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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, 2024: Joan Frank

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Juniper Street, Joan Frank’s most recent novel, brings us a time and a place. The narrator’s childhood, a childhood that comes with its own weather system and mood—heavy heat and melancholy. “We dashed from house to car on Juniper Street because the heat closed around you, a kind of paste.” Like the heat, this story, the narrator tells us, “has hung over me—haunting, hounding… I warn you: memory won’t finally sweeten out like a piece of ironed ribbon. I tell it to loosen its grip.”

And like an Anita Brookner character, this narrator doesn’t want anyone to look at her. Nothing to see here. This story is about Mary, she insists, my childhood best friend. And to prove it, she will not even bother us with her name. The novel opens with a letter addressed only to “Dear ___.” But every story about Mary works to loosen a story about the narrator, and most importantly the story of her mother’s death at a young age, the narrator and her younger sister being the ones who could not wake her. “It is possible your mother just wanted some sleep.”

Juniper Street will take you back to childhood days when best friends trailed sisters and brothers and parents and their houses and their rules, which you knew as well as your own. In Mary’s family, there were four children, and their house was loud and chaotic. “When your parents are crazy, you’ve neither time nor emotional capital to ponder it at length…You act to survive… ” In the chapter following details of Mary’s father’s morning-after rants, our narrator, who remains unnamed, tells us, “In my family’s Juniper Street house, by contrast, we did not demonstrate rage.”

Even the food they ate on Juniper Street has something to tell us. About Mary’s family,

All their food thrilled me. Real, unapologetic food. The dense, rich, truck-driver kind advertised by family restaurants and casinos, the kind people with no second thoughts about eating demanded and devoured. It wasn’t that I was not fed at home, but my parents’ relationship to food was complicated, furtive, embattled. My stepmother was grim and controlling about what we ate.

This novel, slim as a book of poetry, was published by the wonderful C&R Press after winning their Fiction Award. Its stunning cover is the painting by John Willis, “Franklin Street Bay Window.”

In her book Because you have to: A Writing Life, which won the ForeWord Reviews Silver Book of the Year Award, Joan makes an interesting point.

Writers can never ignore the perpetual, imbued irony: needing to be left alone so that we can make work which, fundamentally, strives to connect.

Perhaps like the Juniper Street narrator, we can only connect by telling someone else’s story.

Joan also reviews literary fiction and nonfiction for The Washington Post and Boston Globe. Here’s the beginning of her most recent review.

Roxana Robinson’s stunning new novel, “Leaving,” cost me some sleep, and continues to reverberate. A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, it is a tour de force and arguably her finest work yet.

Joan Frank is the author of twelve books published by a myriad of wonderful independent presses. Where You’re All Going: Four Novellas won the Gold Medal, 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. And Joan’s 2017 novel, All the News I Need, won the Juniper Prize for the Novel. Joan is a MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Ragdale Fellow. She lives with her husband in California’s North Bay Area.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how JOAN FRANK 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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February 1, 2020: Emily Arnason Casey

Once while spending a rare weekend at the cabin when I was sixteen, my mom stood beside her bed in the loft, her back to me, spreading out the sheet. I walked up to fish a book out of my bag and find my swimsuit. She turned to me and said, “Sometimes, when I’m standing here, looking through the window at the dock and the lake, I forget where I am and it’s like for a second I’m a young mom again with small children.
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I know the feeling. We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place. We’ve dipped down into a different layer on the geological map of life, and for a split second we really are the other self again. (9)

This excerpt is from Emily Arnason Casey’s Made Holy, her debut collection of essays from the University of Georgia Press. Throughout the book, just as here, Emily will take us in close for a scene and then float us out to stretch our hearts even more. “Now, as I run, story lifts its wild heart from the trees, stringed together on the wings of blackbirds, of berries, of dreams.” (178)

It’s true that these twenty essays tell the stories of Emily’s family and their struggles with addiction. “Even now, years into recovery, this disease rips apart my carefully stitched seams on certain days.” (39) But she doesn’t leave us there. Just as Emily does with the paragraphs above, she starts close in and lifts us up and out wide wide wide. And who wouldn’t want to follow her there.

Emily and I share obsessions–things, houses, self or selves, leaving, and the passing of time. And then I think, there might so much in these essays that each of us will find shared obsessions inside her sentences.

