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On the first of each month,
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how they spend the day.

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December 1, 2024: Karen Nelson

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The Sunken Town, the first novel by Writing by Writers co-founder Karen Nelson, will be published this December by Sibylline Press, an independent press located in California. I met Karen in a writing group, back in 2007, when she was working on a first draft of this novel. I’ve read several iterations since that first one, and I’m here to tell you, when I read the final version last month, I could not put it down. The Sunken Town just sings.

It’s literary fiction and a page turner and half the story takes place on a college campus, so if you liked Rebecca Makkai‘s I Have Some Questions For You, pre-order this right away. In The Sunken Town, there are two narrators, both young women. The novel begins in Claire’s point of view. She’s a junior in 1993 at a small New England college.

Karen grew up in California, went cross country to Colby College where she studied with Richard Russo, then she worked in Boston for a number of years before returning to California’s San Francisco Bay Area. During her long career in nonprofits she has protected open space, funded cancer research, trained people to complete endurance events, and helped writers bring their work into the world. When not organizing writing workshops (or cookbooks), she can be found hiking with her dog (often plus husband), reading, traveling (often writing about it), experimenting in the kitchen, hosting dinner parties, or hanging out with me. Look for her second novel in 2026!

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Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how KAREN NELSON spends her days.

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

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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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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.

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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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June 1, 2021: Christina Chiu

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At one point in the fourteen-year odyssey that was writing the award-winning novel Beauty, Christina Chiu had over a thousand pages, but once she figured out the structure–jumping forward by way of moments in the life of character Amy Wong–she zipped through to the finish line. Women, sex, power, fashion, a lifetime–and sharp and sensuous writing, Beauty is Christina’s second novel and the winner of the James Alan McPherson Award 2040 Book Award. Kirkus Reviews recently named it one of the Best Books of 2020.

Amy is sixteen when the book opens with the chapter called “Wild Hen.”

“I got a C in math,” I admit.
“I know.” Ma crushes the butt in the ashtray. “You think I don’t know? I know everything. There’s nothing I don’t know.”
I start laughing. But then it hits me she’s talking about Dad. I get a pain like I swallowed a cough drop.

Witness that sharp edge and sufficient detail to engage the reader, as well as the appeal to the senses. We feel the cough drop in our throats. Here are more examples: “an ugly bite in her voice,” “hatred rings in my ears,” “there’s a car wreck inside me.”

In the next chapter, “Bootman,” which was actually the first chapter Christina wrote, there are smells of new leather and shoe polish and the feel of velvet fabric, cool against the skin. Here’s an example of how sensuous the writing can be.

Bootman kneels. Slips the boot on. Then he leans in. One hand cups my calf, clasping the upper sides of the boot together. The other hand zips. The lace mesh makes it feel snug and sturdy while the lining reminds me of a silk slip. I hand him the other boot and he sets me up. He smoothes his hands up and down the backs of the boots, then slides them to the bare insides of my knees. I rock onto the soles, the front of my skirt brushing the spikes of his gelled hair. He squeezes the sides of my foot and presses a thumb at my big toes. He moves so close I feel the warmth of his breath at my thighs. “What a good fit.”

The last lines of the third chapter, “Shadow,” will not spoil anything and again show the power in the concrete detail and in showing the reader what you mean by way of the senses. They speak to the whole novel and are just so beautiful. (And will mean even more after you’ve read the chapter.)

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

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February 1, 2021: Toni Jensen

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Years before Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land was written, Toni Jensen’s childhood best girlfriend commented on social media, “You know, I’m part Kiowa.” In the fourth essay of the book, “Give and Go,” Toni writes,

Of course, I objected to the language, the ‘part.’ Which part? The back of the left knee? The curve of the right ankle? The crook of an elbow? How many ways do we carve ourselves up and portion out our parts, our bodies for other people’s comfort… My childhood best girlfriend was Kiowa, and I am Métis, and we grew up together in a mostly white town…

Language matters. Toni was born to a Catholic mother and a Native father. She defines Métis by way of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as “the offspring of an American Indian and a person of European ancestry.” She adds her own definition. “From within, then, being Métis is about land and people and belonging.”

Toni’s references in essay after essay to Webster’s underscore the importance of language. And the dictionary also works as an anchor in this book that rises up out of the past into this moment in America that holds so much violence–gun violence, racial violence, violence to the land, violence to the body, domestic violence, domestic terrorism. Each of these essays is also grounded in place and could be titled as such–the Bakken in North Dakota; Audubon County, Iowa; Vermillion, South Dakota; Kingman, Arkansas; Valentine, Nebraska; Saint Paul, Minnesota… Toni has practiced this going her whole life. But to have used the names of places as titles would be to suggest that these violences are limited to these places.

[P]erhaps it doesn’t matter in the end what you call this sort of everyday American violence. But simplifying violence like this, demoting it down to the world of the domestic, is a lessening, a looking away.

In this memoir called Carry, Toni insists on the word and its meanings. To carry a gun. To carry a baby. To carry it all with me. When they came to carry her home.

