed. I studied the Sunday-school lesson before it was time to read it to Granny and Muhdea. I waited for one of them to call me like they did every Saturday after we settled down from eating supper. When I finished loading my book satchel with every piece of reference material associated with the lesson, it came to me that nobody had called, so I collected my bag and went to see what was keeping them.
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Maybe I was so wrapped up in my own head I didn’t hear Esther. I was standing in the middle of the living room before I realized what she was doing. Words flew out of my mouth before I could catch them as if I’d never been taught my manners.
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“What the hell you doing? Why in God’s name are you reading to them? You trying to mess up everything I do?”
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I eyed Granny. She was probably thinking that she hated she’d taught me how to cuss. She’d said it was pretty much the only thing that would show I meant business. This old boy used to hit me hard in the middle of my back every day after school. One day Granny told me to put a Coke bottle in my book satchel and gave me the words to say when he tried to hit me. On that day, when he got close enough, I eased the bottle out of my book satchel, set the bag on the ground, and wrapped my fingers around the neck. As soon as he looked as if he were about to draw back his fist, I turned around and faced him, holding the bottle straight out toward his head. “If you hit me one more damn time, I will beat your ass like you stole something.” I said and stared him down.
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Granny told me to put as much emphasis as I could on “damn’ and “ass,” and to say it slow, and to never take my eyes off his.

It might be 1964, but Sarah has neither running water nor a washing machine at her house. What she does have is a set of  encyclopedias up to the letter H and a list of things she wants to find out. “I wrote so many pages that I started keeping them in a notebook. Why did switching get Esther in trouble? was my first question.” So much of the pleasure of this novel is being inside her head.

Dr. Sanderia Faye (Smith) is an Assistant Professor of Practice and Executive Director of the Dallas Literary Festival at Southern Methodist University. She is the co-leader of Pen America/DFW, co-founder of Kimbilio Center for Fiction (a community of writers from the African Diaspora), and the founder of LitNight Reading Series. She serves on the faculty at the Antioch University MFA Low Residency Program, and on the board of Deep Vellum Publishing. She is also a professional speaker, activist and sommelier, where she pairs wine with books.

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Come back on JULY 1st to read how SANDERIA FAYE 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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

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June 1, 2024: Christy Cashman

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I loved Christy Cashman’s debut novel, The Truth About Horses, which came out last August. The writing is terrific and the story is full of surprises. Since part of the pleasure of reading is turning the page to discover one, I will try not to give any away.

The power behind the story comes from its narrator—fourteen-year old Reese. Feisty Reese who loves horses more than anything.

I did pick up swearing, though. A lot, Which Dad hates, so I do it every chance I get. Because Dad was wrong. Trying new things didn’t ‘help me meet friends’ or ‘make me less lonely.’ And it didn’t help me forget about horses. It just made me realize that I’m good at nothing else. So fuck that shit. Without telling him (he wouldn’t notice anyway), I quit it all. Except for the swearing. Instead, every day now, I get on my bike. I know the way to the barn so well sometimes it feels like I don’t even have to steer. Like the barn pulls me. Like a dream.

I still can’t believe Sue [the vet] is doing what she’s doing with a straight face, like she’s combing his mane or cleaning his hoof. It looks like she’s jerking Bubba [a horse] off. In fact, she is jerking him off.

The setting is South Dakota (where I was born).

It’s cool today. Most of the snow on the Black Hills falls in March and keeps the whole valley chilled until the middle of May.

I turn left down Cekiya Drive. Like most streets in the town of Birdwood, South Dakota, which is smack dab between two reservations, it has a Lakota name.

Here’s a taste of the beauty in the writing.

Seeing horses in the wild is like glimpsing another world you knew about but forgot existed. Seeing them gallop across thousands of acres of open land is nothing like seeing horses in a fenced-in field, peaceful and content, like decorations in a pasture. Here the land looked made for them. Like the wind had flattened the plains just for their hooves to gallop along. Like the mountains saw their glistening coats and powerful legs and moved aside to make room enough for all of them to gather.

I also want to tell you about Wes, my second favorite character (after Reese), but again, I don’t want to spoil the way we get to know him on the pages of the novel. So here’s an early excerpt.

