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

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Laurie Stone in 2022 at age 76

October 1, 2024: Laurie Stone

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Laurie Stone might be the most interesting writer I read. I like what she has paid attention to in her life and the way she allows it to mix with what she is paying attention to now and the way it all spills out of her onto the page. Oldster Magazine, which I love, introduced me to Laurie through her regular feature “Notes on Another New Life.” After that, I read her most recent book, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was published in 2022 and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Now I read her Substack, “Everything is Personal,” which is in its third year, has over 10,000 readers, and which Lit Hub recently named as one of the seven best literary publications on Substack.

In the introduction to Streaming Now, Laurie says that this book marks a shift in the way she writes.

When my sister was dying, I would walk in the city mornings and sit on a bench and write what came to mind, and I got to thinking of these exercises as ‘postcards’ …

I have been writing in this form since then. What is the form? You could see it as a series of ‘meanwhiles.’ Also, as a series of ‘yes, ands’… I have been wondering how to describe what people will read in this book, composed almost entirely of these intimate dispatches that, garnered together, form an atmosphere.

Here’s the bit I think goes straight to the heart of why I love to read her:

[T]his book invites something of the overheard of life and the caught-in-the-act of life, the dashed-off idea that can be exaggerated and raw.”

On July 22, 2020 Laurie remembers a man burning incense on Halsey Street in Brooklyn. It’s a hot day in Hudson, NY, where Laurie is physically located. Beckett’s plays pass through, she bought a pot roast, she and the man she lives with watched Roma on Netflix, and

I found postcards my mother had sent me at camp. She said, “I miss you. I can’t wait for you to come home.” And I could see her standing alone in the back of our little house in Long Beach, staring past the flagstone patio to a giant green hedge.

And, Laurie remembers that her sister died three years ago the day before.

In September 2020, she sees a friend on Zoom. In the bath, “I thought with distaste about abstract nouns such as conflict and abuse, although I like the phrase coined by Sarah Schulman that is also the title of a book she wrote, Conflict Is Not Abuse.” Laurie writes to the friend she saw on Zoom, whom she knew when they were in their thirties… Excerpts don’t do this type of writing justice. The thoughts are so intertwined and particular, and part of their beauty is the way one thing leads to another. There’s more, and then there’s this:

That’s when I slipped back to the party at the giant apartment of Nanette Ranone, how I had marveled at such a place with so many rooms and women living together with lovers and children and conflict. How could there not be conflict, and how could women not want to help each other through our beautiful, awkward lives? I missed the sense of being on the lip of things about to unfold: the large and small details of female existence, how we talk to each other, how we can’t wait to tell each other what we are doing and thinking about, how we take each other’s faces in our hands. Nothing is more interesting, not really, if you wake us suddenly in the middle of the night and say, “Who are you? What happened to you along the way?”

Click on “Everything is Personal” to take a look at Laurie’s Substack. If you’re not familiar with Substack, it’s a new way of creating and distributing literary writing. It’s also a community where readers and writers can interact with each other. If you subscribe to “Everything is Personal,” which I recommend, Laurie’s writing will arrive in your inbox. Here are my top three favorite pieces from the last year.

“Two Mistakes,” from March 17, 2024, begins like this: “I’m thinking about two mistakes I made that seem related. The first is getting married in 1966, when I was nineteen. The second is not finishing my dissertation.” If you got married at nineteen (or twenty like I did), this essay will likely give you back a thought or two you’ve forgotten, as well as some thoughts you’ve never had, and at the least, another chance to look back at your young self with curiosity and compassion. There were so many of us doing the same damn thing.

“Anatomy of a Fall,” March 27, 2024, is about the 2023 French film directed by Justine Triet from a screenplay she co-wrote with Arthur Harari. I’m not even going to try to excerpt anything. Especially if you’re a woman, you just need to click over and read it all.

“The Grandstand and the Arena,” from June 25, 2024, I think about all the time. The subtitle is “Where do you live?” Here are the first two sentences: “In my twenties, I knew a woman who said to me, “You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life.” We were in graduate school at Columbia.” I love the way this essay winds around, all its twists and turns, and again, to appreciate it fully you will have to read it for yourself. But in the excerpt below, you will see, I started to say what Laurie does best, but she does so many things best… In any event, you will see.

