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

Today, please welcome writer

JOYCE HINNEFELD

I’ve been thinking about how I spend my days for a lot of days now. At various points I would have sounded pretty bitter in response to this question. But this month is one of my favorites. The days are brighter, and so am I.

In late November 2023, my husband Jim, who’s a good deal older than I am (I’m 64), fell and suffered a brain bleed. He was in the hospital at the time, and he fell after taking a shower during a nursing staff change-over (7 pm—a time I’ve learned to dread in hospitals). I returned from driving home to get his things for what would be, we thought, a simple overnight stay and found him on his hospital room bathroom floor, barely conscious.

He recovered from the brain bleed, maybe. It’s still not clear what’s happened since. After a week in the hospital and two weeks in rehab he came home, and despite endless rounds of physical therapy he never walked without a walker again. Two and a half years later he has dementia, is in a wheelchair, and has been in a memory care facility since the beginning of February. I visit him most afternoons. He has a number of health issues, we still aren’t certain about the source of his dementia, and I could no longer care for him on my own, even with the help of two lovely part-time aides who were here to help me on weekday mornings.

The only other thing I want to say about this situation is that at one point, Jim’s gerontologist told us that basically, when you hit 80, it’s all going to start going downhill (Jim’s now 82). Ever since then I’ve been doing the math, calculating how many good years I have left. It’s not a bad exercise really. So if you’re within counting range of 80, you’re welcome, I guess.

*

Here’s something my friend Rita, who lost her husband to glioblastoma eight years ago, told me when Jim came home from rehab in the dead of winter two and a half years ago, and I was sleeping on a recliner next to the fold-out sofa bed I’d bought for him on the first floor of our house: Start noticing, and appreciating, really small things. I wish I could describe how she said this to me. It was more of a command than a Hallmark-style, self-care bromide. So I’ve been doing that, or trying to, ever since.

It’s our instinct as writers to notice small things, I think, but we can lose that capacity when life is crashing around us like a flood—which, of course, it basically always is now, if you read the news. These days I try to start a round of writing by reading something to slow my pulse and my racing mind, to remind myself to breathe and to notice things. Lately I’ve been reading Larry Levis’s collected poems, Swirl and Vortex. So far I would describe these poems as setting nostalgia and yearning up against loneliness and violence and seeing how everything shakes out. Yesterday I read a poem called “The Double,” and now I’m in love with these lines:

This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.
This poem so like me
it could be my double.

Another way I try to pay attention to small things is by following the advice I read on Rob Walker’s Substack The Art of Noticing: “sky before screens.” This morning I heeded that advice by taking my coffee outside and sitting on a bench and looking up at the sky, then at the blooming irises and honesty plants in the garden, and then at our lovely old ramshackle house that needs a lot of work and that I may not be able to handle for that much longer. And I remembered how very, very fortunate I’ve been.

Before the sky, and the poetry, and some time on a writing project, though, there are the pets to deal with. We have three aging pets—two cats (Frankie, age 18, and Mouse, age 15) and a dog (Rusty, age 14 and a half). They’re all rescues; the cats were chosen by our daughter Anna, who’s now 25 and living in New York, but the dog was my doing. I love them, they’re good company, but they also need care—medications; a couple slow, ambling walks a day for Rusty; endless cleaning up of pet fur and vomit and litter boxes and the like. The pets like me and my company more than they probably should, because I can be pretty cranky with them. When I’m noticing small things, though, and also reading and writing, I tend to slow down and just enjoy their purring and tail-wagging and ceaseless begging for treats.

*

Today I’ll go to visit Jim at lunchtime, because there’s a pre-Memorial Day barbecue and live music at the place where he’s living now. Usually I go after lunch, and if it’s sunny and not too hot, I take him on a couple loops around the pretty grounds, and then we sit for a while and look out at the sky and the trees. Other days we sit in his room and watch a movie or something on YouTube; lately that’s meant Architectural Digest videos about modern homes or the architectural history of New York City, which is where we were both living when we met, and a National Geographic program about desert animals. We hold hands while we sit, and I am learning to simply breathe and enjoy that too. Because I miss the Jim I used to know, the one I fell in love with, but this Jim is sweet and loving too; in that sense, he hasn’t changed.

*

Some evenings I still get myself out of the house. Last night I had a public library board meeting, tomorrow evening I’ll have dinner with some friends. But late this afternoon I’ll get Rusty out and then settle in to watch the storm that’s predicted for our area, and I’ll be glad for the rain, which we need here in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. I’ll check the news to see who will be our Democratic House of Representatives candidate come November, after yesterday’s primary. I’ll fix something simple to eat, and maybe I’ll watch an episode of Hacks or Rooster, because it feels good to laugh, even on my own.

