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

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July 1, 2022: Kirie Pedersen

Every day, I marvel that I get to live almost without sounds of civilization here adjoining the Olympic National Park, where I was born and still live on the same property. Instead, I sleep to the sound of waves on the cliff (May through October when I sleep in a tent right on the cliff), and eagles, seals, great blue herons, and myriad other birds in the wildlife sanctuary I left/created around my cabin built mostly of repurposed materials.

For those of you who don’t know her from the delightful comments she leaves after reading essays in this series, meet Kirie Pedersen. She’s published essays, non-fiction, and fiction in more than fifty literary and general interest magazines. More than fifty. I became aware of her writing because she read a story of mine back in 2013, came looking for me, found Catching Days, and left a comment. The excerpt above is from a letter she wrote me in 2019, when we were talking about our days.

I’m obsessed with where Kirie lives and where she writes. In a wonderful 2017 interview over at The Magnolia Review, Kirie describes her writing spot.

I work in a 10×12 foot hut I call Eagle Cottage because bald eagles nest nearby, and they cackle as I write. Eagle Cottage was repurposed from a 1924 schoolhouse that was being demolished… [It] is lined with journals, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and books on writing craft. Close beside me are jars of colored pencils and fountain pens.

In that interview, you’ll find more lovely details about her process and her materials, and her Artist Chicken!

Kirie has lived a fascinating life. Earlier this year, I read a piece by her, entitled “Finding Pulali,” which was published in Sunspot Literary Journal. This piece is about where and how she grew up. Before I read it, I didn’t know what Pulali was.

Pulali Point sits pretty much in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula and is itself a small peninsula jutting into Dabob Bay, Hood Canal, and Jackson Cove. The geological formation itself dates from the Eocene Era and is about forty million years old.

I could spend this entire introduction talking about this one piece that is alive with form. Here’s the beginning.

For a graduate workshop, I entitled this “Essay in Twelve Genres.” Feedback: The word genre is phony, unnecessary, and insufficiently ironic, a pretension by someone fancying herself intellectual. I was, they suggested, using genre to seal myself up and be safe.
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I too was concerned by the word, but it is the idea that disturbs me. When I try to write about Pulali, I grope for a form that captures my birthplace, my home. I attempt essay, dream, play, story. Word made manifest. Word made flesh.

Kirie had a hard time when each of her parents died in a two-year period while she was living across the country, far away from this world, on the opposite coast in Manhattan. In “In a Dark Time,” she wrote about the despair and depression she suffered and how she brought herself back from it. This essay was snapped up by The Magnolia Review, prompting the interview mentioned above. “In a Dark Time” received the Ink Award, for being the piece that unified the entire issue. It also received a Pushcart nomination. The excerpt below shows the mind/body connection in a number of ways.

My previous despair returned full-force, and perhaps due to the depleted immune response grief can cause, a tooth abscessed, and I developed debilitating back pain. I’d tried my list of non-drug cures that final year of my mother’s life, but my practice was desultory. Now, flattened by physical and emotional pain, I became determined to survive.

If you’re looking for a peak into Kirie’s fiction, check out “Liberating Life,” a flash piece from Glossalalia, with an ending that just keeps echoing out… Here’s an excerpt from the middle.

In Buddhism, Paul said, there was a ceremony called Liberating Life. The monks gathered animals scheduled for slaughter, and they freed them. When the Mormons purchased a live turkey for Thanksgiving, the turkey wandered around the yard. Melissa asked Paul if they could purchase the turkey and talk the Mormons into buying one already killed.
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The Mormons agreed, and the turkey moved to the Buddhist side of the fence.

This essay, “Getting a Life–Coming of Age with Killers,” which was published in Under the Sun and which received a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays 2018, is a personal look at growing up in the same place in which Ted Bundy was murdering women. It’s also a solid piece of journalism about what was actually happening, as well as the realities of the death penalty. Here’s the first sentence, which starts with the personal.

“Ted got Brenda,” my sister said.

And here’s one more excerpt from the beginning so you can get a sense of how the journalistic voice mixes with the personal.

In my early twenties, every three or four weeks a peer in her late teens or early twenties disappeared. Brenda, a year behind me at Mt. Ranier High School, was number six. The women vanished from streets I’d walked that same day, from beaches where my friends and I sat to tan, from beds just blocks from my own, and from the campuses of the universities my sisters, friends, and I attended.

Kirie’s essay “Saving Paradise,” published in the beautiful Still Point Artists Quarterly in 2017, will be of special interest to those who love places that are disappearing.