That insight or prediction [“You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life”] has been the shadow hanging over my life ever since. Not really and yet maybe really. I just said it. It just came to me, the way everything I write just comes to me unplanned, as the keys click along, as if guided by spirits the way a ouija board is guided, or by some collective unconscious or dybbuk.

Laurie Stone was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, a theater critic for The Nation, and a critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian Prize in Excellence in Criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She also writes for The Paris Review, Evergreen Review, and n + 1 and is the author of six books.

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Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how LAURIE STONE spends her days.

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

xA

April 1, 2023: Charlie J. Stephens

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Charlie J. Stephens’s writing feels so light, a lovely counterpoint to the truths and the weight each story carries. I loved Charlie’s story “The Owl People,” published in New World Quarterly, about a couple that moves into the apartment above the narrator. Each word slides you along to the next.

In the past I thought shoeless households were a foolish attempt to try to keep the grime of the world away.  My philosophy was more to let all the muck in and get stronger for it. I imagined their clean feet, housed in cotton, how they must skate across their polished floors and maybe even hold each other and dance sometimes.

This lightness in the face of heavy things offers the reader hope.

At the store, at restaurants, and on the street I get ma’am’d and sir’d with equal regularity. I’ve noticed that people are generally quick to categorize others, uncomfortable with ambiguity. When I was younger, starting around age five, people generally assumed I was a boy. I think it’s the aging—now that I’m middle aged—that causes people to linger with the feminine. Everything is softening. Everything. And when I speak, all bets are off… I like existing in the in-between, not quite fitting.

Charlie’s writing feels real, as if I were listening to someone tell me a story. In this excerpt from their flash piece, “Zeus’s Fear,” published in The Rappahannock Review, it’s the details that contribute to that feeling–the nickname Pops, the trouble with thumbs, that with aging we often start to care about what we can’t do anymore.

My grandson, Jesse, calls me “Pops” and practically has to be beaten with a stick to get off his video games. I infuriate him by always choosing a female character when I play with him, which is less and less often these days, even though I am committed to proving my point. My thumbs are no match for his thumbs. I guess that’s always been true but lately I’ve started to care. Things aren’t working like they used to…

And take a look at this amazing beginning to Charlie’s story, “Willamette,” published in Peculiar, a journal I’m happy to know about. It’s beautiful writing, yes, I’ve read this opening three times already, but the details make me want to know more–the mushroom canning factory and the mother who steams artichokes, smokes Camel Lights, and sees the color of a blood orange when she looks at the sky.

Dusk on the river that evening was darkly bruised, exhausted. The putrid spew from the mushroom canning factory up the road sputtered into nothingness as evening fell, and even the semitrucks that passed on their way from the fields to I-5 rumbled slowly like they too were tired. Mom was in the kitchen steaming artichokes and smoking Camel Lights out the window.

“Babe look, the sky’s the exact color of a blood orange.”

Recently, Charlie’s love of writing has overflowed into a bookstore. They are the owner of the about-to-be-open Sea Wolf Books in Port Orford, Oregon. And if you’d like to support this up-and-coming independent bookstore, you can already order a book. AND Sea Wolf Books is not only a bookstore, it’s also a Community Writing Center offering classes and workshops. So if you’re a writer interested in having an event here or teaching a class or a workshop, get in touch with Charlie or just leave a comment below.

Although I know Charlie from Writing by Writers events, something I didn’t know about Charlie is their passion for returning stolen land to Indigenous people. Charlie has turned this passion into action–they bought land in California and are returning it. You can read more about that here.

In 2016 my partner and I bought 36 acres of off-the-grid land in an area of the Sierra Foothills covered with pine, madrone, cedar and oak. We were greeted by owls, bats, deer, bobcat, and hawks, and by clear night skies and air that smelled sweeter than what we breathed in our Berkeley neighborhood.

Charlie J. Stephens is a queer, non-binary, mixed race fiction writer from the Pacific Northwest. They love animals and have lived all over the U.S. as a bike messenger, wilderness guide, book seller, high school English teacher, and seasonal shark diver (for educational purposes only). Their work has recently appeared in Electric Literature, Best Small Fictions Anthology, Hinterland, Prometheus Dreaming, Original Plumbing (Feminist Press) and The Forge Literary Magazine. Charlie is currently seeking an agent/small press to champion their full-length collection of short stories and novel AND readers to fill their bookstore.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how CHARLIE J. STEPHENS spends their 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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May 1, 2022: Heath Hardage Lee

Vietnam was the war of my childhood. We watched it on the CBS Evening News. I wore MIA and POW bracelets. In sixth grade, I read a POW autobiography. But I never heard anything about the League of Wives, a group of women whose military husbands were prisoners during the war.