And then, my reward after a full day: time with a book. I just finished Tana French’s The Hunter, which I enjoyed for the intrigue and the depiction of life in a small farming community in the north of Ireland, but mostly for the character of Lena, who “takes an expert’s fine-tuned satisfaction in the fact that here she could distinguish March from April blindfolded, by the quality of the damp earth in its scent . . . .” Now I’m savoring Volume II of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (with thanks to my friend and fellow writer Alix Ohlin for the recommendation), a meditation on time and a master class in the art of noticing.

*

These days I feel lonely and nostalgic, and also lucky and still in love. I’m like those blinking amber streetlights in the Levis poem—getting ready for nightfall and thinking about time in a new way, like the character Tara Selter in On the Calculation of Volume. I’m giving all the articles and videos and algorithmic brouhaha in my Instagram feed about longevity and looking youthful only the quickest glance before I put my phone away, then head for the garden bench or my favorite reading chair. Which is what I’ll do later today, once the storm is over and I’ve opened the windows to the cooler night air.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Necessary.

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

• There isn’t a single book that I read repeatedly, but I often go back to W.G. Sebald, especially his book The Emigrants. Sebald’s novels move me deeply, maybe because there’s a sense of dislocation and strangeness in his work—something that’s not uncomfortable or unhappy, but instead quite beautiful—that I’ve always found relatable.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• These days I think it’s probably a little strange that I look forward to bringing in the print edition of my local newspaper, The Morning Call, every morning, then scanning the headlines and reading a bit of local news while I have breakfast. It’s actually pretty expensive to subscribe to the print edition, but I like reading a newspaper this way. I also think it’s important to know what’s happening in your local community and region, and I’m grateful that we still have a good, functioning local paper.

A

By JOYCE HINNEFELDA

A
A

A

—Other Writers in the Series—

A

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

xA

June 1, 2026: Joyce Hinnefeld

X

The characters in Joyce Hinnefeld’s The Dime Museum love poetry and steal books. They live in Venice, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Lisbon. Together, in nine stories, they create the world of this novel, each story told from the point of view of a different character: Charlie, Maude, Liliane, Tess, Nina, Tom, Mary, Min, and Stefan.

Nothing in The Dime Museum is expected, and that is one of its pleasures. I don’t think anyone except Joyce Hinnefeld could have written this book that connects Ezra Pound, the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, a bookstore in Venice, and a vaudeville male impersonator who got stuck in Wabash, Indiana, in the middle of a snowstorm because she missed the last train.

Charlie has the first line of the book. “When I got to Venice in the fall of 2019, I was thinking about death.” Charlie loves books, poetry (Louise Bogan and Adrienne Rich), and Min. “I’m a twenty-first century white guy, I like basketball, and my name is Charlie, so I can’t get out of bed in the morning without being predictable and banal.”

In a later story, we hear from Charlie’s mom.

What can it mean in a world like this, and at a time like this, that my son Charlie wants to be a poet? Which means he spends most of his time in bars, occasionally performing but mostly drinking and getting into fights. is this what it means to be a poet now?

But it is Maude I have a soft spot for with her old stories, her books in neat stacks under the window, her love of Annie. We meet her in the second, and title, story.

Should she tell…the stories she’s never told anyone else? The truths she hid…. About what a failure she’d been at that other thing, that other life as a performer. Or about her time as a dime museum caricature. How could she explain it, the fact that the happiest time of her life was that period, starting sometime during the Great War, when people had paid to gawk at her as she sat on a stool, wearing trousers and suspenders and a monocle over her eye?

…

Her father’s view of her as a child had been all wrong, or mostly wrong, the product of bathtub gin and maudlin sentiment. She’d been thin, but also strong. And she sang, but not that well. For a while she’d believed him. It’s probably what led her to the fond and foolish notion that she might someday be a poet. That, and the books of her mother’s she’d carried with her since her death–Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads.

And Liliane wants to be a poet too… Another of the pleasures of The Dime Museum is discovering how the different characters are connected.

As each story adds another layer to the whole, there are questions of privilege and art and wealth and politics. And there are books—so many mentioned on these 173 pages. I started a list, but kept getting distracted by the characters. And the lines of poetry…

Joyce is also the author of the novels, In Hovering Flight and Stranger Here Below, and the short story collections, The Beauty of Their Youth (part of the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series) and Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction). She is an Emeritus Professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, director of the Moravian Writers’ Conference, and a Program Facilitator with Shining Light, an organization that provides reentry-based programming for incarcerated people throughout the US. The Dime Museum was published by the wonderful Unbridled Books.

Come back on JUNE 1st to read how JOYCE HINNEFELD spends her days.

