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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.

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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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October 1, 2021: Bonnie Tsui

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Bonnie Tsui calls her 2020 narrative nonfiction book Why We Swim, “a love letter to water and to her lifelong relationship with the water and swimming.” Bonnie is a journalist who’s passionate about swimming, and I discovered her writing thanks to the series Readings by Writers hosted by Writing by Writers. During her reading and conversation, she said she was “way more interested in other people’s stories than my own.”

In Why We Swim, Bonnie tells the story of the Bajau nomads, the water-dwelling Moken, and the Icelandic swimmer Guðlaugur Friðþórsson. She tells the story of the samurai swimmer Midori Ishbiki and the story of Kim Chambers, who after a fall had to learn to walk again. There are stories of teams and practices and Olympic swimming. From the story of Dara Torres, here’s an excerpt that highlights Bonnie’s wonderful storytelling style.

Competition kept coaxing her back to the edge of the precipice, as Edgar Allen Poe called it. This time, the precipice was lane four.

Why We Swim is divided into five sections: survival, well-being, community, competition, and flow. About the last section, Bonnie writes, “Swimming is about the mind, too. To find rhythm in the water is to discover a new way of being in the world.”

But we do get a little of Bonnie in Why We Swim, enough to understand her deep connection to the water and to hold together a book on the stories of others who also love the water. Bonnie was born in Queens and raised on Long Island. Her parents met in a swimming pool in Hong Kong. Everyone in their family of four swam—until they were no longer a family. Bonnie is the only one who kept swimming.

I swam through the divorce. I swam through college. I swam from Alcatraz, on a dare. I swam as rehab from knee surgery. I swam across a lake at my wedding…Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water.

In the first chapter, Bonnie dives for abalone and surfaces with a six-pounder. “In my backyard later that day, I clean, trim, and pound the meat tender—yep, with a rock—cook it up over a flame, and feed my family of four a meal I’ve prepared entirely with my own hands and breath and body.”

Why We Swim is one of TIME magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 and is currently being translated into eight languages, but it’s not even Bonnie’s most recent book. Her first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about big-wave women surfers, was published a few months ago, in May 2021.

Before Why We Swim, Bonnie’s book American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods won the 2009-2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection. She has won awards for travel journalism and food journalism. She helped to launch F&B: Voices from the Kitchen, a storytelling project from La Cocina that shares stories from cooks and kitchens that are less often heard. Most recently, she received a 2021 Mesa Refuge writing residency and was selected for the 2021 Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellowship. Bonnie’s writing can be found in The New York Times, and Bonnie herself can be found at Pop-Up Magazine and other live storytelling events. These days, Bonnie lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how BONNIE TSUI 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.

February 1, 2019: Tessa Fontaine

This is a woman who eats fire and charms snakes. “What couldn’t I learn in a couple of months?” she wrote in her debut memoir, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, the prologue of which is called, “The Trick Is There Is No Trick.”

We start by lighting ourselves on fire. Parts that are easier to put out than our faces. Hands, to begin. Arms outstretched, palms toward the darkening sky, I watch as a flaming torch is wiped across my hand from wrist to fingertips. For one, maybe two seconds, I am on fire.

I’d hoped some magic was involved in learning to eat fire. Something that meant you didn’t really have to do the thing it appeared you were doing… But the class is a total disappointment. There is no trick. You eat fire by eating fire.

I thought the only people who performed in sideshows were people who had grown up in sideshows. Closed-minded on my part and also wrong. But in Tessa’s “TNB Self-Interview,” she wrote this,

Years before I began writing The Electric Woman, before I even knew the sideshow I’d eventually join, the World of Wonders, existed, I was obsessed with sideshows. My stepdad told me stories about a very early friendship he had with a retired sideshow performer, a little person, whose mother had been a bearded lady. I had no idea what path would unfold when I started doing my own research, even when I joined the show. But I followed my obsession.

As fascinating as the fire-eating is, there’s another story. In 2010, at the age of sixty-four, Tessa’s mother had a hemorrhagic stroke, “as big and bad a stroke as you can have and still be alive.” Her mother became paralyzed on one side and could not speak.

For my whole life, I have been scared, terrified, of losing my mom.

I am losing my mom.

Although many mother/daughter relationships are complicated, Tessa and her mother’s was on the more-so side. When Tessa was two, her mother left. One of my favorite parts of the memoir is a section where Tessa alternates paragraphs, beginning one with “in my mom’s story” and the next with “in my dad’s story.” Tessa and her mother’s difficult but improving relationship makes the stroke all the more difficult for Tessa, and three years later, she joins the circus.