Huge thanks to fellow Davidson College graduate Heath Hardage Lee for telling this story. Her narrative nonfiction book, The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took On the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home, is now out in paperback, and Reese Witherspoon and her production company Hello Sunshine, in partnership with Sony 3000, have optioned the book for a feature film with Heath as executive producer and historical consultant!

During the course of the book, we meet many amazing women. Sybil Stockdale, the founder of the League of Wives, was born in 1924, an era when women had few rights. And, she was a Navy wife, schooled to stay home and stay quiet. Before her husband was shot down in the fall of 1965, she had “found her role as a mother and wife fulfilling.” Jane Denton was not only born in the twenties but also southern. When her husband was shot down in 1965, she was thirty-nine and the mother of seven. She “was determined to follow the U.S. government rules to the letter…terrified of deviating from protocol in any way.” These women, and Louise and Phyllis and Andrea and Helene and Kathleen and more, were led to believe they might endanger the lives of their husbands by speaking out.

To make matters worse, most of the wives needed their missing and imprisoned husbands’ signatures to cash the paychecks the military was writing. And because it was the early sixties, “[m]any could not buy or register a car, create and manage a mortgage, refinance, rent an apartment, or buy a house.” Not only were the women filled with worry for their husbands, but they had major practical problems at home. Sybil urged “the Navy to make the wives a priority, not an afterthought.”

These women played nice until they couldn’t stand it any longer. Then they flew to Washington, over and over again. They organized (with wine!) and, with the military’s help, wrote coded letters to their husbands. The end result was better treatment for the men while they were in prisons in Vietnam and better treatment for the women while they managed houses and children at home.

It’s a fascinating story. The details will amaze you–many of these women kept diaries. And Heath’s writing style is a pleasure to read.

What would later be called “mansplaining” was almost always how men in power communicated with women. It would not even have been remarked upon or noticed.

The truth was, when confronted with the Vietnam POW/MIA scenario and the women the men had left behind, neither Whiz Kids nor Wise Men knew what the hell to do.

This next excerpt begins with President Nixon’s words during a press conference.

“I have the very great honor to present in this room today five of the most courageous women I have had the privilege to meet in my life.” Sybil stood next to him, nodding in approval, dressed again in her favorite bright-pink wool suit. There was no doubt in her mind that she had gotten her money’s worth out of that outfit.

I had no idea that the POW/MIA bracelet fund drive was started in 1969 by two college students, who sold more than five million bracelets and raised tens of thousands of dollars for POW/MIA awareness-building programs. While you wait for the movie, read the book!

In addition to being a historian, Heath is a biographer and a curator. Her first book, Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause, was published in 2014. In 2017, Heath was the Robert J. Dole Curatorial Fellow, and her exhibition entitled The League of Wives: Vietnam POW MIA Advocates & Allies about Vietnam POW MIA wives traveled to museum venues all over the United States. She is currently at work on a biography of Pat Nixon that is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in 2024.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how HEATH HARDAGE LEE spends her days.

Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.
–David Bowie

This is sixty.

60 is more freedom than I’ve ever had. Really. It’s awesome.

60 is not just feeling the same but feeling better than I have in years.

60 is thinner skin–actually not metaphorically.

60 is loving my new MacBook Pro with touchbar a little too much.

60 is not yet having used age as a reason I can’t do something.

60 is wanting to do just as many things as I wanted to do at 15.

60 is wondering why, still, I’m preoccupied with freedom.

60 is starting to think hashtag before pound.

60 is having lived 21,900 days. Which doesn’t seem like so many. If anyone had asked me I would have guessed a person lived hundreds of thousands of days. But then math is not my strong suit.

60 is my own small house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the very tip of Cape Cod, as far as you can go without falling into the sea.

60 is wearing peace sign earrings and a nevertheless she resisted bracelet.

60 is having not as many days as I have lived still to live.

60 is googling life expectancy. Did you know the longer you live the more years they give you?

60 is 4 adult children—all off on their own—plus a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, and girlfriends. And liking them ALL.