At the beginning of the book, Emily thinks of her grandmother’s old oak dresser, which is for sale, as a link between the women in the family. “How the objects in our life extend such meaning, I’ll never know, but the history of things gives joy.” (21) Sixty pages later, Emily revisits this theme in an essay devoted to the subject, where she is writing about her husband’s baseball cards. “Collecting wards off ending. His objects refuse to let the past slink away, to let childhood dim into remnants of something lost.” (84) In the last paragraph of this essay, this line. “Objects are the antithesis to letting go.” (88)

About her grandparents’ house in Minnesota, she writes, “I will not return again, and the house will fall to memory, to the unguarded parish of nostalgia, but the myth and story of it remains growing stronger with every year.” (32)

Early on, Emily writes about trying “to put together a solid self.” (11) Later, about her childhood, she goes deeper. “I started to divide. What was really me remained folded inward, a secret, different from the me I presented or let be observed.” (65) Still later, she writes, “But perhaps longing becomes a pleasure all its own, and we are merely an amalgamation of all our selves–all the girls we once were and the lands beloved.” (135) Which sent me in search of these words from earlier. “If nostalgia is the desire to return, to know again, to relive, longing carries the want for nostalgia over the thing that never was.” (109) This back and forth makes me think of my childhood self weaving a placemat with ribbons of paper, picking up the next strip and taking it over and under the others. It makes me think this book may have started out as twenty essays, but it turned into one.

About her move from Minnesota to Vermont, Emily worries. Maybe she is “living the wrong life,” but here is the thought that floats up. “I needed other landscapes. I needed the distance that myth is made of and a sky fortressed by mountains.” (139)

Not only has Emily written these gorgeous essays, but she had the brilliant idea to invite artists to be in conversation with one of them. “The Essay Exhibits” is a show of eight Vermont Artist’s work in conversation with “Beneath a Sky of Gunmetal Gray.” This exhibit is currently touring Vermont libraries. Next stop, Brandon Public Library, where there will be a Reading & Conversation on Tuesday February 11th. For more information and future dates and locations, please check her website.

Emily is a faculty member at the Community College of Vermont. Her work has been published in the Rumpus, the Normal School, upstreet, and other journals. We met at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how EMILY ARNASON CASEY spends her days.

I was born in 1957, the oldest of what would turn out to be five of us, and my mother needed help. In those days, she referred to Fanny as a maid. These days, I use the word housekeeper. But in the way that household help often is, Fanny was so much more. My favorite memory is our sitting on bar stools in the kitchen in 1966 waiting to find out if I would have a fourth sister or finally a brother.

In Maids, Abby Frucht‘s enchanting slim volume of 87 pages, we meet Ida and Della and Cynthia, and our childhood. From bullfrogs to brooms, from The Grenadines to Finland, from twin beds to the color of our skin, from then into the future and back again. The epigraph by Geoff Manaugh reads, “Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it.”

This book is described on the back as being “in poetic form,” but I have to say I never once thought poems. Perhaps it’s the prose writer in me, but Maids reads (and I’m not alone here) like a collection of linked stories.

Whatever you call it, the short pieces, long sentences, and lack of commas were a masterful choice, conjuring a different place and time–the blur of childhood and the haze of young adulthood. The lack of commas in particular slowed my reading, often causing me to reread a sentence, after which I’d come away with a jolt of meaning I’d missed the first time around.

[C]ommas bug her because they cause a divide between halves of a thought parts of a recollection…”

In this excerpt from “What Is/Was Her Name Again The Pretty Maid From Finland,” note how the lack of commas contributes to that feeling of wait a minute, is she saying what I think she’s saying.

For instance once Aunt Stella said but when I got back to the telephone the caller was gone. Of course he didn’t say he was he wouldn’t why would he but I could tell by the sound of his voice he was by how he sounded when he asked is the house still available he was but all I said was excuse me for just one minute I need to get this same meatloaf we’re eating out of the oven but when I got back he’d fled he had hung up the phone he was extremely polite he was very well spoken I felt/feel lousy about it except I have to imagine it’s best for the neighbors.