I turn to look at the man who seems so at home here, scrubbing down the mare, dipping a rag in a bucket of steaming water.

“I’m Reese. You might have seen me around.”

He looks at me and smirks. I’m relieved to see a flash of nice white teeth. Probably not a meth head.

“I don’t live too far away. I used to spend a lot of time here.”

He has a young face but old eyes. His hair is almost to his shoulder, but most of it is hidden by his floppy-rimmed cowboy hat…

You don’t have to love horses to love this novel. You just have to love a good story well told.

Christy does love horses and has all her life. She’s also an actor, a producer, and the founder of YouthINK, a nonprofit mentorship program for teens with an interest in the creative arts. She grew up in North Carolina, and now she, her husband, their two sons, and three dogs split their time between Ireland, where they live at Kilkea Castle (which is also a resort), and Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to The Truth About Horses, Christy has published two children’s books, The Not-So-Average Monkey of Kilkea Castle and Petri’s Next Things. She is currently working on her second novel, Beulah, and on her third children’s book, The Cat Named Peanut Shrimp Cookie Fry Muffin Who Lives on Staniel Key. (Photo of Christy by Georgina Preston.)

Come back on JUNE 1st to read how CHRISTY CASHMAN 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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

photo credit: m.price

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December 1, 2023: Sara Lippmann

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In Lech, Sara Lippman’s debut novel, a short prologue situates us in the summer of 2014 in Sullivan County, New York.

Ponds are called lakes. There are lakes galore. All through the county, a river wends. For some it’s a haven, for others it’s a trap. Just ask the people.

We hear from the people in short chapters, starting with Noreen. Sara’s writing is dense and compact. You’ll have to breathe on your own time. Her sentences are mini stories. Her paragraphs are mini novels. Take a look at this paragraph (the opening) from Noreen’s section.

When the phone rings, Noreen Murphy is minding her Monday at Sullivan Sales. Zero foot traffic, spit of rain. She blows on a fresh coat of polish: Can’t Elope. Her nails look like candy corn. She ears the receiver. All men are honey.

Paige, Noreen’s daughter, enters the novel next. The first line of her section is, “The fuckers are coming.” In a lovely circle back, the almost-last lines of this section are, “Tommy is a fucker too, but he is her fucker. Bells jangle her heart as he plows through the door.”

I love the way Sara incorporates language into the novel. Noreen “uses the word ‘jiffy.'” Customers of Paige’s at the diner say “to boot.”

The third character we meet is Ira Lecher, sixty-six and “long past shame.”

Ira is a man of few tricks. Mornings go like this: wake, watch, coffee, shit. Shave whenever. Stay active, the marching order. Thirty push-ups. Tuna in a can. Sometimes he drives to the bookshop; he doesn’t think about it, really. Time passes regardless.

And,

Whatever is put in front of him he can’t look away.

Ira owns property here in Sullivan County, where he rents the main house out for the summer, and for this summer, the summer of 2014, he rents to Beth, our fourth main character. Beth loves her lists.

Tweezers, Off!, sunscreen. Lists keep her grounded, a balloon on a string, tied to the task at hand. Lists stave off the dark beasts of thought that encircle and creep, sniffing out her susceptibility like scent. … At home she keeps lists on her nightstand, smeared on receipts, she pours items through her mental centrifuge, falling asleep to their tumble and whir.

Here’s a paragraph/mini-novel from Beth’s section.

Discomfort she can manage. She has Midol. She has the radio. Merciful quiet. She has her lists. One glimmering child, terrifically alive.

The last of the five main characters is Tzvi, who finds himself in Sulivan County for a summer gig. But more than that, his mother, we discover early on, drowned, years and years before, in Murmur Lake (aka Murder Lake), which is located on Ira’s property. This is Tzvi.

Three times a day he prays; that is, he moves his lips. Like the secular world with their lyrics to American Pie. The song comes on, and without thinking, you sing it.

As you can see, one of Sara’s skills is compression. Here’s an example from Paige’s section.

Once he [a neighbor] brought her a Big Wheel but she was already too big, so he brought her to the hayloft, her body sinking beneath his red-faced weight.

