Roxana Robinson

This morning, I woke up around 5:30. I never get back to sleep once I wake up, so I got up quietly in an attempt not to wake my husband. I checked my email briefly and skimmingly, (though I know I shouldn’t,) didn’t answer any, had my writer’s breakfast–granola and yoghurt–and then carried my computer and mug of coffee down the hall and into my writing room. This is not my study, but an old maid’s room, a tiny room behind the kitchen, with nothing in it but a chair and a bed and a night table. I shut the door and sit cross-legged on the bed, with my computer and the books I’m using for research. I like working in a small, warm, bare, enclosed space. On the wall are photographs of interiors in my grandparents’ house, and a watercolor my father painted, of the field by the house where I grew up. But I don’t look at them while I’m writing.

I work for two or three hours. I start out by revising, in order to work my way into that place, remembering the voices, re-entering the landscape, and then I begin to add something new. It’s like painting a floor, repainting the same area over and over to get the high gloss finish, then adding some new strokes of the brush on a bare part. At first it looks strange and awful, horribly new, and the wrong color. It doesn’t at all match the rest. But the next time you see it, it has taken on a comforting familiarity. Or else it looks worse, and you have to paint over it with another color.

I’m working on a novel now, but that’s about all I’ll say about it. I don’t talk about fiction while I’m writing it. I’ll admit that I’m doing research, though. Ever since my second novel I’ve become increasingly interested in subjects that require research. It’s odd, because one reason that I chose to write fiction was that I didn’t want to be trapped by facts. But I’ve become fascinated by subjects I didn’t know enough about–groundwater contamination, mountain lions, heroin addiction, military morality–and so now I’m used to working with piles of reference books stacked around my computer.

After two or three hours I take a break and carry my computer back down the hall to my study. This room has a desk, cable connection to the internet, phone, bookcases and so forth. Now I really check my email, and this is a risk. This may change my brain from the hazy dream brain, where I write, to the jazzed-up twitchy daytime brain, where I spend much of my other life. I usually can’t stay in the dream brain all day; after a couple of hours I usually get curious about the world and check emails. I can do this a couple of times and still go back to writing, but at some point I can’t go back to that state of mind, and then I’ve finished writing, and I start in on the day. Sometimes, when I’m at the end of a book, I can start in again after dinner, and write late into the night, but not now, not in the early stages. There isn’t enough of it yet.

This is Friday, so at noon we leave to drive out to the country. I can’t wait to see the garden. The house is old–it was built by my grandparents–but the garden is new, put in by me when we renovated. When we arrive it’s raining slightly, and everything is a fresh pale green. The tall ferns are still upright, this early in the season, regal and lordly. The fothergilla, the bottle-brush plant, is in bloom, thrusting its tiny cream fuzz up into the air, and so is the beautiful tiny magenta wild-flower, shooting star, or dodecatheon. You can feel everything drinking in the rain.

We carry our things inside, and then I go out and stand on the porch and look out at the garden. This is a wild, steep, rocky landscape, full of gray stone ledge and surrounded by woods. I’ve planted a lot of native plants, juniper and calycanthus, sweetfern and potentilla. They spill out across the slanting hillside, spring up between the rocks. Native wildflowers are scattered everywhere. The sweet little wild columbines, aquilegia canadensis, have always grown out of the stones, for as long as I can remember.

As I stand there I hear a crazy loud alarming buzzing, and I duck instinctively. It’s a ruby-throated hummingbird, zigzagging through the garden. He pauses, hanging magically in front of the pale white bleeding heart, which has just come into bloom, and glows in the misty rain. His wings shimmer, and he drives his beak deep into each bloom, then lifts his head, hangs still for a moment, then whirs busily off.

I love it here.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante. I chose it because I was stuck on a layover in the London airport in the middle of the night. I bought an American book, and then I thought that, since I was in Europe (sort of) I should buy a European one. I’d heard Ferrante’s name somewhere and bought the book. I’ve now read everything she’s written, and I am breathlessly awaiting the third book in the Naples series.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Write from your heart, not your head. Your head will get into it anyway.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I like to read in chronological order, and when I bought the thirteen volumes of Chekhov’s short stories, I spent hours laboriously looking up the dates of each story (which are not given beside the title, but instead listed in the back of one of the later volumes) and setting them beside the title of each story, so I could read them in the order in which they’d been written.x

By Roxana Robinson

..

.

.

—Other Writers in the Series—

.

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.

June 1, 2014: Roxana Robinson

I’ve been reading books by Roxana Robinson since 1996–June of 1996 to be exact. So I’m excited to announce Roxana as the writer in the series for June of 2014. The first book of hers I read was Asking for Love, a collection of fifteen stories, of which I starred over half, with the last story, “King of the Sky,” receiving two stars.

This past October, I had the pleasure of meeting Roxana at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, where she won the Literary Death Match–beating Pam Houston in the final round! In addition to that honor, she is the author of five novels, three collections, and one book of nonfiction.

Her most recent novel, Sparta, published last year by Sarah Crichton Books, tells the story of Conrad Farrell, who, out of the blue, enlists in the Marines. During a weekend home from Williams, his junior year, Conrad, a classics major, tells his parents his news.

So, I want to do something big. I don’t want to just go into some graduate school and get another degree. I want to so something that has consequences. This is the biggest challenge I know. I want to see if I can do it.

His mother struggles to make sense of his decision.

She tried to sound supportive and interested instead of appalled and frightened… Their family was bookish and liberal, not martial and authoritarian.

Conrad describes his decision as a kind of continuum of his studies.

The classical writers love war, that’s their main subject. Being a soldier was the whole deal, the central experience. That’s what first got me interested. Sparta. The Peloponnesian War, the Illiad. Thucydides. Homer, Tacitus. I wanted to see what it was like.

The book begins beautifully, with Conrad in transition, on a plane–a floating bridge–about to land in the States after his four years of service are over.

What came into his mind was the place he had left, which was still there. He was here, descending over this place, cool, errant, silent. The place he had left, which was still there, was arid, brown, deafening. Suffocatingly hot, heat pressed over it like a mattress. At this moment, while he was here, that place was there. But he could not hold both places in his mind at once. Trying to do so felt risky.

Conrad describes how he feels after his four years in Iraq, and the words he uses show how, despite his body having left the war zone, his head is still there.

The thing was that he was tired of himself, tired of his thoughts, tired of the anxiety that permeated his brain like a bad smell. Being inside his head, just thinking at all, just being conscious, was like walking across a minefield. At ay minute something might detonate, hurling him into someplace where he didn’t want to be. He was sick of it. There was nowhere to go.

I want to tell you about Conrad’s girlfriend, Claire, who took a classics course because the Illiad was “so major.” I feel like I have to know it. I need it in my head. I want to tell you how Conrad describes fear, about his breathing, why it’s important to write letters–real letters–to people you know who are far away.  How at every turn, despite the world of the novel being big enough, Roxana opens it up wider. So many things, I want to tell you about this book. And I haven’t even gotten to the story.

So read Sparta. And,

Come back on JUNE 1st to read how ROXANA ROBINSON spends her days.