Abby uses details to conjure people. From “Mirrors,” “the bottle of Windex she carries and the dangling rag.” And details to conjure time periods. From “Sheets,” “Swanson’s foil trays.” She uses repetition of themes and threads and language–all of which contribute to the cohesiveness of this book but more than that they create the feel of those mysteries that start in childhood and linger into adulthood and even now make us wonder. From “Occasionally,” “Also is it wrong to hope to imagine Cynthia’s feelings?”

I will leave you with this line from “Broom,” where the puppy Truman is watching the nightly sweeping. “It’s the thing he believes she is tussling with not the thought behind the spine of it…” The end of this story is pure delight.

Thumbs up. Maids out today from Matter Press.

How We Spend Our Days: Abby Frucht

To paint a thing had always been a way for me to love it.

If you’re looking for a good book–a sure thing, a book you can sink down into and a world you can get lost in–you’re in luck. Robin Black’s debut novel, Life Drawing, was published on Tuesday. The story of a marriage between a painter and a writer, it’s written with lots of interiority, and most importantly, lots of honesty. The characters are as flawed as we all are, and there are no easy answers anywhere.

The opening paragraph paints a picture that sticks with the reader not only the length of the book, but even now, months after I finished it.

In the days leading up to my husband Owen’s death, he visited Alison’s house every afternoon. I would watch him trudge over the small, snowy hill between our two properties, half the time away from me, half the time toward me. And I would wonder what he thought about as he went. Wonder too if Alison watched him from a window of her own, and whether the expression she saw on his face as he approached was very different from the one I saw as he came home.

The narrator, Augusta (Gus) Edelman, is a painter, and periodically she tells the story as if she were looking at a picture.

This is me, just before my first glimpse of Alison…

And later,

This is Owen, on the day we moved in…

Genius structure for a novel written in the point of view of a painter and here’s a genius use of an adverb:

We shared our bed, uneventfully.

While renovating a bathroom, Gus discovers old WWI newspapers, which spark a desire to paint these lost boys, and this project is as captivating as the relationship between Gus and Owen, with the dead boys moving through the rooms as though they had all the time in the world, an eerie echo of Owen’s movements, and for that matter, all our movements.

There are rich descriptions of table settings…

On Thursday morning, I decided to set the table in white, almost entirely white. White lace over white linen. White napkins. White china—or as close as I could find among our strange collection. White candles set into old silver candlesticks. I wanted a canvas for the meal. I wanted to experience the table filling with food as I experienced a painting coming together. The only exception I made was for a handful of leaves, still moist, orange, red, that I cut into thin strips and scattered, confetti across the whiteness, ribbons of autumn itself.

There is the world of marriage…

“And so it begins,” Owen said at dusk, as together we crossed the hill between our homes. And so it began.

There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you’re having and the one you’re not. Sometimes you don’t even know when that second, silent one has begun.

Meanwhile, we lay side by side each night like figures on paired sarcophagi, and instead of stopping for a caress or a kiss when our paths crossed in the kitchen, or on the stairs, we muttered things like excuse me, and sorry about that.

Often in novels about a marriage, there’s nothing driving the novel forward. Not so here, where, with the retrospective point of view, we know from the first paragraph that Owen dies. In addition, the writing itself pushes the reader from page to page.

“Yet I didn’t hate Nora that night.”

I may have to read Life Drawing again, right now, right this minute.

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

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

October 1, 2013: Thomas Larson

Tom Larson was already a seasoned reviewer when I took on the job as Reviews Editor of Contrary Magazine back in the fall of 2010. That was scary. But in my first tentative forays as an editor, he did a terrific job of shoring up my confidence. I hope he won’t mind if I share his first response to my first edits:

[Y]ou’re not being brusque by being an editor. Goodness knows I’ve been edited like you wouldn’t believe, especially in journalism. Keep doing what you do, which is making me make sense.

Tom loves to write about music and his knowledge and love show in his writing. Take a look at these passages:

Minimalism. Art’s 50-year-old movement. A force of stasis. Of repetition. Of the barest materials. In writing. Ray Carver. Language eviscerated of ornament. The impact: disturbingly hollow. In painting. Frank Stella. Primary colors, perfect shapes. The response: purely dispassionate.

from I Am Large. I Contain Multitudes. on Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown by David Yaffe published by Yale University Press (2011).