To memorialize correctly, language matters.

Priyanka Kumar, in her New York Times review of Carry, writes

In “Carry,” Jensen scours language to find a new way of writing about how historical injustices seep into the present, and how the politics of racism and neglect poison bodies (Flint, Mich.) or choke them (police brutality)… Her statistics on the American contagion of domestic violence (which she lived through at home), gun violence (which she skirted in the neighborhoods she lived in) and mass shootings (which one of her students experienced) anchor an unsettling account that creeps into your bones.

Toni teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a 2020 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA. She is also the author of the short story collection From the Hilltop (Native Storiers: A Series of American Narratives). You can watch Toni read from Carry and in conversation with Pam Houston as part of Writing by Writers’ Readings by Writers series.

When I started writing in January of 1997, I had no idea what I was doing. It would be a number of stories and three novels later before I started writing Tidal Flats in January of 2013. So there’s the story of all the people who helped make Tidal Flats a real book, but that’s only part of the story of how I kept myself going all these years as a writer without the most accepted, and most hoped for, form of validation–publishing a book.

A big part of the answer is YOU. All of you who read a post and left a comment or emailed. You have kept writing novel after novel without publication from feeling as if I were writing in a void. Particularly when I hit that low point back in December of 2014 and began the one true thing a day, so many of you came out to support me. I’m happy to be able to officially thank you in the Acknowledgments section of Tidal Flats.

While we are working away on something that may take years and years before it appears in the world, the single most important ingredient to keep going is to feel as if we are being seen and heard. And the way to do this is through community.

It might be a writing group, an MFA program, a group on Facebook, a writing conference that you return to over and over, a writing program where you volunteer, a residency where you work during the day but have dinner together at night.

I am so solitary and private and need so much time to myself, and yet, looking back, this is how I kept myself going–other people.

Without understanding that was what I needed, I sought communities and found them. And I have been so lucky. In 2007, I joined a writing group. Since 2008, we have had a community here at Catching Days. In 2010 I joined the community at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2012 I became a part of the community at Ragdale. And starting in 2013, I became a part of Writing by Writers.

Many thanks to all of you for being out there and responding to my writing, for bolstering my confidence as a writer, and for making me feel part of a community.

Cheers.

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, 2019: Andre Dubus III

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Don’t read any reviews of Andre Dubus III’s new novel, Gone So Long. Not because they’re bad but because all the ones I found include spoilers. And it’s not that they would ruin the big picture, but they will ruin the lovely, slow way we begin, the way we meet Susan and Daniel as who they are now and only gradually learn about their past. Meeting them this way first adds so much depth to the hard questions the novel asks.

Andre is a master at building a story, brick by brick, moment by moment. I always have such trouble with where and how to begin. It feels as if there is so much that needs to be said all at once. But reading these opening pages calms the writer in me at the same time that the reader in me has turned 7 pages without realizing it. In 7 pages I was hooked on two different characters.

Here’s Susan.

One afternoon it was so hot she could smell the rot in the dead branches on the banks. She could smell the wet sand and clay and the tiny crayfish. She could smell gator shit and Spanish moss and her own sweat. But what she never smelled were the brown and gold scales of the cottonmouth snake coiled a foot from her bare feet and legs. When she looked down and saw it, she’d just taken a deep drag of her cigarette and now she nearly coughed but did not move…How could she have been so stupid? How could she have allowed herself to be so exposed? …She slowly exhaled smoke through her nose, and maybe she made a noise of some kind, for the snake lifted its head and opened its white mouth and Susan was sprinting back through the trees and this is the moment that came to her as she watched the shadowed entryway of her father’s parole officer’s office.

Here’s Daniel.

Today he notices his hands. They’re his old man’s–thick fingers, chipped and yellowed nails, though his father’s always had carnival paint in his cuticles that never came out. Daniel reaches for the nail file he uses to weave the cane under and over itself. A warm wind kicks up from the east and brings with it beach sounds, or maybe it’s just Daniel’s memory of them–the creaking gears of the Ferris wheel and the popping water balloons and the cries of the gulls.

Andre Dubus III is a force of nature. He is always all in. His books are beautifully written and real. And he can quote a gazillion writers on whatever craft issue needs addressing or whatever seemingly unreachable goals he wants you to strive for. But it was what he shared about his own rejections that have meant the most to me and that I have copied and pasted and sent to friends and even to my agent way back when.

He says his first book, the fiction collection The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, was submitted to 38 publishers over five years before it found a home. His second, the novel Bluesman, was turned down by more than 30. His third, House of Sand and Fog, collected 24 rejections over two years.

I first met Andre in the fall of 2014 when I picked him up from SFO to drive him to Tomales Bay for a Writing by Writers workshop. He railed for an hour and a half against smart phones, proudly displaying his flip phone. He also put me on that phone with his wife, although at this moment, I can’t remember why. I took the above photo in Chamonix, France, last year. Andre was reading to us from Gone So Long.

