On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLO

What is This?
I read an article recently about a man who spent years as a monk sitting in front of a blank wall asking himself, “What is this?” The article said this question could change your life. When I tried asking myself, I felt a surprising rush of rapture, reminiscent of being a child let out for recess after the rain, the promise of puddles and a good stomping, and for about ten seconds the thrill swelled inside my chest. Then a deep abyss opened, overwhelming darkness, and I backed away from both the ecstasy and the terror. I returned to the middle, the connective tissue of daily life, and tried not to be fooled by the mundane.

A Different View
I wake and scrawl fragments in my notebook, catching what I can before they dissipate like fog and the dream state is gone. It amazes me how our brains create elaborate narratives while we sleep.

If I were home, I’d lift the shade—to check the weather? Confirm the sun has risen? Reorient myself to the day?

But this morning, my hotel room windows are cloaked with heavy blackout curtains. I heft back a corner to look outside, to witness morning walkers…but my view faces the hotel’s innards. A spiraling rotunda six floors high, carpeted in multi-patterned prints. The only people are those painted on wallpaper stretched along the empty halls. Metallic light fixtures hover like spaceships casting everything a yellowish hue. A shorted bulb three floors down flickers.

Nothing about today is how I usually spend my days; but how I spend my days has brought me here today.

A Debut
I’m in Baltimore for AWP, the national conference that brings together over 10,000 people each year. Four days packed with panels on writing, publishing, teaching, and a massive bookfair with hundreds of exhibitors, literary magazines, and presses, along with author events, readings and receptions throughout the days and nights. It is as nourishing and invigorating as it is overstimulating and draining.

I’ve come to do a panel with four other writers; a group off-site reading; and my first ever book signing at UGA Press’s booth. It feels both exciting and daunting.

Worker Bees
The metallic light fixtures are sculpted like honeycombs. This feels appropriate. Almost spring, I imagine worker bees emerging from hives, flying toward the source of nectar, hoping for—reconnection? Community? A secret key to the enigmatic publishing industry?

Over the past two decades I’ve attended AWP a handful of times in various cities—Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia. But this is my first time as a “published author.” My debut story collection is being released at the conference, and this feels like a small miracle, a constellation of many steadfast years.

The panel’s called “Debuting After Fifty.” It’s scheduled for 9 a.m.

Folders
If I were home, I’d be at my desk in a small walk-in closet turned writing office.

On the left side of my desk, a printed draft of my novel manuscript is covered with notes for revision. On the right side, a vertical file holder separates a dozen current projects in earth-toned folders—sienna, charcoal, caramel, moss; a system I recently created to manage the sprawling overwhelm. The colors, I read, were grounding.

The moss green folder, labeled AWP Panel, I’ve brought with me today.

Nectar
Baltimore Convention Center buzzes and swarms. It’s 8:30 a.m. and the energy is frenetic, lanyard-clad crowds ready to feed and absorb and commune.

A mass clusters in the hall where tactical officers guard the doors. Our assigned room is already packed. They’ve cleared the aisles. A Fire hazard. They have to turn away many who are waiting to attend a panel about debuting after fifty.

Panel—Room 321-322
We talk about the long journeys on our various paths to publication, perseverance, the ups and downs, failures along the way, how with age comes perspective…

During the Q+A, hands shoot up. What we shared seems to have resonated and it feels good to connect.

Poetry on the Steets
If I were home, I’d finish working on novel edits, then head outside to talk to strangers. I’d bring the honey-colored folder labeled Transit Stories with my postcards to hand out at bus stops.

Later, I’d work on the charcoal folder—The Community Poem Project and update entries.

Book Signing
Instead, I ride the crowded escalators down to the bookfair, wander the enormous aisles, browsing literary magazines and books displayed among candy, pens, stickers. I find University of Georgia’s booth where they’ve set up my book signing. A few gracious and generous friends stop by, and I gratefully sign their copies. I sell only one to someone I don’t know. She introduces herself and tells me she read my essay last year in Electric Lit. This feels like magic—how words from my walk-in closet have traveled across time and space and somehow connected us here. Everything swells with meaning, and it feels like this is the point.

Commitment
We have little control over whether our work will slip through the gates. But we do have control over the dedication to the practice, the belief in creating alternate realities by putting words on a page, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. This focus and attention, stepping outside of yourself to inhabit another point of view, imagine another way of being, is a powerful and worthy practice in and of itself. I say something about this during the panel.