60 is four grandchildren. But we are not your mothers’ grandmothers; we are grandmothers who facetime from airplanes.

60 is, as Cal says, one day older than I was yesterday.

60 is walking in the women’s march.

60 is finally liking yoga.

60 is liking socks.

60 is contributing to the ACLU on a monthly basis.

60 is taking 3 prescriptions–for blood pressure, for eyes, and  for hypothyroidism.

60 is still loving to travel–all the movement and that moment the wheels lift off the ground.

60 is strength training twice a week.

60 is feeling happy.

60 is resisting.

60 is still wanting adventure.

60 is almost never wearing makeup.

60 is finally, finally finding clothes that are comfortable, that look good on me, and that look like me–black leggings, a short little black skirt, a long top, and these kick-ass black ankle boots. That is, when I wear something other than black exercise pants.

60 is more adverbs.

60 is 32 years of marriage and still liking each other. He still makes me laugh. 

60 is being born in 1957, the same year as Caroline Kennedy and Princess Caroline of Monaco.

60 is remembering each of the years and understanding that they add up to 60, that they add up to me.

60 is listening to my body instead of telling my body what to do. It’s resting instead of pushing. It’s eating more vegetables, doing qigong energy movements, and having my body say finally. It’s being amazed as, after a year of trying, the weight just falls off.

60 is listening to Sarah Jaffe’s Clementine, The Killer’s Human, the Branches Darlin’, and Roo Panes’ I Was Here…

60 is preparing to do one last revision on novel #4.

60 is knowing the correct form is to put the names of songs in quotes but liking the way they look in italics better.

60 is adding coconut oil, cinnamon, and turmeric to my coffee.

60 is using the word still a lot.

60 is 6 decades on this planet.

60 is gratitude for each of those days in each of those years.

60 is not yet 70 or 80 or 90. It’s not yet 100.

60 is spending a month in my small house on the water.

60 is being excited about the year ahead and the rest of the journey.

~

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

THIS IS 60

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this was 58

this was 57

Continued appreciation to Lindsey Mead for the inspiration.

Here are a few I remembered after the fact–being a Brownie leader, spending every New Year’s Eve until graduate school cooking a fancy meal with friends, sending Bobby to Harlem when I was trying to send him to the Threepenny Opera, a conversation with Peyton Manning that let me know the charm of my youth was gone, watching Heroes on Monday nights from 2006-2010, Friday Night Lights on Tuesday nights from 2006-2011, Glee on Tuesdays/Sundays from 2009-2015, Parenthood from 2010-2015, binge watching House of Cards in 2013.

Last night I discovered this line in Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time–Life Beyond Sixty:
What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.

2016: Exhausted from the holidays, I arrive in Provincetown in a drenching rain storm. By the time I unload my suitcase and the groceries from the rental into the house behind the wharf house (which is closed for January and February), I’m drenched and standing in a puddle. The next day I wake up with fever. In a few days, the #1truething project is not only over but has worked its magic. At the end of 365 days, I’m now out of whatever hole I’d gotten myself into. I’ve recovered who I was and who I am. And more enormous good news–after months of looking for a house in Provincetown that I love as much as the wharf house, I’ve persuaded the owner of the wharf house to sell it. You just rent it, I said. I love it. But lots of potential road blocks–including a mortgage. My new Massachusetts lawyer and I become best friends. Still, I stay sick for weeks and weeks. I gain 10 pounds. At my six months’ endocrinology checkup in late March, my blood work shows hypothyroidism. Finally an answer. Mid-April I start taking a pill every morning and begin to feel better. I spend my birthday at AWP in LA. The week after that is Writing by Writers in Boulder. And the week after that, I close on the house. In May we add a new WxW event in the Methow Valley of Washington State. At the Seattle airport I pick up Ron Carlson and Andre Dubus, great teachers and WxW regulars, and we start the 5-hour drive west. Sam graduates from college, and even Jack flies in from LA for the weekend event. I rent my little house to pay the mortgage. Family vacation in Florida. Visits to and from the kids, who are now 35, 29, 27, 23–and living in Texas, Alabama, California, and North Carolina. I put a Stronger Together bumper sticker on my Prius. In NY, Cal and I stay at the Park Lane, where they upgrade us to a huge suite on the 46th floor with a mirror-lined dressing room and a living room and a dining room and a piano and so many closets I can’t count, and stairs to the outside, where we can walk all the way around the building. A once-in-a-lifetime experience. Amidst woodland creatures, Ro turns one and we go to Birmingham for the party. I hang a Hillary flag on my house. October is Tomales Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a major clean-out of my closet. After months of worry and posting and talking, it looks as if Hillary will win. I vote and settle in to watch the first woman elected president. But the results come in with too much red. I don’t leave the TV. When she concedes, I burst into tears. The next morning I pack up the Hillary dolls I’d bought for each of the little ones, but thankfully Kathleen persuades me to give them out anyway. The resistance begins. A few days later, WxW is in Lake Tahoe for boot camp. In December, my mother falls, and my parents, now 83, need even more help. After five years, my agent and I decide to part ways. 34 books this year–my favorite is easy, Patti Smith’s M Train. My playlist for the year includes 51 songs–Anthem Lights’ Wildest Dreams, Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine, Natalie Taylor’s Latch, Emily Barker’s Nostalgia, Ryn Weaver’s Traveling Song…And 107 days in Provincetown, with a record stay in the fall of 19 days. It goes so fast.