The memoir is told in fragments. The sideshow bounces off the aftermath of her mother’s stroke which bounces off famous sideshows of the past which bounce off Tessa and her mother’s charged relationship. By taking us from one event to an entirely different one, the story reverberates and gets bigger, and then bigger again. The reader is drawn in, working not to miss a thing.

And not only that, but Tessa’s relationship with her mother was pre-existing as she began her sideshow life. So I imagine that by guiding the reader between sideshow and relationship, we more closely approximate the experience she had.

The Electric Woman received a fantastic review in the New York Times, and readings last year took Tess to over forty places–bookstores and colleges and festivals, theaters and bars and even a high-end travel bag store. Tessa was a fellowship winner at Writing by Writers Tomales Bay, in 2016 I believe. In an Author’s Note in the book, she writes, “If you want some juicy stories that were left out, send me a postcard and I’ll see what I can do.”

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how TESSA FONTAINE spends her days.

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

1973: Every day that passes after I turn 16 and can drive myself away from the restrictions that are my family, the happier I am. The Best of Bread comes out, and I play it over and over again. Baby, I’m a want you… The Vietnam War is finally over, but it stays with me. Trying to understand, I read books written by POWs. That summer, camp is not an option–I’m too old. At the beach, it’s the Atkins Diet and getting a tan and listening to Dionne Warwick with the older guy next door who looks like Mark Spitz and has a motorcycle. My boyfriend sends me a letter, and instead of using my whole name, uses only my first name, which I think is weird. I spend a month on the Young Life Western Tour, where I’m all smiles. This photo is standing in our driveway.

44 days to 60

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Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Just look what I came home to!
I am obsessed with the changing colors of fall leaves.

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 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

I’m obsessed with the Kennedy’s.

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 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

Columbus, Georgia

I have a thing for little houses in a row.

It’s the matching in a world of randomness that draws her to the houses. On the outside, for all to see, they belong to each other. Proudly. Yes, they say, there is something alike about us and we need each other to be whole. Each little house standing against a world of chaos. Doing its part. Lined up in a row. And sometimes, at just the right angle, the row appears to go on forever.

from “Hidden Tracks” in Contrary Magazine

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 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

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 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

Here’s the beginning of “Hidden Tracks.”

Once upon a time is what Noalee wishes she could say about this time of her life. She sighs and glances at the burgundy underbelly of the hotel awning. She was hoping travelling to a different place would help, but this trip to Atlanta, her annual visit to company headquarters, may be making things worse. The anticipation of her swim is what pulls her through a normal day. She wonders what will pull her through this one. Her eyes turn to the heavy gray sky, then to the thick, wet air. Stuck to the pavement in front of her is light pink chewing gum, all stretched out and looking like a spider web.

The concierge steps forward, dressed in a top hat and tails. White gloves. He smiles at her.

Noalee pretends she doesn’t see, looking past him toward the parking garage. She’s waiting for her rental.

“Meeting over?” he asks in a loud voice.

She nods, looking down at her chest and peeling off her name tag. She wonders if she should think of this day as abnormal.

Continue reading…

photo credit: Chuck Grimmett

one of my favorite writing views

Since I started Catching Days back in 2008, it’s been my policy (also my personality) not to do the group blog things. Which made it easy to decline the first time someone asked me to join the my-writing-process blog tour. It was less easy to say no the second time because by then I had enjoyed reading many writers’ posts about their process. Then I discovered Robin MacArthur’s post about her process, where she wrote about how she had also said no and then changed her mind,  joining “this ever-expanding web of voices.”

So when Catherine McCall wrote a couple of weeks ago and invited me to participate, I changed my mind. Cathy is a friend of a friend, a marriage and family therapist, and the author of the powerful memoir, Never Tell. In her post on process, she writes about “surrendering to summer’s requirements for a nearly constant process of re-prioritizing the activities of my life.”

At the end of this post, in appreciation of the earlier invitations I received, and in lieu of new names, I will give you a link to the two writers who first invited me to participate, as well as a link to Robin’s post.

Here we go…

What am I working on now?

Novel number four. In fact, on Sunday I printed out a very-close-to-final draft of this novel that I’ve been working on since January 2013. But because it’s still a WIP, I don’t want to say too much about it. But I can tell you that it’s about a young couple just starting out, who love each other to pieces but who want different things in life as far as family and daily rhythms. And this novel is the reason I’ve been scarce here.