The last thing on earth I wanted was to walk to the front of that room, but if I didn’t say something, I would forever lose my chance. “I propose preservation of Meadowdale as a wilderness,” I murmured into the microphone, voice thin and shaking. “A walking-only park where children can learn about the environment.”

Kirie earned an M.A. in fiction writing from Western Washington University, where Annie Dillard (!) was her thesis chair. Kirie also loves the writing of Ellen Gilchrist, another favorite of mine. She’s taught writing for gifted and talented inner-city students, elders, and others. Washington State commissioned and published her Writing Handbook for Teachers and Tutors (published in Spanish and English) and Teaching Creative Writing Using Native American Songs and Myths. Please check out her website–I love how she introduces each new publication with a few words about the piece and about the journal where it’s published. P.S. Click on the little white lines in the upper right to subscribe to her publication updates!

Come back on JULY 1st to read how KIRIE PEDERSEN spends her days.

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

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December 1, 2021: J. Drew Lanham

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In The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal, Drew writes, “My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” One of the reasons I loved this book was the pleasure of being inside Drew’s head. “What is wildness?” he asks. “To be wild is to be colorful…”

The place J. Drew Lanham writes from is a childhood in Edgefield, South Carolina,

where Cheves Creek snaked foamy and quick and where Daddy taught us to fish. Wetting a line, hoping for a bream to take a wormy hook, calling the cows in from evening pasture; picking butter beans on a sweaty summer’s eve…the belly-filling satisfaction of homegrown food and thirst-slaking coolness of spring water; the awe of a whitetail leaping the blacktop road in a single bound; the wonder of finding an ancient arrowhead in a newly plowed field; the breathtaking beauty of the bluest jay against golden hickory leaves.

His writing lights up the brain with imagery and alliteration.

My memory continues to run like a rabbit around the times spent in the small piedmont place I call home. It weaves and winds through woods and wetlands to reconnect me to my nature-loving roots. That pleasant wandering is reason enough for remembering–and returning–home.

His love of nature gives him a strong sense of the order present in the world.

My heart has moved on to love other people, places, and things like I never thought I could. But that first place I knew as home will always be locked within.

He describes the chapters as “patchwork pieces stitched together by memory,” the book as “the story of an ecosystem–of some land, the lives lived on it, and the dreams that unfolded there.”

To listen to Drew read a short excerpt from the book via Krista Tippett’s On Being, click over to The Home Place.

In 2019, Drew’s essay, “Forever Gone: How bird lives and black lives intertwine under the long shadow of history,” was published in Orion Magazine and then chosen for the The Best American Essays 2019, as one of the twenty best essays of that year.

My office walls are covered with portraits of birds gone past existence. At a glance I can see ivory-billed woodpeckers, Bachman’s warblers, passenger pigeons, heath hens, great auks, and Labrador ducks. It’s an ornithological pantheon of loss. Some Gone Birds, as I call them, especially the ones that would’ve inhabited my southern home place, have cast spells that I can’t shake.

Today, when I lead others out to birdwatch in the remaining fragments of wild places, I cannot help but bring the history of the enslaved, and the landscape we tread upon, into the same head-heart space. I cannot tell stories of birds and of the cypress swamps and old rice fields I frequent in low-country South Carolina without telling the story of those who moved forests, soil, and water through force and greed. There are stories in the soil that have to be plowed up.

Back in 2013, before The Home Place and before “Forever Gone,” Orion Magazine also published his enumeration piece, “9 Rules for the Black Birder.” In lightening speed and with such simplicity and so few words, Drew turns me into the Black birder and I feel the fear. Rule number three:

Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.

In May of 2020, in Vanity Fair, Drew was asked about the “9 Rules.”

I don’t even know why nine rules, why not 10, 13, there could’ve been more. But I got to nine and I sort of exhaled…There are times in writing litany that you feel like you’re not breathing, and you feel like if you take a breath, you’ll lose the thought, you’ll lose the words, you’ll lose the flow. That’s what happened there: I didn’t want to lose the flow. I’ve been asked before about that nine—was there something magical you were thinking, something numerological? No. There were nine. And I didn’t need any more. I wanted in that process to then be able to exhale. And that’s when I did.

You can find Drew’s poetry, along with the “9 Rules,” in his most recent book, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. And while you’re waiting for the book to arrive, click over to listen to Drew read “Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.”