I first read his work over twenty years ago. After somehow missing his debut collection, The Cage-Keeper and Other Stories, I started with Bluesman, his first novel structured in 40 short chapters, and after that came House of Sand and Fog (an Oprah pick and movie), then The Garden of Last Days, Townie (his memoir–get the audible and listen to him read it), Dirty Love (4 linked novellas), and now Gone So Long.

More than what happens, I remember his characters. In Bluesman, it’s Jim playing guitar and his son Leo watching his face, how soft it gets. From Dirty Love, it’s un-cool Marla and cool Devon. Read these lines from “Marla.”

Sometimes after dressing for work, Marla would stand at the kitchen sink with the last of her coffee and feel as if her small apartment and everything in it were props for a movie she wasn’t even in, as if she were working for all this for somebody else. She was twenty-nine years old and had been a teller at Providential Bank for eight years.

Soon the condoms were in a bag in Marla’s hand, and as she stepped out onto the sunlit sidewalk she felt part of the bigger picture somehow, more of a citizen of the world she lived in.

The ending is just perfect. But my favorite line from Dirty Love comes from the title novella. We’re in Devon’s point of view.

With no music in her head, there’s too much in her head…

Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how ANDRE DUBUS III 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.

February 1, 2019: Tessa Fontaine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am losing my mom.

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

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

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

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

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

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, 2018: Samantha Dunn

This is a long game, folks. Be the storytellers.*

As we approach the new year, life circles round. In 2001, even though I’d finished a novel manuscript, almost the only thing I knew about writing was reading it. But I signed up for the New York State Summer Writers Institute because it was the rare summer workshop offering a full manuscript review. The writers-in-residence available for these tutorials were Tony Eprile, Honor Moore, Lloyd Schwartz, and Sam Dunn. Now Sam teaches at Manuscript Boot Camp, a workshop exclusively for writers with completed manuscripts and part of the Writing by Writers nonprofit organization of which I’m a board member.

Although back in 2001, my manuscript was assigned to Tony Eprile, Sam had recently published her first novel, Failing Paris, and I bought a hard copy that I’m looking at right now–the only thing I’ve ever been as passionate about as writing is all things French. But even if that had not been the case, I still would not have forgotten Sam’s book.

Failing Paris, a finalist for the PEN West Fiction Award, is divided not into parts but into days of the week–Monday to Monday. From the first paragraph, we discover that a nineteen-year-old American is in Paris and that she needs an abortion.

In the next five minutes or fifteen or even two hours from now (how does time parcel itself, one moment becoming separate from another?), there will come the most difficult French test of your life. There’s a chance you will have to argue why you must have this procedure. They will say, How many weeks has it been? and you’ll say, I don’t know. I never keep track of these things.

It’s been fifteen years since I read this novel, and although I don’t remember the story, I do remember the writing and the use of the second person, which was the perfect choice to convey the distance the narrator feels from herself and from her body.

You have been walking this goat path of a sidewalk every night from the boulevard Saint-Germain up to the Pantheon on insomniac rambles through the city, trying to extinguish the neon colour that is sleeplessness, phosphorescent and annoying. Those hours when you catalogue the times you haven’t measured up, when you feel the tension between your ribs and the weight of it in the moments before dawn.

But the second person is not used across the entire novel as I had thought.

The night air clings, wraps me in a faint sweetness. Spice cupboard, cinnamon, the pinch of ginger. In honour of the break in the clouds I am wearing my one good dress, black with fake pearl buttons lined ant-like up the front. Humidity wraps around me as a kind of shawl…

When Sam was 32, she had a serious horseback riding accident in which she almost lost her leg.

Dirt is in my mouth as I’m pushed to the ground. The odd beauty of the angle formed by my arm as it pops out of my shoulder. I feel no pain right now, aware only of how mammoth my horse appears as he stands over me, blocking all sun. He snorts, not able to see me under him but knowing by scent I’m there. His muscles quiver. His sweat drips onto my face; perhaps it is my own.

‘Harley, easy boy, easy.’

But his body pulls away and I see the flash of the steel-shod hoof as it strikes downward. I hear the crack of something, loud as gunfire, and look to see my left leg snapped apart like dry kindling.

Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life tells the story of the accident and her recovery. From Nicole Gregory’s blurb:

Dunn chronicles her five-year recovery as it became a revelation. With the help of a therapist and a well-known yoga instructor, she realizes that her tendency to be accident-prone is self-inflicted punishment for her ‘failure’ to solve her family’s problems.

Yes, it seems we are always telling the same story.

Sam Dunn is a journalist and the executive editor of Coast Magazine. Her most recent memoir is Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex, and Salvation. She teaches at Chapman University in the UCLA Extension Writers Program and at the Idyllwild Arts Center in California. She lives in Orange, California, with her husband and son and is at work on a new memoir about trailer parks, pink gravel carports, and metal skirts.

Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how SAMANTHA DUNN spends her days.

*We Are the Story by Samantha Dunn