How does my work differ from others of that genre?

I bet I’m the only writer who mentions an Etch-A-Sketch in each of her novels.

Why do I write what I do?

I write about relationships because that’s where the mystery is for me. How they work. What makes them survive. What destroys them. How to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the couple. How time changes things.

How does my writing process work?

In the fall of 2012, my youngest son left for college, and that December, my oldest son got married. In January of 2013 my writing process changed. I began to travel to Provincetown once a month for a week. This week away from the life I’ve lived for thirty years allows me to put writing first for seven days in a row. It allows me to cover a room with pages. It allows me the time to take a novel apart and put it back together without being interrupted by things like the exterminator or dinner. It allows me to live where I want to live and look at what I want to look at. And on travel days, I do some of my best work waiting in airports and sitting on planes.

I can write anywhere anytime. When I’m really in the middle of something, words will wake me up at night and cause me to pull over on the side of the road.

I am discovering a new rhythm. For so long, my days were similar and filled with family, and I had to squeeze writing in. Now that the kids are gone and I have this whole week once a month, I don’t feel as if I need to hold the reins quite so tightly at home. I still feel uncomfortable if a whole day goes by without any writing, but I’m trying to learn to be comfortable with that. These days, family comes in quick, huge doses, and then they’re gone again. Or I’m gone again. I’m traveling a lot. The wind is shifting.

If I’m able to choose all the little details around sitting down to write, I will light a candle and face some large body of water, like Cape Cod Bay for example. Some people prefer a wall. I prefer water. A wall would make me crazy. Nowhere to go with my eyes. Nothing to draw out the right brain. A wall would send me into myself and awaken my left brain. The water coaxes me out.

You know how in Ron Carlson Writes a Story (a book I love), he writes about staying in the room? Well, I have discovered that for me, staying in the room doesn’t always produce results. If I get stuck, getting up for tea or to do some other mindless task often allows me to get out of the way of the death grip I have on the words. I’ll sit back down, raise my fingers over the keys, and the words run free.

The particular process around each of my novels has been different. The first one took ten years–I was learning how to write. With the second one, the left brain was still pretty much in charge, and the right brain was just angry–the ugly teenage years. The third novel is where my right brain came of age, putting on a chiffon skirt and sandals and flitting around Europe. And with the novel I’m working on now, the brains seem to be working together in a mature thirty-something kind of way that I am very proud of.

May you find the process that works for you.

Next up (but actually up now)

Claire Guyton at Daily Shorty. Claire was my co-editor at Hunger Mountain, who went on to write a story a day for a year. An excerpt from her process:

I developed my current (tentative) manuscript using index cards, each bearing a story title and notes on voice, length, form, themes, and arresting images and phrases. As I arranged and rearranged and arranged again my stack of cards, I kept drifting, mentally, into the fetal position, marveling that the gift of wordskill can morph into manacled ankles before you can say, “A speculative flash piece in narrative form exploring mortality, confused identity, and ruptured familial ties, with metaphors and analogies using water and blood.”

Jodi Paloni at A Stone’s Throw. Jodi publishes a story a month : ) Anyway that’s what it seems like. An excerpt from her process:

I’m also pleasantly engaged in the heart-of-my-heart project, my novel-in-progress, which takes place in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. I’ve just returned from what I call “a gathering retreat.” I didn’t have a plan or schedule any research appointments. I walked the coast and smelled the air. I slept and ate pastries from the French bakery. I collected artifacts from the beach, and took long drives to re-acquaint myself with the presence that got this thing started two years ago this May. That was also when I also discovered the French bakery. 

Robin MacArthur at Woodbird, Them Mornings. In addition to being a writer, Robin is also a singer/songwriter. An excerpt from her process:

I am working on finding a way to make a living, raise two young children, build a house, lead a sustainable life, and write. This is, as anyone who has been here before me knows, no easy feat. I recently started an editing business for myself, which is how I’m paying the bills. My writing—oh, sweet writing!—is simmering in the background in multiple pots. At the front of the pack is my nearly-finished-for-two-years collection of short stories. They take place in Southern Vermont where my father was born, where I was born, where my children were born. They are about women and ghosts and animals and the ways in which we humans are shaped by the landscapes we inhabit.

Happy Writing…however you do it!