J. Drew Lanham is a poet, essayist, and memoirist who loves birds. He has a PhD in Forest Resources and teaches at Clemson University, where he’s an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher and Certified Wildlife Biologist. This January, he will be teaching a course online for Writing by Writers.

Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how J. DREW LANHAM spends his days.

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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.

Since my grandmother took me to Europe for one of those Cartan twenty-one countries in twenty-three days tours back in the sixties, I’ve loved to travel. In recent years, I will often arrive home from a trip, unpack, repack, and leave the next day for somewhere else. I get some of my best writing done in airports and on airplanes. I love the movement, the getting to and from, the new places, the old places again, the roar of the engine right before the plane barrels down the runway and that moment when the front wheels come off the ground.

Many of you know that Cal and I live in Columbus, Georgia, and also that I love Provincetown. I discovered it when I took a class at the Fine Arts Work Center back in 2006. Over the years, each time I went back, I loved it more. But it was the summer of 2012 when I fell for it like crazy. And in 2016, I bought a house here. Since January of 2013, I’ve been in Provincetown every month except for one.

Until this year.

On March 2nd, 2020, the day before I left Provincetown for book tour events in Atlanta and Birmingham, people were just beginning to talk about stocking up in advance of Covid-19. I went to the store too, thinking even if I couldn’t fly, I could drive the nineteen hours. I was thinking going to the grocery store before I left would be the thing that would make it possible for me to come back.

Cal and I have been sheltering in Columbus since March 15th. For us, going to a restaurant on March 12th felt perfectly fine, but when we sat down at a table on March 14th, it did not. And that was that. No grocery stores, no one in the house, no children, no friends, just wiping the groceries left on the front porch, letting mail and packages sit for three days, and having the wine dropped in the back of the car where we’d left the exact change.

When I drove away from the house yesterday morning at 8:45 am, I had not been by myself in a car for over three months. Deciding to come to Provincetown was not a decision I made lightly or by myself. In addition to so many more important things, Covid-19 has also deprived us of our independence. What we do affects others in our pod. Cal is the other in my pod. We talked about driving the nineteen hours, but that would involve not only the driving risks but our creaky bones in sitting positions for hours and hours and at least one hotel, and gas stations and bathrooms galore.

On June 14th, Cal and I ate outside at a restaurant. As Massachusetts reopened, the metrics were continuing to trend down. Delta was capping seating on all flights at sixty percent and leaving middle seats open. The ferry was going to run again. Earlier in June, I wasn’t ready to even consider flying; now I was. But Cal still wasn’t. We worked our way through it, and he said even if he wasn’t ready, knowing how much it meant to me to be in Provincetown, he was okay with my trying it.

When I drove into the Atlanta airport, the parking meter issued a ticket without my having to touch anything except the ticket, which I reasoned had been in the box long enough. Still, I put it up and sanitized. Finding a parking place was not a problem.

I wore long sleeves and a baseball cap. Everything I had with me was zipped away from any flying germs, so I almost forgot to empty the water out of my bottle. I avoided Clear and went to pre-check where I did not have to get within six feet of the checker to be allowed into the line. The six-feet floor markers were unnecessary. Only one person was ahead of me, and she was done by the time I got to the front of the line.

The TSA agent was masked and gloved. He asked for my driver’s license and for me to lower my mask. Then came the tricky part. He tried to give me my driver’s license back. My first thought was there was no way I was taking it back. But of course I did, and then I didn’t know what to do with it so I stepped to the side, hesitated for just a moment wondering what sanitizer would do to a license that had so much information on it the agent didn’t even need my boarding pass, and then poured a pool of sanitizer into my hands and rubbed the license and my hands around in it.

Next obstacle. Again, not people. The gray bins. I was supposed to move them from underneath to the top and put my suitcases inside. I used my shirttail. And when I got to the other side and got my bags back, I sanitized.

At the escalator, there were signs to keep your distance, which people were doing. Waiting for the trains, the same signs. Then I remembered I didn’t have to get on a train, I could walk. In fact, I usually walked for the exercise instead of taking the train.

Going up the escalator at the terminal, I couldn’t remember the number of my gate, and it didn’t show up on my phone. That’s another thing you’ll be doing all day. In addition to using hand sanitizer, you’ll be putting your passcode into your phone what feels like a thousand times because facial recognition won’t recognize your masked self. At the top of the escalator, I found the flight boards, and that was a weird moment. Of the ten boards that list the flights and the gates, only three and a half had anything on them. The rest were empty, just like all the blue seats at the Trump rally in Tucson.