Dylan is a shape-shifter, a premodern postmodernist. He’s legendary and real, the tightrope-walker still plying 100 concert dates a year. His long life lacks a singular narrative. Like Miles Davis, his genius has been to forge a new identity, frame it with a new sound, then abandon it for—or be called by—another turn.

I loved the books Tom chose to review, most of which I ended up buying. In addition to the ones above, here are a few of the others, with the links to Tom’s reviews.

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes

Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work by Carmen Gimenez Smith

The Guardians: An Elegy by Sarah Manguso

I’ve heard Tom speak on memoir at AWP in a huge and packed room. I’ve read bits and pieces from his well-respected book The Memoir and the Memoirist, reviewed by my friend Richard Gilbert back in September of 2008, the same month I started blogging and just a couple of months after Richard started blogging.

Over the last few months I’ve been reading from Tom’s book, The Saddest Music Ever Written, while listening to the that music. I recommend the book (also reviewed by Richard Gilbert). I’ve underlined throughout but want to leave you with an excerpt from the prelude, along with a clip of Samuel Barber’s music itself.

Anyone who loves music realizes that this piece expresses no single thing, no one truth, and yet there’s no mistaking its honesty. What’s more, the work taps into undiscovered feelings, feelings we may not know we have until the work unlocks them. If there’s one piece in the American classical canon that lends its voice to help us grieve losses of which we are conflicted or unaware–personal, national, universal–it’s Barber’s Adagio.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how THOMAS LARSON spends his days.

It’s never the wedding dresses, you know. We keep those, too, but only because they’re so blooming expensive. No. I’ve seen enough old ladies’ closets to know what we really hold on to. Not the till-death-do-us-part dresses. It’s those first lovely dresses: the slow dance dresses, the good-night-kiss dresses. It’s those first pangs we hold on to.

[S]he began to understand why her sister liked to come here and try on beautiful dresses she could never buy: it was like trying on another life.

Isabel’s friend Spoke works in tech support at the library. In this sentence, we feel the gentleness of the narrator:

Spoke is the nickname he got in the war, and though no one here was in the war with him, it comes out naturally, as if it were the only way to acknowledge what he has been through without actually bringing it up.

Take a look at this paragraph:

She remembers sitting in an armchair with Agnes reading the nature encyclopedia, screaming over and over again, first with fright, then glee, when they turned to the magnified pictures of spiders. Her sister read that spiders have book lungs, which fold in and out over themselves like pages. This pleased Isabel immensely. When she learned later that humans do not also have book lungs, she was disappointed. Book lungs. It made complete sense to her. This way breath, this way life: through here.

Seven sentences. The longest one with thirty-one words; the shortest, with two. Each word feels carefully chosen. And then comparing books to lungs. This way, through here.

Here’s what Isabel’s mother told her:

Isabel, she said seriously, believe me when I tell you that everything is temporary. Everything. There’s not a thing in the world that will not change, including you.

Repeated words and images (glaciers, lung, cheap, fuck, hands, bell, story) act like beads strung together to create a chain–only here they create a whole world, Isabel’s world.

And the ending will take your book lungs away.

On April 1, Alexis will add her day to the How We Spend Our Days series.

And I belong to a big family–this month we have four weddings–a godson, two nieces, and a son–and Christmas. Still I want to take time out to begin (yes I just mean begin) again to think about this question.

If you’ve clicked on the “about blog” tab at the top of the page, you know that my book review policy includes this statement:

My challenge to myself is to find the good thing in every book I read.

In A.M. Homes new novel, May We Be Forgiven, despite The New York Times review, finding good things was not difficult. I think this is a good book. In fact, it’s one of the best novels I read all year.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. For me a good book does not have to be perfect.

May We Be Forgiven is deliciously long. The ARC a friend gave me clocks in at 480 pages. Dense pages. A world you can get lost in for days and days. While reading The Round House was like running downhill, May We Be Forgiven was like hiking up.

The dialogue is stellar. Most of it anyway. The NYT cited a poor example. But there are so many crisp passages. Here’s one from page 48 about a body in a coffin:

“How do you know they put the right clothes on her? Ashley [11 yrs old] asks.
“It’s a question of trust.” [the narrator]

And so many that made me laugh out loud. Here’s one from two pages later, after the funeral:

“Can we go home now?” Ashley asks.
“No,” Nate [12 yrs old] says. “There’s like an after-party thing?”