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

Today, please welcome writer

YAEL VALENCIA ALDANA

In the morning
I have been waking up about seven thirty. I could go back to sleep, but this morning I decide to get up. Miss Spicy, my small black cat, is mewing determinedly on the other side of the door. I open it, and she rushes over my feet and onto my bed, followed by her brother, a larger tabby.

Beyond the open door, the remaining council of cats stares at me, disgruntled. A still larger gray and white tabby, an orange tabby, and the distinguished Russian Blue mix. They only gather like this when my son hasn’t fed them the night before.

I wander out to the kitchen to feed them. I didn’t mean to have five cats. I was content with one. Then my son brought home an orange kitten he found at his high school. Then after my sister died, I inherited the Russian Blue. Then a family of cats appeared in the back yard, led by a frisky black kitten I named Miss Spicy.

Next is fresh espresso, an egg over easy, and toast. The previous day still lingers. I was driving to work when I saw a small brindle dog, alone, limping down the road, one of his hind legs tucked tightly against his stomach.

I wanted to stop and scoop up that dog. Take him to the vet if he needed it. But I couldn’t, I was heading to my new job, and I had to be on time. As I drove, I thought, what has happened to my life. A main life goal was always to stop and help if some animal needed it. And I couldn’t do that. I was heading to work to be a small cog in a larger corporation’s wheel. That isn’t what I wanted or thought I would be doing at this middle age.

Leaning against my kitchen counter, sipping my coffee, I am still frustrated, but a new idea is working through my mind. A year and a half ago, I lost my partner in crime, my son’s father, Geoff. If he were still here, I would have stopped, called him, and told him he had to meet me and get the dog. He would have groaned but come. I would have continued to work, and he would call to let me know what was happening with the dog. Did he go to the vet? Was he putting up lost dog flyers? Now there is no Geoff, and the dog and I are on our own.

I sit down on my couch and survey the living room. It’s like Geoff never left. The room is full of his collectibles accumulated over decades: African masks carved for ceremony, a stylized Aboriginal painting of a turtle, a lacquered mother-of-pearl screen, and a standing world globe he got from who knows where.

My life feels like a wind chime for the dead. Two years ago, we lost my older sister, then Geoff, then early this year, another close friend passed. I stopped asking what was happening. I was numb. Every day, I focused on dealing with what was in front of me. The goal was just to make it through the day.

On my writing desk
Percy, my sister’s former cat, is sitting, resting against a pile of poetry books. I rub his soft head and open Julie Marie Wade’s collection Skirted and read the poem “Ekphrasis.” A beautiful, layered work that is both simple yet knotted with ideas and meaning.

I pick my pen with turquoise ink. I will work on some poems from my new collection, Cruel Childhood, for a while. Until my Zoom meeting in the early afternoon, to talk about my brand-new idea with a friend. I work on a well-deserved poem about Miss Spicy.

Noon
I watch the sun’s shadows shifting into noon sharpness across my desk. I glance at my phone, and it’s twelve minutes after. I’ll make a quick lunch before my Zoom call at twelve thirty. I throw some creamy dill sauce on chicken and udon noodles, my new obsession. (Why didn’t anyone tell me they were this good?)

My friend
Erik pops up on my computer screen with fake Hawaii beach waves rolling behind him.

“Hey, hey, hey.” He smooths his long hair over his shoulder. He looks like a misplaced hippie from the sixties, but here he is in 2026, not looking a day over thirty-five.

He squints at the screen. I can tell he’s reviewing the email I sent him. “I think this could work.” He pauses. “Yeah, an animal shelter that’s also a writers’ retreat. I think people can get into that.”

He’s the friend I trust with my most crazed ideas.

I say, “I mean, writers are always posting about their pets, right? There is built-in love there.”

He says, “I see it. We need to work on a plan to bring this thing together step by step.”

Miss Spicy jumps up on the desk and peeks at the screen as if she approves. I flick my pen between my fingers. “I thought we could start a newsletter about writers and their pets, start gathering a community. Maybe work in some fundraising?”

Erik nods. “It won’t just be you contributing, will it?”

“I talked to a few of my friends. They are willing to write about their cats.”

He says, “Damn girl, you are moving fast.”

“When I have something on my mind, I get moving. What do you think about the name Pens and Pets?

“Sounds good, sounds good,” he replies.

I scratch out some notes in my journal. We talk about next steps, and we end the meeting.

Miss Spicy is now prancing behind my laptop screen.

“What do you think, Miss Spicy? Do you want to work at a writing retreat?” At the sound of her name, she zips into my lap for a cuddle.

In the evening
San Diego is cooler than expected in April. The temperature is hovering in the sixties and cloudy. I throw on a flannel jacket and venture out the door for a walk. I feel like I am just emerging from the shell of grief. I am finally able to think and make plans outside of survival mode.