3:00 Author Headshot—Room 313
I’m annoyed at myself for thinking it was a good idea to try the sample-sized hair gel. I’ve never worn hair gel before. Everything feels sticky and weird.

This is definitely not how I spend my days.

I bookmark a panel to attend tomorrow—”Sustaining a Private Life in a Public Vocation.”

Dinner
If I were home, I’d be making dinner for my family, helping with homework, loading dishes.

Instead, I commune with writer friends at a restaurant nearby the convention center. One friend is considering rewriting her novel manuscript from the beginning. We all cringe, it’s painful, brave, and yes, we agree, a good idea.

Maybe this is why we gather. This is the nectar. This is what we carry home, sustaining us when we return to the work. That we understand each other and are not alone.

Return
In my hotel room, I Facetime my family, my touchstone. I feel ready to go home, return to my base, my hive, the work, the page.

I read a little before bed. My mind slips off the words, and I let it drift, wandering toward the dream state, readying to create its own story, hoping that when I rise, I’ll catch fragments before they dissolve again into day.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Committed.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

• Not a book, but a poem. “Stepping Backward,” by Adrienne Rich. It hangs on my office wall, so I look at it daily. Lines from the poem serve as different epigraphs in three of my novel manuscripts!

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Talking to strangers at bus stops (Transit Stories!) Or asking strangers on the street to write a poem (Poetry on the Streets!)

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By MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLOA

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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

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April 1, 2026: Melanie Pappadis Faranello

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Melanie Faranello’s debut collection, Everybody Needs Something, is the 2025 winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence and out in the world today. In the first story, “My Father, My King,” a father, standing at his father’s grave, tells his son that his grandfather’s name was Frederick but everyone called him Ralph, and when the son laughs, the connection between the two expands to fill an ache the father has had since he was a child. In “Flotsam,” after Jack’s wife dies, he spends an evening with an old high school girlfriend. While the encounter is longer and more complicated than in the first story, it’s still laughter that fills the emptiness. These stories value moments of connection.

In “Take Me Out,” at the suggestion of her therapist, Leah decides to try ballroom dancing. (Her husband, Nick, has left their five-year marriage “to live on a catamaran, like some kind of made-for-Netflix movie.”) It is Leah’s interior push-pull with the therapist that gives the beginning of this story its propulsion. The dance class takes place at the Community Center (“which to Leah sounded the same as the Senior Center”) in the basement, in a children’s ballet room where Leah herself took ballet as a child. She finds a picture of her ballet class, and her nine-year-old self, on the wall. When the instructor offers her a butterscotch, the same candy her father used to keep in his pockets, her father comes alive for her, and despite the physical connections made with her ballroom dancing partners, it is the connection to her father made during this one class that changes things for Leah, that reconnects her with herself. 

“The Treehouse” is my favorite story in the collection because of its writing, honesty, and structure. Here, a couple’s seventeen-year-old daughter goes missing in October, six months before the beginning of the story. Take a look at how interesting the writing is:

They were still Martin, still Dawn. The dogs, still the dogs. The coffee, the knitting, the mornings. Some things never change. But they were not Martin-and-Dawn anymore. The calamity having taken up residence in that seemingly benign conjunction between their names.

The story begins with Martin talking about the weather as they head to the treehouse, a quarter-mile walk into the woods they’ve been making every morning for the last six months. We are in Leah’s point of view. “Martin knew she didn’t like talking about the weather. It was like painting a picture of air—just air…” But Martin continues with the weather, while we learn that the day before, their daughter, who turned eighteen in March, had sent a text and photo of herself to a friend. She was fine. In the excerpt below, so much truth:

…[A]nd here they were in the actual outdoors, Martin insisting on his report. A low rage roiled at the base of her sternum, and still she didn’t answer him, because really, what was there to say about any of it? Because if she opened her mouth, she was afraid of what kind of monstrous trapped creature might fly out.

The structure of the story is simple, yet powerful. There’s the walk to the treehouse, what happens at the treehouse, and the walk back. You will have to buy the book to enjoy the pleasure of the walk back. 

As well as of the pleasure of “Just Fine,” a close second to my favorite story and the first of three interconnected stories, where the tension between a father and a son is magnified by what is happening in the restaurant where they go for breakfast. There, everything is decorated in red and green, the wait staff dressed as elves. The father and the son must swim upstream against the current of Christmas in August. 