The main area of terminal A was full of people (not normal full but still) and for a few minutes, I felt like I was in a video game trying to make my way to the gate without getting within six feet of anyone. I ducked out of the flow a time or two because I could feel people close behind me. Most wore masks. Maybe ten percent did not. And then another ten percent who had them around their chins.

After successfully driving the hour and a half from Columbus without a bathroom stop, now I needed to find one. My gate was at the far end of the terminal, and I thought a bathroom nearer the gate would be less populated. But it was being cleaned. I turned around to find another, and then I turned back. I had plenty of time. Why not wait for a clean bathroom? After five minutes, it was open, and I was not only the first but the only one in there.

At the gate, it was easy to stand away from people. The agent boarded the plane so that I was never closer than six feet to anyone. I didn’t have to wait on the jetway or at any time during the boarding process. The closest I got to anyone was the flight attendant as I boarded the plane, and I whizzed right by her.

The flight was full at the sixty-percent cap, and that felt safe. I had the window seat next to an exit (more space) and ended up with no one else on my row. There were people behind me and in front of me. With a wipe, I cleaned around me and above me. I didn’t recline. I declined the pre-bagged snack and water. They kept the lights low. No one spoke. I didn’t even read. I just sat there. Try as I might, I couldn’t make it fun. After we landed, I thought I would just wait until everyone got off, but people were keeping their distance and when it was my turn, I went.

In Boston, the water taxi is not yet back in business, so I took a Lyft to the ferry. Very few drivers so that was a fifteen-minute wait. I handled my own bags and was in the car less than ten minutes. I sanitized.

I had a two-hour wait, and I’d only eaten a few nuts driving to the airport. So I headed across the street to a restaurant with a large outdoor area. After giving my name and contact info to the host for tracking, I pulled the menu up on my phone and ordered guacamole and chips. And a margarita on the rocks. Closer to fun, but it still felt risky.

Only one ferry was running to Provincetown, and it was the first day for that. I was on the last run of the day. They are temporarily capping their passenger limit too, but it was unnecessary. There were only about twenty of us. I sat outside on an upper deck. As we were about to dock in Provincetown, the captain reminded us to wear our masks and to set a good example. I think he meant as visitors though, not as people.

When I opened the door to my house at 7:45 pm, I stood there for a minute and took it all in, felt the peace of being in the one place that feels right to me beyond anything I have the words to express, and then I took everything I was wearing off, including my hat, stuffed it in the washer, and got in the shower.

I had walked the last leg, and when I saw my house, it was almost too much. I think I’d been feeling as if I really might never be here again. And it still doesn’t feel quite real. Not only did I not love the traveling, I didn’t even enjoy it. Which, I have to say, surprised me. Out in the world, where I hadn’t been in a while, I was masked and vigilant for eleven straight hours. Most people and entities along the way did what they could to lower risks. And I took the risks in as smart a way as I knew how. That’s the thing. If you’re contemplating getting out there, be as smart as you know how, and you’ll need a little luck too. I hope luck was with me yesterday. There are not many reasons I would do it again, but I will to get back home.

And then to get back here again.

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

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

photo credit: WBUR

September 1, 2016: Robin MacArthur

I’ve been writing about Robin MacArthur on this site since July of 2010 when I heard her give her graduating lecture on landscape at VCFA. “Our obsessions are key to our art,” she said. We later published that essay at Hunger Mountain. Here’s an excerpt from “Abandoned Landscapes:” 

I was born amidst three hundred acres of land in Southern Vermont that my family has owned for three generations, on a road that carries my name. I grew up throwing hay bales, tapping sugar maples, building forts in the woods… This landscape is how I know the world and myself in it, and, undeniably, part of who I am.

Barnes and Noble / Atlanta

Robin’s debut collection, Half Wild, has just been published by Ecco and was selected as an Independent Booksellers Association’s INDIES INTRODUCE book for summer/fall, 2016. It’s also been chosen by Barnes and Noble as a “Discover Great New Writers” book for summer 2016. And it’s a finalist for the 2016 New England Book Award.

Back in 2014, Robin described her collection in progress:

[The stories] 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.

Half Wild’s eleven stories will slip you into the woods, onto porches, into clearings, behind trees, and up next to creeks. Here’s a little something to give you a feel for the collection, from the first story with the terrific title of “Creek Dippers.”

We’re waiting for the storm, which we can smell coming through the trees. We’re waiting for Robbie, her boyfriend with the bad teeth. We are, in some regards, waiting for dawn, or tomorrow, or next year. Leaves shuffle. Milky clouds stream past. The creek calls the water in the clouds home. My mom says it smells like desire and tips her head back, sniffing.