People are coming home from work, and the street is choked with parked cars. In some places, the road is just wide enough for one car to pass.

I take a deep inhale and finger the face mask in my pocket. Are my allergies acting up? No. I walk on.  Is Pens and Pets really a good name for the sanctuary? Maybe just Geoff’s House? We were all safe at Geoff’s house.

As I walk by the house on the corner where a small tan Chihuahua constantly escapes, I think, What makes you think you can make this work? I repeat a mantra that has served me well: I don’t know how it’s going to work, but it’s going to work. After all, Erik and I started a press from nothing that is still going strong.

I stride past a fifties-era stove with a sign that says “free.” What should I write about for the newsletter? Maybe about the first time I saw Miss Spicy in my backyard by the shed.  Her mother and her two littermates stared at me warily. Miss Spicy was tiny, maybe two and a half months old, the runt of the litter. She held my gaze unafraid as she skipped and strutted in front of her mother. She was supposed to be a tiny stray cat with no hope, but she didn’t know that and didn’t care. She was too brave to notice.

I reach the end of the block and turn toward home, pulling my collar closed. I should make a poster, “Be like Miss Spicy.”

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Erratic. I have tried for years to have a writing routine, aka waking up at five am with a steaming cup of coffee and writing for a few hours. Invariably, I wander off schedule without noticing. I tend to write to deadlines, even if I have to make one up.

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

• I read Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye almost yearly. It’s the first book I read that inspired me to be a writer. It’s still one of the best books I have ever read. Her writing is poetic, and she breaks many rules. Her protagonist is annoying, complicated, and passive, but it works. Her audacity inspires my own.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• I eat salads without salad dressing, which seems to drive people crazy, especially servers.

A

By YAEL VALENCIA ALDANAA

A
A

A

—Other Writers in the Series—

A

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

xA

May 1, 2026: Yael Valencia Aldana

X

Yael Valencia Aldana was born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, grew up on the neighboring island of Barbados, and moved to Brooklyn as a teenager. Adopted as a child, at age forty-four, she took a DNA test and discovered her maternal line: Indigenous, origin Colombia. As she tried to find her grandmother, she began writing poems again. Four years later, she entered an MFA program, and at the age of fifty-four, her debut collection, Black Mestiza, was published as part of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series. The first poem in the book, “Talisman” declares “Ancestors…means nothing is lost.”

And then the speaker confirms that yes,

We are all in here together
xxxdistilled into this one casing of corpuscles.

I love this collection, the way it explores who we are and how we got that way. I also love the cover art. When I asked about it, I was thrilled to discover that Yael herself is the artist. The title of the painting is “Open Your Mouth,” and there’s a poem of the same name in the book. But this beautiful painting came first—before the words.

There’s so much truth in the painting, so much “I am a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots,” and when I turn to the third poem in the first section, Yael’s description allows me to see this place where the wild women live, these women who “know how to stand in more / than one place in time.”

there is a slip of land on la frontera
a land of haunted untamed tongues
forked and black like the dark.
a land of wild women with smoke cloud
hair and legs that span rivers.
they know how to stand in more
than one place at one time.

In “Why Don’t You Write About Joy,” we read

Because you cannot hear me
doesn’t mean I am not singing.

But throughout this collection, we hear the singing.

And we see the “Black Person Head Bob.” This poem, which won a Pulitzer Prize, takes the reader inside. The opening line says so much, you almost don’t need anything else.

I still count. How many of us are in here?

The head bob returns in the third section of the book, in “The F Train 1999.” The speaker is running, running, and then

A wheat colored Timberland boot
pierces the silver line
of the closing doors.
I sail through steel toe cracked air
A head bob the only thanks needed.

That boot, the way it stops time. I can see it. And then the speaker leaps. Like a flying fish.

“I am small dark and moving,” the line and the image, carry us through all four sections of the collection, the first and last, my favorites.

In the last section, the speaker turns her eyes toward her mother, always moving, “iron-forged,” who dies and is buried, and then she turns toward her son “who looks just like his Granny.” And in this way the last section moves us from the past into the future. While always in the present. My favorite poem of this section is the second one, “Titan.”

You couldn’t know that when dealing
with the Titan that you become one yourself.

Yael earned a Master’s degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Florida International University (FIU). Her work has appeared in Torch Literary Arts, Cutbank Literary Journal, Obsidian, and Nelle Journal. Her work has also been featured in Poets & Writers, Ms. Magazine, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Hip Latina, and The National Latino Book Club. She is the Managing Editor at Purple Ink Press and a member of Aunt Lute Press board. She was named a Poets & Writers “5 over 50” for 2025. She lives in Florida.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how YAEL VALENCIA ALDANA spends her days.

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!)