1 day to 60

 ~

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

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2015: Back in Provincetown, I sit still and stare at the water. The last couple of years, all my writing efforts have poured into this current novel and apparently all my self-worth as well. When I see people, they ask if they can buy one of my books yet. I lose my voice. I slip further away from me. The true me. What matters. I come up with a plan to recover myself. I will post #1truething about me every day for a year. When I’m in Georgia, I spend Wednesdays in Atlanta visiting and helping my parents. I begin to revise my novel again, but the one true thing project takes precedence and that feels right. In March I wake up one morning not believing my eyes–huge pieces of sea ice/ice floes/icebergs cover the Provincetown harbor. My hair is thinning and my nails are breaking. My endocrinologist says my numbers are fine. I cut my hair short and turn it red. Columbus is coming into its own with the longest urban whitewater course in the U.S. and a zipline across the Chattahoochee. For my birthday I step off the platform into nothingness and slide across a cable form Georgia to Alabama. Hillary Clinton will run for president. Bobby and Claire are expecting a baby! A couple of years ago I started going through our photos and digitalizing them. No real progress until now when I decide to tackle a year at a time and to finish by December. In addition to the generative workshop in Boulder in the spring and the Tomales Bay workshop in the fall, Writing by Writers adds a boot camp for completed manuscripts. We take our family beach trip to Sarasota for Memorial Day week. For our 30th anniversary, Cal and I take our first trip to the Caribbean, to Petit St. Vincent, where we raise and lower a flag outside our oceanside cottage if we need anything. Until now I’ve shelved every book I read. I begin to cull. I don’t feel that great. I don’t have my normal amount of energy, and when I get sick, it takes forever to get well. Perhaps it’s because I eat too much sugar and cheese and not enough vegetables. Cal and I go back to Canyon Ranch in July. I do a whole 30 but feel terrible the whole time. Throughout the year, there are visits from family, visits to family. In September, Baby Ro is born! And the nights become magical again–filled with little peeps and scratches, little fingers and toes. Only 34 books this year but so many that rise to the top: Niall Williams’ History of the Rain, Joy Castro’s Island of Bones, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping, Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (736 pages), Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby. 72 songs on my Spotify playlist–Joshua Radin’s Worlds Apart, Lucius’s Wildewoman, O.A.R.’s Peace, The National’s Gospel, LP’s Into the Wild, Distant Cousins’ Fly Away, Andra Day’s Rise Up, and Nate Ruess’ Nothing Without Love… My agent sends my novel out to 4 more editors, and either something’s missing or it’s too literary or it’s too commercial or just nothing. 92 days in Provincetown.