These fourteen stories range in length from two to nineteen pages, and inside these pages, in addition to truth and connection, you’ll find “molasses-like quiet,” “suffocating mugginess,” and “meaningless exercise clothes.” There’s something so visual about the writing. I can see these characters, and I won’t soon forget them.

Melanie, a believer in creative writing and stories as a way to connect and to explore human experiences, is a teacher and the founder of Poetry on the Streets. Her stories and essays have appeared in Swamp Pink, StoryQuarterly, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, Vol 1. Brooklyn, HuffPost Personal, Blackbird, StorySouth, Catamaran, and Connotation Press. She is the recipient of a Writer-in-Residence Award from Monson Arts and an Artist Fellowship from the CT Office of the Arts. She has also researched oral Limbu folklore in Nepal. Originally from Chicago, she lives with her family in West Hartford, Connecticut, where she is at work on a novel that has been shortlisted for the Dana Awards and the William Faulkner Wisdom Competition and that has won a Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLO spends her days.

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

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September 1, 2025: Maureen Stanton

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At the age of 35, Maureen Stanton quit her job to focus on her dream of becoming a writer. At 40, she graduated from an MFA program where she wrote the first draft of a memoir that would be published, yes, but not for 25 years. In 2024The Murmur of Everything Moving won the Donald L. Jorden Literary Prize, which grants the recipient $10,000, and publication by Columbus State University Press, located just a few miles from where I live in Columbus, Georgia.

In between the first draft of The Murmur of Everything Moving and its publication in March, Maureen has not been sitting around eating bonbons. In 2012, her debut, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting was published and won a Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. And in 2019, her second book, Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, was published and won the Maine Literary Award for memoir.

The Murmur of Everything Moving, a title I love for its length, its sound, its evocation of the heart and time, is a memoir of love and illness. A beautiful one-and-a-half page Prologue begins with Maureen’s memory of being six and walking down the street with Frankie S, the boy next door, and culminates with the three sentences below that tell the story of the memoir.

When I met Steve, at 27 he wanted, for the first time in his life, to find love. At 23, full of myself, I thought I knew what love was. In time, we would both learn about love, the hard way.

Maureen and Steve meet in the 1980’s. Early on, Maureen must decide whether to stay in Michigan with Steve or return to Boston. She calls her mother. “Just follow your heart,” her mother tells her. “Everything was clear then,” she writes. “[M]y heart was with Steve, and Steve was in Michigan.”

Of course, it’s not that easy; relationships never are.

Quickly my life in Michigan failed to live up to my expectations, though I wasn’t even sure what my expectations were. I hadn’t envisioned this life I’d chosen, hadn’t put any rational thought into my decision to move here and live with Steve.

At a year and a half in, they hit a particularly rough spot, which coincides with the arrival of Maureen’s sister Sally in Michigan. Sally is full of life and plans, and Maureen understands that she has lost herself.

In the year or so that I lived with Steve, I hadn’t swum at the Y, I hadn’t seen a foreign film or visited an art gallery. I hadn’t written any stories. I’d traded my night time reading for snuggling with Steve on the couch, watching television. For comfort and safety, for love, I’d opted for passivity, for a circumscribed world.

A month later, the Challenger explodes, and Steve checks into the hospital with acute back pain. We are on page sixty-eight. Part II, of the book and their life together, begins.

Throughout the memoir, Maureen weaves in moments of her past that enlarge the current narrative. For example, as a child, she stepped into deep water in a lake, where it was quiet and dreamy. After being rescued, she fell asleep to her babysitters singing love songs. “For a long time after, I associated loving somebody with that feeling of drowning.”

The writing is clear and a pleasure to read. Maureen will often start a paragraph with a short declarative sentence that grounds us, like “In love we are vulnerable,” or “Places shape us.” As we read on, she goes into more detail. And Maureen also writes sentences that lift us off the page.

There are moments in our lives when the wick of desire is lit, when standing on a threshold we glimpse possibility, a larger world that awaits us, and we are forever changed.

Maureen lives in Maine and teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Some of you may already know Maureen and Steve’s story from a NYT Modern Love column that appeared last June entitled, “An Engagement Ring, but No Fiancé.”

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Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how MAUREEN STANTON spends her days.