A

By MELANIE PAPPADIS FARANELLOA

A
A

A

—Other Writers in the Series—

A

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

xA

April 1, 2026: Melanie Pappadis Faranello

X

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.

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

Today, please welcome writer

ERIKA J. SIMPSON

My tarot card for the month is Knight of Swords, reversed. Which represents being restless, unfocused, impulsive, and burnt out. I wish I could say it wasn’t true, but:

Unfocused

It is 8 am on the second day of “Super Fun Spring Break Earth Quake Auntie Niece Week.” I’ve flown in from Denver to babysit my five-year-old niece during her snow-covered spring break while my sister and her husband are at work. The air mattress I’m sleeping on in the basement has deflated a bit beneath me, and the Massachusetts chill is seeping in. My niece will come for me soon, as she’s drawn up a schedule for us that includes starting the day with “love talk” and playing barbies.

Internally, I’m panicking about work.

Bold font emails antagonize my inbox. I need to choose a date to pitch my television show to a potential network. Problem is, I haven’t finished writing the beats of the pilot because my brain keeps freezing. My editor is waiting for me to approve the paperback cover of my memoir. She is using the word imminent. I’m hesitating because the quotes from more successful authors are starting to get bigger than my name and I’m not sure how to give such a vain critique. There’s a notification that my students have turned in their writing assignments for the short story class I teach remotely, so it’s time to grade. And it’s my turn to respond to my agent, who told me to do some revision before we move forward on pitching my short stories for a collection about fatherless girls. Of course I have to spiral out about my writing capabilities instead.

The tarot card said I was full of energy and ideas but unable to actualize any of it. That I want to be involved with everything but am succeeding at nothing… Felt.

I close my laptop without responding to anything.

Restless

Saraya and I write a book in crayon on printer paper. She’s named it “Jane and the Loose of the Ice Cream.” I make her write the title words herself while I spell them slowly out loud between sips of English breakfast tea. While she colors, I respond to an email on my phone. I choose the latest date in March that they offer for the TV pitch and hit send. Anxiety levels fluctuate. I will simply have to finish writing. My niece demands the phone be put down and that I write her story as she tells it to me. I’m inspired by her. But after four sentences, she declares she’s tired of writing, and I find comfort that it’s tough for everyone.

At 11 am we do experiments with snow from the backyard. In a plastic salad container, we add red and blue food coloring and make purple. We sprinkle cocoa puffs on top, and call it casserole. Afterwards we soak our fingers in warm soapy water to get the red stains off and call it Hand Bath. Wet bubbly hands can’t email or write, and I’m thankful for that.

By 2 pm we’re feeling cagey in the house. My sister Samantha suggested earlier that we go to the library. It’s a 30-degree day, which feels like summer after it’s been cold, so we walk the three blocks down thin slivers of sidewalk caged in snow.

On the children’s floor, we pick out a book called Grumpy New Year, since Lunar New Year was yesterday, plus nine other colorful books about fairies and bullies, and family wrestling matches. We venture to adult fiction, and I point out books I own on the Black History Month table. My Sister the Serial Killer. Parable of the Sower. Chain-Gang All-Stars.

I am curious. The minute the librarian at the desk finishes helping someone, I swoop in to ask if they carry This Is Your Mother and try to say my name like it’s a stranger’s. They do! I gasp out loud when I see my yellow spine under library laminate. I admit I’m the author, and the librarian declares, You’re famous! To which my niece immediately responds, “No she’s not.” Girl!!

Maybe not Kpop Demon Hunters famous, but I’m trying, I whisper back.

Burnt out

Tonight I’m doing a reading for San Diego University on zoom, and I didn’t realize that 7 pm PST would equate to 10 pm EST, so I focus some anxious energy on that. My eyelids are already heavy from playing make-believe even after Sister got home from work at 4:30.

It’s 7:30 now. My sister orders Indian food for dinner. I try not to overeat chicken tikki masala. We watch “Mermaid Magic” with my niece while we eat. Samantha and I get up in arms that the mermaids are about to let a Mama whale die to save the baby. But at the last minute, Merlinda the leader (We joke about naming a baby BlackLinda) uses her missing mother’s memory to summon more power from within and raises Mama Whale up to the surface for air. She lives. My sister and I are totally not thinking of our deceased mother and moved emotionally by this children’s show. Totally not.

My niece chooses me for the bedtime story and Sister smiles gleefully. I can’t stop looking at the time. Saraya bounces on her bed while I read. Still bursting with energy while I fight to drum some up for my speaking engagement. After she goes down for bed, (which here means, reads books hidden in the covers by flashlight), I rush downstairs to put on a nice top over comfy leggings and move my air mattress out of camera view.