Or this one from Beth’s section.

One prom night and boom: her son’s damp head on the pillow, slick as a newly hatched bird.

In an essay at Lit Hub, Sara writes about how she started this novel,

When I first conceived of Lech, character came first. One grim NaNoWriMo, I scribbled in a set of legal pads, chasing one voice, then two. From there, It went like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls, the major lifts—and, oh crud, I had a polyvocal novel. If that sounds ill-conceived, welcome to my creative brain.

Lech, in addition to being a word in and of itself, is, of course, short for the character Ira Lecher, and lech also comes from a Hebrew word that means “to go forth.” Here’s what Sara has to say about the title.

The word Lech was integral to helping me crystalize the imperative of the novel: how do we go forth with all the shit that we carry? How do we begin to liberate ourselves from various tethers—self-imposed, culturally, historically, socioeconomically, and so forth. That was very much the central question, hand in hand with its other definition—I wanted to explore the predatory nature of humanity. It was always the title in my heart. 

Sara spent a lot of years (over ten, I think) writing this first novel.

Over years of writing and rewriting her novel, she crafted enough short stories to publish a collection. She taught other students to write a novel. She birthed and raised children. She ran half-marathons. She doubted herself over and over. 

In 2022, in addition to Lech (published by Tortoise Books), Jerks was also published by Mason Jar Press. Not much time for writing new things.

I’ve spent the past couple years on edits, production, the constant sweat hustle and grind that comes with putting out two small press books (my novel and second story collection) in one year, and between that and teaching (and editing and kids and dogs and college visits and covid and life) the days go by. As Annie Dillard puts it: How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, right. 

Sara is also the author of the story collection Doll Palace (re-released by 7.13 Books)—she considers herself primarily a story writer. Her fiction has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Catapult, and Lit Hub. Along with Seth Rogoff, she is co-editing the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible for SUNY Press. She has been teaching creative writing for over 20 years, most recently with the teaching cooperative Writing Co-lab, of which she is a founding member. She grew up outside of Philadelphia, and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two teen-agers, and a dog. 

Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how SARA LIPPMANN 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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

Couresty photo | Ucross Foundation Brendan Shay Basham in his studio at Ucross, Wyoming.

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November 1, 2023: Brendan Shay Basham

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If you love the magic of story or the magic of language, you will love Brendan Shay Basham’s debut novel, Swim Home to the Vanished. This excerpt from the third page gives you a taste of both:

After his brother died, Damien’s body went too. He simply goes through the motions as he cooks. I lost a piece of myself, he says to the potatoes, to the rising bread, to anyone who will listen. He tries to speak to him, admits to his brother that it feels like dismemberment. ‘Dismemberment is the perfect term, the opposite of remember… Some days (most) he feels like he has run out of words. Not enough poets can summon his brother, the vocabulary of loss. Grief has claimed his capacity for language.

But Damien feels there is “more of his brother out there.” And soon a journey begins. “When you lose someone close, you travel to a place of the dead. You enter the river, you swim in it, it takes you out to sea.”

The world Brendan has created is a world where anything is possible. At the end of the first chapter, Damien is preparing to shave when he feels slits behind his ears that over days develop into gills. Although this is the first time this has happened, he accepts it as a natural response to grief.

One of my favorite characters in the novel is an old man called the Goatherd.

His crusty linen and burlap clothes cling desperately to his emaciated frame. His wrinkled grin is off-putting yet sincere, a smile neutralized by dark, sorrowful eyes. His glacial joints pop and crack as he tries to rise…

The Goatherd encourages Damien to rest a bit and tells him about a village, “a land for the grieving.” He says, “The village is a place where memory goes when you think it is lost.”

The Goatherd helps Damien along his way by giving him tea sweetened with dead bees that float to the top. And he feeds him.

The Goatherd hums and chuckles as he cooks a trout in an iron skillet over the fire. He fries eggs in the leftover grease, pulls a charred potato from the embers, and pours two cups of thick, grainy coffee.