Rather than tell us on the page what emotion to feel, Homes generates emotion inside the reader by using plain, honest, detailed, and lacking-in-emotion words. Often the narrator is numb to what’s going on, but I was feeling emotion. [The following quote is from page 14, but it is a spoiler. Skip it if you don’t want to know.]

She is screaming. The one blow isn’t enough. She tries to get up; the lamp isn’t even broken. George looks at me and then picks the lamp up again and swings it at her. The porcelain vase that is the base explodes against her head. By then I am out of bed. He tosses aside what remained of the lamp–picks up the telephone, and throws it to me.
“Call it in,” he says.

Yes, there are gruesome descriptions at the beginning and some weird sexual situations throughout the first half, and in the second half I did wonder where all the money was coming from and where the other side of the picture was (no designated parts or chapters). But each evening I looked forward to sitting down and picking the book up. I liked the main character. The writing is excellent. I wasn’t ever bored. I didn’t skip over any parts–any. I don’t think I skipped a single word. 480 pages.

I didn’t underline a lot. There are very few lyrical passages. Homes tells it like it is. But here are two:

I unpack the box, making a row of piles of the material, careful to keep things in order–but wanting to get to the middle, the end, wanting a sense of the arc of the materials, the shape of things.

I stand on the front steps, slightly apart, observing [the children], as though I now hold knowledge that separates me from them–but I don’t. They are simply engaged in what is before them, and I am thinking about what time we have to leave, about passports, currency, and suitcases, while they are thinking it is summer and the day is perfect and I’m making spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

More on Homes’ use of white space when I have time…

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky,

I want to write something/so simply/about love/or about pain/that even/as you are reading/you feel it…*

264 pages, 2 parts, and 6 points of view. With solid details like ten-dollar bills wrapped in aluminum foil.

On page one, Rachel is leaving the hospital. On page two, she refers to the accident. What has already happened is revealed (not here) slowly over time, never making us angry or confused and building a picture we want to resist for so many reasons but that ultimately we can’t avoid seeing.

From Rachel, who is in sixth grade when the book begins:

I am caught in before and after time. Last-time things and firsts. (8)

Grandma uses a sharp comb and it feels like she’s dividing me in half. (11)

From Jamie, who will adopt the strong name Brick:

When he finally reached the courtyard, he saw that his bird was not a bird at all. His bird was a boy and a girl and a mother and a child. (19)

With assured echoes from the beginning of the book to the end and from mother to child, The Girl who Fell from the Sky is at the same time a story we have never read before (as Barbara Kingsolver writes on its cover) and a story we all carry with us.

* from “I Want to Write Something So Simply” by Mary Oliver Evidence

Poetry: Northerners by Seth Abramson

Essays: Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer and A Journey with Two Maps by Eaven Boland

Fiction: And Yet They Were Happy by Helen Phillips, You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon, and The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen

Here’s the beginning of my review of The Bird Sisters:

When they were teenagers, Milly hoped to marry and have children, while Twiss hoped to stand on the Continental Divide and “to be the world’s most interesting spinster.” Rebecca Rasmussen’s debut novel, The Bird Sisters, opens at least half a century later with Milly and Twiss living together in the house where they grew up. Perhaps, as Twiss concludes, they just didn’t want those other things enough.

To read more…

Here’s what’s up and coming at

THE WRITING LIFE:

1) ANOTHER LOOSE SALLY – Hunger Mountain’s blog about writers and writing anchored by Claire Guyton (check in every Thursday!)

~june 16: The Catch / june 9: Shape is the Thing / june 3: Envisioning Concrete Pianos /may 26: New Writing Rule

2) AUTHOR VISITS  – interviews with the Hunger Mountain contributors

3) CRAFT SHORTS & ESSAYS – large and small doses of craft (online submissions for both forms now open)

~first short: On Endings: 11 Strategies by David Jauss

~May essay: Conjuring the Magic of Story by Stephanie Friedman

4) LISTS: LITERARY & LAUNDRY – coming soon – postcards from the organizational side of the writing brain

5) WRITER, INC., debuting in September, memos from the business of the writer’s life 

6) REVIEWS GONE SIDEWAYS – coming soon – anything but your mother’s reviews.

Check us out here

and

stay tuned!