Impulsive

There are thirty people at the zoom reading. One student has my memoir cover as his background image, and I giggle in delight. Maybe my niece will consider me famous now. The moderator mentions my love of astrology and that we’re both Cancers! I say I wouldn’t mind if they all told me their signs, and they type zodiacs in the chat enthusiastically. My cheeks are warm.

I rap Eat me Out! like my 15-year-old self while reading one chapter then preach in the rhythm of a southern Black Baptist pastor as I read from another. Bringing it home emotionally, I beg God for the cancer not to take my mother’s life. My eyes are red from fighting back tears. The moderator makes everyone go off mute to clap for me, and then the chat lights up with questions.

The water signs (Pisces, Cancer, Scorpio) ask about happy memories of my mother, dealing with emotions while writing. The air signs (Libra, Gemini, Aquarius) ask about process. My favorite question is what character I relate to the most from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” (Little sister Dawn! Hungry for validation, attention, and love.) We end on a high note, everyone waving from their digital boxes.

I’m left grinning in front of a dark laptop screen at 11:40 pm. I might really be a writer, I think to myself, changing into my night shirt and lowering the air mattress back down. I snap a selfie with the vampire teddy my niece lent me to sleep with and vow to answer my editor’s email the next day. Maybe even write.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Frantic. I battle imposter syndrome too often. Then hop from one half-written page to another from a different project. Working on focus every day.

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

• There’s a tattered copy of Practical Magic on my bookshelf. The dark blue paperback version with the moon and a black cat on the cover. I could exist forever in a world centered around sisters where magic is real in the softest way.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• Would my incessant trips to Goodwill count? I go two to four times a week and my main obsession is finding my childhood on the shelves. It’s all about the books. We lost so much to evictions growing up that one original Goosebumps book can lead me to tears. I’ve repurchased paperback X-files books I owned at thirteen, all the media tie-in novels for Angel, Bruce Coville books about six-grade aliens, some Babysitter Little Sister books and even Kicks by Janet Fitch, which got me in trouble in 5th grade for reading the sex scenes to my friends. All these books are nostalgic little time machines. Where Mama is alive and Sister hasn’t gone to college and when things are difficult, I can disappear into adventure. The thrift store brings it all back. I’m owning myself again.

A

By ERIKA J. SIMPSONA

A
A

A

—Other Writers in the Series—

A

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

xA

March 1, 2026: Erika J. Simpson

X

“Imagine this is your mother”  is the powerful first line of Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir This Is Your Mother.

Imagine this is your mother. Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten. She’s a June Gemini, inquisitive and playful, so sensitive she cries before the switch reaches her legs. She pretends to be the teacher in games of schoolhouse, leads the neighborhood kids on adventures along the creek, and most of all she yearns for a life beyond the fields of North Carolina.

This first chapter, called “Genesis,” continues for only two and a half pages and spirits the reader from Sallie Carol’s childhood to Erika’s departure for college. When we turn the page to the next chapter, it’s a couple of decades later, August of 2013, and Sallie Carol’s cancer is back. The doctors give her two months to live.

In This is Your Mother, two timelines move us forward. In one, Erika is a child growing up in Atlanta with her mother who is trying to make ends meet (and often they don’t), and in the other, Erika is an adult working in Chicago with her mother dying in Atlanta. Erika is creative with structure and form, using second person, lists, transcriptions, short screenplays, a TV game show, and scripture. This memoir is alive on the page.

While Mama studied her Bible, I studied her, making scriptures from the ways she kept us afloat. Book of Sallie Carol 1:2: The only things that matter, and the order of their importance, are food and rent. Don’t pay no bill before you’ve eaten. Because how you look sitting around with all the lights on but nothing to eat?

Erika’s descriptions are substantive and pop with freshness.

Eighties food stamp money: “Oranges and pinks loud enough to be heard. Bright enough to tell everybody in line behind you that you’re on government aid and your daddy left your mama for a white woman …”
x
A bus stop: “We ran across the parking lot like the roaches scattering out, heading toward a bus stop that wouldn’t make a comment on our lives.”

Love is everywhere. While her mother’s in jail for writing a bad check for a car, Erika lives in North Carolina with her aunt who has “a house phone normal kids could call.” After almost a year, Erika’s mother comes to get her.

It was spaghetti night. Mama spoke cordial at the table. I felt weird being witnessed this normal, like I lived in the house and Mama lived outside it. I wanted Mama and me to have an inside, but I also didn’t mind being on the outside with her.

In addition to love, this memoir is full of truth, and the humor in truth. Erika refers to the fact that her mother’s cancer is back as “the health reveal.” At one point, when Erika’s cell phone buzzes, she puts it under her pillow and breathes slowly as if she’s asleep, “putting on an act for a woman who’s thousands of miles away.”

Strong sentences bind this book together and add to its heft.

Mama did it wrong, the Great Migration. She went deeper south, instead of north…

The end of October was for pretending life was normal.