Damien’s journey continues, and the iron skillet, charred potato, and grainy coffee are mild foreshadowing of the abundant food details to come. Brendan’s website is papayathief.com, a nod to the many hours he spent climbing pawpaw trees in Puerto Rico where he worked as a chef and went out looking for the perfect green fruit for his famous Asian-style salad. In an article published last month at LitHub, Brendan wrote about that other life, how with cooking he focused on process over final product, and how his chef’s life led to his writing life.

Sometimes a flavor reveals itself in color, other times the sound of butter crackling in a hot pan is a sign from the universe… What I didn’t realize until later was that chef-life was part of my training as a writer: I was absorbing a sensory vocabulary, inventing new language.

Brendan Shay Basham is a Diné poet, short story writer, and novelist. He was born in Alaska, grew up in Northern Arizona, and lived in Puerto Rico where he ended up running two restaurants. In 2015, he returned to the States to focus on writing. During his time at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he received his MFA, his mentor Tommy Orange would ask, “Why are we writing?” Brendan answers this question in an article in the Navajo Times: “For me, I’ve decided I’m trying to remind Americans we’re still here. We’re present-tense Indians. I’m battling mythologies while creating new ones.”

Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how BRENDAN SHAY BASHAM spends his 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.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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

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Michael with his father in Mill Valley in July of 2022

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August 1, 2023: Michael Bourne

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Michael Bourne’s debut novel Blithedale Canyon is not the type of novel I normally read–it’s about a guy–and yet I couldn’t put it down. The author does something in this novel that is difficult to do–he takes a screw-up of a character and allows us to see inside him and to care about him.

Trent is twenty-nine and working at Howie’s Hamburgers, a job he needs to avoid trouble with his probation officer and a possible trip to state prison. But things are actually worse than that. He lives with his mother and step-father and a case of Stoli mini bottles hidden in the closet. Trent is not even struggling with addiction; he’s letting it have its way with him. For the first two chapters of Blithedale Canyon, about the only bright spot is when Trent listens to Nick Cave’s music.

But in Chapter 3, at the Last Ditch Bar & Grill, when he’s sitting across from Suze, a good friend from high school, things change.

Around us, the restaurant had turned festive: couples laughing, families talking over their Friday night dinners. It’s a sound you only hear, really, when you’ve been outside it, out on the dark sidewalk, alone and a little high, listening to the laughter from inside. From the sidewalk, other people’s laughter sounds so smug, so pleased with itself, but that’s only because you’re outside of it and you think they’re laughing at you. I was with Suze now, drinking near beer, because I never wanted to be left out on the sidewalk again.

I had been so lonely for so long, and for the first time in years a woman I knew and liked was looking at me in a way that suggested I might not always have to be alone.

And so the struggle begins.

Take a look at this passage from Chapter 6, where, after Trent tells Suze’s mother that he’s got a new job helping launch an online shopping service at Tam Grocery, she’s impressed and comments that she didn’t know Trent was a computer programmer.

“Actually, this job, it’s mostly administrative,” I said. But then, fuck me, I couldn’t help it, and I added: “I’m hoping to get into the programming side of things later on.”

That’s it, it’s like he really can’t help himself. As he says later in the book to his sponsor, “It’s like I’m fucking crazy, Frank. Like some part of my brain is missing.”

Now read this description of Frank that conjures him right in front of us thanks to strong verbs–jammed, drooping, pinched–and  specific details–not just a shabby sport coat but one that is short in the sleeves.

These days, he drove a cab, mostly at night and lived in a residence motel in San Rafael’s Canal District, the closest thing in Marin to an actual barrio. He looked like the kind of guy who drove a cab at night: sixtyish and balding, a little frail, a little sad, a man you could look at and safely forget. He wore polyester Sansabelt slacks and a shabby checked sport coat, a few inches short in the sleeves, and those thick-soled black shoes cops and hotel bellmen wear. His long, lean, curiously unlined face was a Picasso painting come to life: a broken nose jammed a quarter inch to the right, his left eyelid drooping like a fallen tent flap, one corner of his mouth pinched in on itself like he was holding in some private joke on the world.

Also, Northern California is alive and well in these pages with Blithedale Canyon smelling of honeysuckles and eucalyptus…

Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how MICHAEL BOURNE spends his days.