Hear the voice in this simple description of a day, from “Wings, 1989,”

But that day was all sun.

See the characters come alive in these descriptions from “Maggie in the Trees,”

Julie: long legs and feverish eyes and a habit of looking anywhere but at her old man.

That sly, Scorpio grin.

I thought then how she looked like she was of this place, like she was some kind of creature or tree that had grown here, and wondered how it was Rich had landed something as spectacular as that.

And in this description of Jimmy from “Barred Owl,” in one short paragraph, we know what he can do, what he drives, the way he smiles, something he says, and his power. And so much about the narrator.

Jimmy will be back tomorrow with however many OxyContin they want. That’s the kind of guy he is: the man. My man. Twenty-four-year-old Jimmy with a brand-new Jeep SUV and that beautiful win-you-over shit-eating grin, throwing fives down the front of my dress when we’re at parties, saying, “Shake it, Vale, come on, show me what you’ve got, shake it.” And just like a stripper I do.

Robin is also half of the band Red Heart the Ticker, along with her husband Tyler Gibbons. Woodsy, elfin lyrics and music that I’ve been listening to since I first heard it. They have a new album out that loosely accompanies Half Wild. Click to have a listen, and then,

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how ROBIN MACARTHUR spends her days.

I was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I went to college in Davidson, North Carolina, and then lived for a year in France. I went to law school in Athens, Georgia, worked for two years in Atlanta, then got married, and agreed to move to Columbus, Georgia–where my husband is from and where I’ve now lived for almost thirty years.

When I was 13, 14, and 15,  I went to camp in Vermont–two months each summer. That place was magical. I was hoping to go to college at Middlebury, but…

My junior year of high school I went skiing in North Carolina–in jeans. I was miserably cold and concluded I would never be able to make it through a Vermont winter. I didn’t even apply to Middlebury.

I was an idiot.

I loved every minute of my time at Davidson College but regret the basis on which that decision was made.

A lot of you know that I adore winter. As Robert Frost wrote in his wonderful and long poem Snow, “You can’t get too much winter in the winter.”*

These days, I spend a week a month in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I guess I’m a southerner in fact but I’m a New Englander at heart.

*thanks to the Hopeful Herbalist for this lovely line of poetry.

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 365 true things about me

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.

January 1, 2015: Josh Weil

I met Josh Weil in October at the Writing By Writers Tomales Bay Workshop, and he is maddeningly young, a fact also noted by the National Book Foundation who gave him a “5 Under 35” Award five years ago for his first book, The New Valley, a collection not of stories, but of three linked novellas, which also won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts.

Each novella in The New Valley takes place in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and each one parts the curtain on the life of a solitary man—first, a young, cattle farmer, then a 71-year-old mechanic with a huge, promiscuous daughter, and finally, a mentally disabled gas station attendant who has fallen in love.

Listen to how Josh draws you into the opening of the first novella, how he gives you details to picture and then a question to figure out:

It was the hay bales that did it. The men and women who knew Osby least, who nodded at him from passing trucks or said, “Hey” while scanning cans of soup in the Mic-or-Mac, they might not have seen the change come over him. But the few who knew him a little better would have noticed Osby’s usual quietness grown heavier, that he stuffed his hands in his sweatshirt pocket a little more often. They would have chalked it up to him missing his father, figured it for nothing more than a rebalancing of the weight of a life that suddenly contained one instead of two people. They would have been wrong.

When I picked up Josh’s recently published debut novel, The Great Glass Sea, I have to tell you, I was skeptical. From rural Virginia to a Russian fairy tale? But this is who Josh Weil is.

He believes in writing what he knows about what he doesn’t know, or at least in starting from that point. He believes in brevity and in breathing room—in letting time expand on the page to hold the importance of moments.

In his novel, a fraternal love story, Dima and Yarik, twin brothers who struggle to hold on to their childhood closeness amidst the pressures of adult life, become irresistible within seconds of beginning the book.

In its New York Times book review, the novel was described as “a fantastical vision inspired by bits and pieces of Russian language, history and culture”—“beautifully baffled by the mysterious Russian soul.” The Great Glass Sea was a finalist for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize.

But there’s more. Josh’s alluring pen and ink drawings can be found in both books. In the first, his images are inspired by old tractor manuals and appear in the second novella because Josh felt that a hard stop like a chapter or a number would break the flow of the story. In his novel, the drawings are inspired by the work of a Russian illustrator, and they frame the titles of all twenty-nine chapters, contributing to the fairy tale atmosphere of the novel.