You can’t tell if she’s freaking out. But you can’t tell if you are either.

When trying to decide whether she can afford to go visit her mother, Erika writes, “If you wait much longer, it won’t be that you can’t but that you didn’t.”

I’m not going to tell you how the memoir ends. I want to, but I’m not. I will tell you that I loved the ending. Don’t miss this wonderful book. Imagine this is your mother.

Sallie Carol “usually comes over the hill with her suitcase and her cane looking mad as hell.”

Erika was born in North Carolina, grew up in Atlanta, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, with her partner and their black cat. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky and is the recipient of the 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction. Her essay “If You Ever Find Yourself” was published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and featured in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. She also writes fiction for the page and screen. When meeting with potential publishers for her memoir, she made sure to ask each editor for their Zodiac sign.

.A

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ERIKA J. SIMPSON spends her days.

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

Today, please welcome writer

BARBARA BOYLE

Morning…

I am on a treadmill.

No, really. I am in a hotel gym.

Far from the home I left behind in Italy, no longer at home here in San Francisco, in that awkward place between home and not home. I am running, pounding on and on, going nowhere, breathless.

It is a rainy morning, deep in January, with thoughts of faraway Italy tucked away in my heart. It snowed there today, said the neighbors, and I can picture the steady, pristine silence. Faded scenes of my childhood in San Francisco occupy other corners of my heart, comforting and innocent.

On I run.

Out the window, I watch a family trying to take selfies while holding umbrellas in the wind and rain. A cable car comes click click clicking past them, ringing the bell as it crosses the intersection. I admire their determination. A helpful passerby takes the camera from the young family with their umbrellas and takes the photo for them, the old school way. It is a great shot. The little girl is laughing and so are her parents.

The San Francisco I know from my childhood, my city by the bay, is famously grey and foggy and beautiful. But this wet, rainy town with a whipping wind throws me. I am happy that the tourists don’t seem to mind. Downtown is coming back, they say, though homeless still wander 6th street, bent over in fentanyl-fueled gyrations, talking animatedly to the air.

It has a ways to go.

My little town in Italy, Roddino, has no homeless people. No one sleeps on the cobblestone streets. No one goes hungry. Osteria da Gemma routinely serves a hot meal to neighbors who may be in need of one, for whatever reason. Gemma says there is always enough to go around.

I hit the down arrow on the treadmill, slow to a walk and begin to recover. Scribbled notes and pieces of paper are waiting for me in my room, strewn across the unmade bed. It is time to focus on them.

Midday…

Back in room 328, I am propped on the bed, half-packed suitcases piled to one side, computer on my lap. I need to create something, some sketches, a timeline, or perhaps a back story. It is hard to write in the limbo of my room. Colorless. Temporary.

But writing is like that. I cannot always put life aside and focus purely on the craft, or escape to an ideal setting without interruption, the need to prepare dinner, or look after someone besides the characters in my head.

My first book was a memoir, and it was a thrill to write, to see it accepted, published, and sent out into the world. I took my time with it. Writing it felt almost too easy. But in the end, all I had to do was tell what happened. I did not focus on arcs, plots, character development, and all those technical aspects of a novel that I will need in the story before me now.

Now it is daunting. I keep looking at my notebooks, the yellow sticky notes, the messy phrases on scraps of paper and on the backs of envelopes, and hope, trust, that it will all come together at some point. I hope, trust that those scraps of paper are pieces of a puzzle yet to reveal itself.

Probably not today, however.

What I do have is a character I love; the woman who was born in my house in Italy, and died there ninety-eight years later, having never married. Emma was her name.I am fascinated by her. Who was she? What did she experience in her long life? Did she ever fall in love?  Where did her enormous strength and will to survive through two wars come from?

I feel her spirit in the walls and halls of my three-hundred-year-old home and want to imagine the story of her life. If I were there, I could simply put a log on the fire, lie on the couch, and study the stones in our thirty-foot walls, their echoes and whispers revealing tales they have heard for over three hundred years. I know the setting well, because it is where I live. I know how noisy the birds are at dawn in April, where the sun sets in winter and in summer, and how the autumn mists curl over the valleys below.

Before I left, I was able to write the first chapter, or at least a draft of it. How and when this will become a novel keeps me up at night.  Sometimes, as I toss and turn, an entire scene comes to me, almost like a memory, or a piece of film, and I know what my heroine will do and how. In the morning, sometimes, it becomes a paragraph or more. Those are good days. But the road ahead is long.

Finally, sitting quietly in my stark beige room, some thoughts and half-finished phrases come to me. I scrawl them by hand, in blue or red ink:

“Emma adores the power of the tractor she drives and tunes the engine like a skilled mechanic.”