2 days to 60

 ~

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

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2013: One week a month in Provincetown. Space is opening all around me. I plan ahead, run the dates by Cal, and start booking flights. In January, I stay at The Watermark Inn. It’s closed. But I’ve stayed here before and it’s Provincetown. So just me in an entire inn. At first it’s a little spooky and then I love the darkness and the sound of nothing but wind and waves. I start a new novel. Blank pages everywhere. February is AWP in Boston and my last writing group in Provincetown. Even the universe is trying to help. I visit Jack, who’s living and working in LA. A week later, at the beginning of March, while Kathleen and her family are visiting, Jack calls to say his stomach hurts. Within hours I’m headed back to California–he’s having an emergency appendectomy. Kathleen is pregnant again. For my birthday, Cal comes to Provincetown for the first time–and he likes it too. Pam asks me to be on the board of the new nonprofit she’s creating with Karen Nelson–Writing by Writers. It feels like progress to be on the other side of a writing workshop. In May, the Days Cottages at the top of this blog, which are just outside Provincetown in Truro, open back up. I drag a mattress from one of the adorable tiny bedrooms into the den and plop it on top of the pull-out sofa so I can sleep looking at the water and the Pilgrim Monument. Cal and I go to Canyon Ranch–his 1st visit, my 14th. All my writing efforts pour into this new novel. No stories or essays. Very few blog posts. I start reading a Shakespeare play a month, beginning with Henry the IV, Part One, thought to be his first. Everybody comes home for a visit in July. Before Davidson starts back, I take Sam and his girlfriend to the beach. Lily is born in August, and just like I did with Mack, I spend a week helping Kathleen–doing one of my favorite things–getting up with the tiny baby in the middle of the night. The first Writing by Writers workshop takes place in October at Tomales Bay in California, and over the Golden Gate Bridge I drive again. On the way home I add a visit to Jack. Cal and I visit Sam in North Carolina and Bobby and Claire in Alabama. I’m now on some drug to prevent migraines, but when I head to Vermont to be on a panel–Building Communities of Readers and Writers–at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, there’s no doubt the drug is making me crazy. I hand the car keys to Pam and call the doctor, who tells me to stop taking it. My mother turns 80, and I fly to Sarasota for her birthday–taking 80 candy bars (each one numbered). Everybody comes home for Christmas. 35 books this year with the highlights being Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Robin Black’s Life Drawing–each one short but sweet. My agent sends my third novel (no one except for me likes my second) to 11 editors, and some love it but no one enough. I’m spending more time helping my parents. By way of Spotify, not albums or CDs–I listen to Motopony’s King of Diamonds, Fleet Foxes’ Montezuma, Mumford & Sons’ Winter Winds. And a new thing to count–80 days in Provincetown.

4 days to 60

 ~

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

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2012: After I give my lecture and reading, I start making the changes to my first novel that my agent (late addition to yesterday’s post) has requested, Tori Amos’ Silent All These Years and Regina Spector’s Us on repeat.  Cal comes to Vermont for graduation. When I get back home, I put my feet up and breathe. I’m exhausted. Burned out. And I’m getting headaches and visual migraines. I need to stop doing so much. At AWP in Chicago, I go to a book launch party for Cheryl Strayed. She wrote the January 1 essay in the How We Spend Our Days series. For my birthday Cal and I go to Seaside and stay in a honeymoon cottage. I resign from Contrary. In May Cal and I go to Fort Worth for Mack’s first birthday, and Jack and Sam graduate within hours of each other on opposite coasts. We split up so both have a group to cheer as they walk across the stage. Wedding emails and texts are flying. In June I stop submitting to the writing group but will still read the other submissions, and I head to Provincetown to finally stay in one of the Days Cottages at the top of this blog. I fall in love–their retro feel, the screen doors, the line of roofs that never seems to end, the way I can look out at PT. In July I make my first trip to Maine. August is a wedding party for Bobby and Claire in Birmingham. Sam has chosen Davidson, so in the fall I get to head back to North Carolina to my alma mater. And just like that—a f t e r  3 2  y e a r s—no lights leak from under doors of children’s rooms. I have made it to Part Five. The first week and the last week of September I go back to Provincetown, staying in the Days Cottages both times. In October I clean out the attic, have lunch in NY with my agent, and see Crosby, Stills, and Nash at the Beacon Theater with Cal. In November I do a two-week residency at Ragdale. The rectangular Playroom, which is my room, has a round window and stairs to a cupola, where I work. When I’m done with a page, I launch it down the stairs. President Obama is re-elected. I resign from Hunger Mountain. After Christmas Bobby and Claire get married in a very cool brewery with little white lights strung across the ceiling and a CD wedding favor with a playlist of their favorite songs, some of which become mine. The Alabama Shakes’ I Found You, Ingrid Michaelson’s You and I… 48 books this year–back to back reads of Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations topping the charts. My agent sends my first novel to 18 editors, and some love it but no one enough. My parents begin to need help with things. I listen to so many wonderful but random songs this year–Yael Meyer’s Shed Their Fear, Amos Lee’s Windows Are Rolled Down, and Lucy Schwartz’s I Don’t Know a Thing…