Born in the Appalachian mountains of Southwest Virginia, desirous of a few more inches in height and a cherry orchard—Josh currently lives with his family in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where he is at work on a collection of stories.

Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how JOSH WEIL 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.

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

August 1, 2014: Ron Carlson 

It seems wrong, somehow, that I first met Ron Carlson in Italy, as if he should never be separated from the western United States where his writing takes place—the skies over a construction project in the Rocky Mountains in Five Skies; the mountains of Wyoming during a hiking trip in The Signal; and in Return to Oakpine, a small Wyoming town.

But Ron is not just place; he’s also language. The Signal, a brilliant example of story arising out of character, with the main character’s choices driving the plot forward, is full of sentences like this one:

This was his life, riding out two hours from a ranch that itself was an hour from town and still knowing there were unknown hours ahead.

Return to Oakpine, Ron’s most recent novel published in July of last year, is a story about a friendship that began in high school between Jimmy, Frank, Craig, and Mason, but it’s also about the choices we make. And it’s about facing who we were, or thought we were or thought we wanted to be, as we finished high school and left, or did not leave, and who we are thirty years later. “All these years had passed, but it seemed simply impossible,” Ron writes.

“Last week,” Jimmy said. “That must be what thirty years is.”

In Ron’s novels, the men and women are equal but the men are, after all, the men. And against the will of these strong men who don’t talk, the bull’s heart leaks out, a heart you could crack “with a whisper.” Frank’s ex-wife says:

The modern woman wants exactly what the modern man wants. She wants to put out the fire and rescue everybody, and then when it’s safe, she wants to go back in and wait to be rescued.

In her New York Times review of Return to Oakpine, Deb Olin Unferth quotes a passage in the book where Craig’s wife, counting up all the good things in her life, thinks to herself, “It was so close to being enough.”

Unferth, speaking about the new novel, describes what I love about Ron’s writing:

The men and their tender, disgruntled families get almost enough to sustain them, but not quite enough to calm the inner cry. These characters will stay with you because this is how we are too… What we do with the inevitable residual longing—is our story.

Ron was born, and grew up, in Utah, and he’s currently the director of the writing program at the University of California at Irvine. He’s an award-winning writer whose work has been published for over thirty years—five novels, five collections of stories, one YA novel, one book of craft (excellent if you don’t know it: Ron Carlson Writes a Story), and Room Service, a book of “poems, meditations, outcries & remarks.”

“Thirty years,” Mason said. “What is that?”
“Minutes,” Jimmy said.

Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how RON CARLSON spends his days.

Every month, I was there. Usually for a week–one month for more, two months for less. Writing, reading, walking, cycling, eating, drinking, visiting…living. I stayed in five different places. I made friends. I had visitors. In March, my writing group was there.

2013 was a wonderful year.

2013: 80 days

Happy New Year!

I’m on the board of Writing by Writers and was volunteering at the conference. My first duty was to collect Ron Carlson from the airport and deliver him safely to Tomales Bay. I lucked into a convertible (Hertz’ answer to a tiny problem) and so Ron and I could actually hear crickets and notice drops in the temperature as we made our way, directed by Siri (who deserted us five miles out). But with only one wrong turn we made it.

During workshop time I worked on my novel, except for Saturday morning when I went for a walk at Limantour Beach, recently featured in the NYT Travel Section. On Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of introducing Ron, who has a wonderful new novel, Return to Oakpine—more on the novel coming soon.

Then on Sunday morning I did something I’ve never done before. To make a flight at SFO, I left at 6:30 a.m. in the dark, trying not to wake my roommate (Practical Karen). I drove for twenty minutes, debating whether I had enough time to stop at Point Reyes for coffee but decided to risk it, and made the turn off my route hoping the coffee place was open. When I reached for my purse–no purse. I had no choice (ID) but to drive all the way back…where I parked, woke Karen (who, being practical, had advised me to start 3o minutes earlier than I had planned), and grabbed my thin black purse, which still sat by the door, invisible in the dark, then back into the car–no stopping for coffee this time. I did make my flight, going around the city because of the marathon and crossing over on the San Mateo Bridge.

Enjoy the photos!

Writing By Writers Tomales Bay

Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and join us at our next workshop–with Pam Houston, Ben Percy, and BK Loren, March 14-16, 2014, in Boulder at The Colorado Chautauqua!