“early one morning in May, she comes into the barn and witnesses the bloody and beautiful birth of a baby goat.”

“an American paratrooper lands in the gully below the house, and her cousin protects him from the enemy; after she tends to his wounds, they fall in love, he goes back to the front, leaving her carrying his child.’

My back begins to ache. I find myself hoping that the rain will let up so I can take a walk outside, away from the scattered scraps and notebooks.

Paragraphs are for another day, I suppose.

Later in the day…

I stride past the hotel bar, football games blaring, glasses clinking, and venture outside to breathe in the cool air.

The rain has become more of a heavy mist, and the sun is just beginning to set as I head up the hill towards Grace Cathedral. The lights from the Nob Hill hotels twinkle reassuringly in the dusk.

Entering the cathedral, I am welcomed by the warmth, the majesty, the hushed beauty. There is a positivity to its architecture and the soaring grandeur of its stained-glass windows. It is an icon in the city that has always stood for equality and unity and love. Amidst the candles and plants in the vestibule, I find origami birds with handwritten messages of hope and kindness. “No more racism.” “No more poverty.” “Peace.”

My heart is in Italy, but my life today is here.

I can only imagine what lies ahead for me, for my book, and for our world in these next few months. I do not know how far along I will be with my story of Emma, or where she will take me. But I do know that while I am here, I need to keep my eyes open, making notes of my journey, all that is around me, and hope to make some sense of it all.

To keep going. To keep writing. To keep running.

~

THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Purpose.

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

• The book I have been keeping by my bed and reading and rereading this past year is Guidance from the Universe by Jill Amy Sager. Aside from that, I love reading and rereading Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and anything by Jane Austen. Old school. (English Lit major!)  

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

• My strangest habit might be always counting stairs anytime I go up and down. A therapist would have a field day with that one.

A

By BARBARA BOYLEA

A
A

A

—Other Writers in the Series—

A

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

xA

February 1, 2026: Barbara Boyle

X

Newly retired and on her honeymoon, after spending a week in the south of France, Barbara Boyle and her husband arrived in Italy, and she fell in love. With Monforte, a small town in the Piemonte region. After the honeymoon, Barbara began taking Italian lessons, and her husband Kim signed them up to receive house listings in the Piemonte region. Pinch Me is Barbara’s story of making a dream come true.

It was eighteen months before they were able to return to Italy, but when they did, they met with a real estate agent.

We wanted character and tranquility and were not afraid of a ruin… I wanted birds, grass, mature trees, sun, and shade. My husband wanted a wine cellar.

The day before they were to head home to San Francisco, the real estate agent called to say he had a property to show them, not in Monforte exactly but in nearby Roddino, which was not exactly a town, and actually the house was not exactly in Roddino. “But my husband felt it was worth a quick look, so I reluctantly agreed to go along.”

I turned and faced the empty old house and barn sitting demurely in the afternoon sun—tall, proud stone walls and rusted iron doors, broken windows and shutters, crowned with a roof of old terra-cotta tiles, logs, and twigs. There were two or three outbuildings, crammed with wood, wine barrels, old farm tools, wires, tiles, and stones. The house was situated precariously on a narrow level plain that sloped up the hill behind it and slid into the valley in front. And it looked out over the whole world—vineyards, hazelnut orchards, farms and forests, and even the little hill town of Monforte, all the way out to the craggy Alps, still brushed with just a smattering of snow on the highest peak… I touched him on the arm and said, “This is it.”

These more detailed descriptions of the walls and the roof made me feel as if I were standing in the house looking around and up.

[The walls] are a disorderly combination of Langhe stones and handmade terra-cotta bricks, held together with mud and mortar.

[The roof] was a patchwork of weathered terra-cotta tiles, coppas, interspersed with old logs and branches.

Pinch Me is a delight to read and includes recipes like the “Ravioli del Plin con Burro e Salvia.”

Plin actually means “pinch” in the Piemontese dialect, and it is in fact that characteristic little pinch that separates these raviolis from all others on Earth…. the pinch forms little pockets all around the outside that cradle the ragu or melted butter with sage and Parmesan.

Spending time in Italy was teaching me, firsthand, how something as primal as eating and as simple as shopping, as essential as being part of a small community, creates a life.

Barbara’s fiction has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Star 82 Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other literary journals. In her first life, she was a global creative director in the advertising world, living in Paris, Frankfurt, New York, and San Francisco. While living in Paris, she took the Regional French Cuisine course at Le Cordon Bleu, and later in New York, she completed the professional cooking course at The Institute of Culinary Education. These days she lives in Italy, in the medieval hill towns of Roddino and Monforte, cooking, taking walks, working in her garden, in her husband’s vineyard, and on a novel.

.A

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how BARBARA BOYLE spends her days.