5 days to 60

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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

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2011: In January, I finish up winter residency and fall under the spell of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. February is AWP in Washington, DC, where I spot Josh Ritter in the bar and actually talk to him. In March, Contrary reviews are due to me, I go to Fort Worth for Kathleen’s baby shower, and Cal and I go to New York. I apply for the position of Assistant Fiction Editor at Hunger Mountain, VCFA’s literary journal. I don’t get it, but they ask me to join the staff as Art + Life Co-Editor with Claire Guyton. Together we revitalize this section of the journal and give it a new name–The Writing Life. We spend so much time on Hunger Mountain, it’s crazy. In April, Sam and I go to Florida for his spring break, and a week later Jack comes home for his. In May, Mack is born and technically speaking that makes me a grandmother, but it will be years before I’m able to use that word about myself. I’m blown away by Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water. Bobby graduates from St. Andrews and moves to Birmingham to be with his girlfriend. In June it’s more reviews to edit, another residency, and another anniversary (#26). During my grad school years, Cal and I are apart for three new year’s eves and two anniversaries. The fall brings another writing group trip to Pam’s ranch, more reviews, the beginning of Jack’s senior year of college, and the beginning of Sam’s senior year of high school. I can almost see the end. On September 12th, my to do list includes reading over 5 pages of my novel–every day, 5 pages. In October, “Mackenzie,” a short short, is published in Gargoyle, Pam and I take a trip to Napa, and Steve Jobs dies. I’m now in the thick of preparing for my graduating residency–working on my lecture and my reading, which will be from the opening of my novel, Love Like This. In December I sign with an agent who finds me by way of my blog and who loves my first novel! Bobby and Claire get engaged! 34 books this year–20 novels, 3 books on the craft of writing, 3 story collections, 3 essay collections, 2 poetry, 2 nonfiction, and 1 memoir. I start using Spotify and listen to U2’s One, Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, and The Band Perry’s All Your Life.

6 days to 60

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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

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2009: Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President. After a visit to Bobby in Scotland, Cal comes with me to Sirenland. It’s the only writing conference I know that is spouse friendly. In Italy we make a daily habit of climbing all those steps and then spending several hours enjoying lunch at Il Ritrovo. Just when we think we’re done, the brothers bring out another limoncello… Robin Black is the Sirenland Fellow, and her husband is also there. Robin’s One Story #104 is one of those I kept. We no longer rent DVDs from Netflix; now we have Apple TV and the movies just appear. Pamfa meets in Point Reyes, and I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, spending a night in Sausalito to adjust to the time change and finding a purple dress for the rehearsal dinner. On the way home, I visit Jack at Chapman. The spring is filled with wedding activities–one of my favorite being filling the guest goody bags that fill our dining room table. I love my dress for the wedding–black, serious at the top with a burst of ruffles at the bottom. My favorite part of the wedding is the arrival of the gospel choir singing “Oh Happy Day.” Michael Jackson dies. Sam gets his driver’s license. In Provincetown, I’m shocked when I cycle out to visit the little cottages at the top of this blog and discover they’re called The Days Cottages. I had taken the header photo in 2006 without knowing their name. In August I switch from a PC to a Mac. Huge. This month also marks the debut of the How We Spend Our Days series, with Pam kicking things off. The fall brings another trip to Pam’s ranch with a stop-over to visit Bobby on his birthday in Denver, where he’s taking time off from St. Andrews to go to cooking school. “The Empty Armchair,” loosely based on my first novel, is accepted at Contrary–and they feature it on the front page of the journal. I start writing reviews for Contrary, specializing in debut novels by women. “Frosting” is published in Contrary‘s Winter Issue. And right after Christmas, I start grad school at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Yes, I’m back in school–in New England! 42 books this year with the highlight being Infinite Jest. Jackson Browne comes to Columbus, and I break the rules, record a few of his songs, and put them on YouTube. During a dramatic pause, you can hear Cal sneeze in “Sleep’s Dark and Silent Gate.” Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder where the years have gone…

8 days to 60

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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

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