It’s Monday, one of three days a week that both my kids are in school. It’s cold out and everyone is up early because everyone is always up early so we put on slippers and make tea (licorice for my kids, who are six and nearly three, black for me and my husband). Between six am when we get up and nine, when everyone has been dropped off, we make and clean up first breakfast (cereal) and second breakfast (eggs). We pack lunches and get everyone into clothes. Our drive is toward the Flatirons, past farms and fields. There are a few golden leaves hanging onto the cottonwoods but the branches are mostly bare by now. The mountains are clear and bluish and there is a cap of mist at the top.

The list on Monday is always long. I try to write first, before the flood of emails and tasks to be managed takes over. When I get home, I make another cup of tea and some eggs and go out to the studio in the backyard. We moved to Boulder this summer and looked at many houses, made offers and lost out, for months. And then this house appeared—a simple ranch, small but nice—and it had a 200 square foot studio in the yard and the moment I saw it on the internet, my heart raced. I’ve never had a dedicated writing space. A desk in the bedroom, the bed itself, the couch, the kitchen table, the library. It still feels weird to have a whole room, but it’s the best kind of weird.

I sit at the old-fashioned school desk and look out at the yard. I’m working on a new novel, just starting, and I’m going back and forth between research and creation. For three weeks I wrote 1000 words a day, but I’ve gotten stuck because part of the book revolves around science that I just don’t know. So today I go back to my notes and pull up a video of an evolutionary biologist talking about the different strategies people have considered for de-extinction—that is, bringing species back. The book will hinge on this. The passenger pigeon, the woolly mammoth. It’s a ninety-minute talk and I have ten pages of notes after.

I watch a squirrel work on one of the pumpkins we never got around to carving. The squirrel has managed to roll the pumpkin from the deck to the grass and is now standing on it, gnawing. He’s fat and happy.

I go inside for snacks (a persimmon, some peanut butter pretzels and two clementines) and then write for half an hour about a particular character. She’s one of two teenage sisters in the book and I haven’t figured her out yet. I know that everything I write in this first exploratory draft will change. Settings are not fixed yet, the plot is still bending and shifting, the characters are sketches. I also know that the only way to find out what I need to know is by writing through to it. After five hundred words, I have to stop because the to-do list is buzzing from the back of my mind.

I correspond with students in the low-residency program where I teach, I change a doctor’s appointment, I plan for a class I’m getting ready to teach, I book a hotel. Time zips along. It’s already one and I have just an hour and a little bit before I have to go pick kids up.

On research days the best, most helpful thing I can do is go for a walk after absorbing a lot of information. I do my best big-picture figuring on foot. There’s a path near the house that goes through a big field with huge cottonwoods and tall, silvery grass. I think about people trying to reintroduce mammoths and I think about my characters and the plot I’ve got so far and I adjust the timeline in my mind like it’s on a slider. What if everything takes place over one winter? What if it all happens much later than I’d been thinking? What if, what if, what if?

I walk fast in order to get home in time to make some notes, eat a hunk of cheese and an apple.

My daughter is asleep on her nap-mat when I get to her preschool and after gathering her lunchbox, snack box, water bottle, jacket, hat and shoes, I scoop her up and she dozes on my shoulder. We drive to my son who has three new paper airplanes to show me. We get groceries, discuss the speed of a cheetah vs. the speed of a falcon, drive home calling out any animals we see. “Horse alert! Mom’s window!”

Since having children, I’ve tried to find ways to keep my writing awake and alive even in the many hours I’m not working on it. I give my brain little tasks to chew on while I go about my day. As we drive, I’m thinking about the puzzle of a space of time in the book where everyone is just waiting, which is not an interesting thing to read about. Other events cycle through my mind. Something about a horse? I wonder, looking at black and white paint.

It’s always hard to elbow out the time to write but once I’m in it and as long as I keep coming back a little every day, my whole life shifts in that direction like a flower turning toward the sun. I notice things everywhere that change the book or belong in the book. My job is to keep watching and living.

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What book is on your night table now and why?

• New American Stories, edited by Ben Marcus, which I’m teaching from.

2. What one word best describes your writing life? 

• Mish-mash.

3. Any obsessions?

• Birth, death, and the crazy magic heartache beauty in between.

~

By Ramona Ausubel:

IAM

IAM

—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.

December 1, 2017: Ramona Ausubel

Summer fattened everybody up. The family buttered without reserve; pie seemed to be everywhere.

One of my favorite openings. And you’ll find it in Ramona Ausubel’s third book, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, published last year by Riverhead. When the novel opens, Fern and Edgar and their three young children are vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, which they’re able to afford thanks to money Fern has inherited. Fern is “a mother and a wife and herself all at once.” Edgar is an aspiring writer. On page four, the phone rings, and there’s no more money.

It was just nine years ago, in 2008, that Ramona published her first story, “Safe Passage,” in One Story, Issue #106. Which is how her agent found her. Four years after that, in February of 2012, Ramona’s first novel, No One is Here Except All of Us, was published. But she began writing that first novel in 2004, and it took five and a half years just to get to a first full draft, then two and a half years and seventeen more drafts before publication in 2012. In 2014, her first collection was published, A Guide to Being Born, which opens with “Safe Passage.”

Which catches us up to 2016 and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. This new novel opens in 1976 but goes back and forth to 1965. Ramona says the structure took a long time to figure out.

I wrote the current 1976 story first and I knew that would be the through-line, but … I’d do a draft where I separated each character’s journey into its own document and worked it through, then I’d splice them back together and play with the order. That went on for a long time. Meanwhile, I had the backstory tucked into those sections mostly as memories. It was really complicated and I kept trying to find the perfect spot for each recollection and it was a maze and a puzzle… Somewhere, somehow I realized that it was possible to choose simplicity, to choose clarity, to choose to allow the oxygen of chapter breaks and that lovely negative space as we shift from one year to another. And … it turned the structure into part of the story, an invitation to read something into the order, the story we see from the past at the particular time we see it up against the moment everyone is currently in.

As is evident from the opening lines, part of the pleasure of this novel is the writing itself. Take a look at some of the lines I underlined.

For its cleverness,

“Men could stand to be reinvented. Men are due for an update,” [Glory] said.

For the way it caused me to stop and imagine more than was actually on the page,

[Glory] leaned over and kissed him well, like it was enough, not a short and irritating detour on the way to the good part.

For an example of how to take a physical trait–tallness–and make it mean something,

He was hugely tall and it was as if he did not have enough self to fill that whole body.

For the efficiency of the word cuffs,

Fern sat on his lap and smelled his scalp and made cuffs around his wrists with her hands.

For its beauty,

The emptiness of night, the darkness, seemed like the only honest thing.

For its honesty,

If the marriage ended Fern knew it would not matter what the lawyers drew up: Edgar would get out with dignity, she would get out with children.

For this metaphor,

[U]nless one bought her way out of it, motherhood was a small room with high walls and no door.

For this simile,

She remembered the early days of her and Edgar, of walking around with her new last name like it was jewelry.

In this last excerpt, Evelyn, Fern’s mother, is holding her just after she’s born. Look how the quick summary works to establish class and expectation, and also to question it all. Plus, see how it involves the reader who must make the leap from “this very same moment” to “women having children.”

In the girl’s scrunched face Evelyn saw the entire path: pigtails, dollhouse, riding lessons, foxtrot, engagement, white dress, all in service of the repetition of this very same moment.

Ramona has published three books in six years, and if she had it to do over again, she told Writer’s Digest,

I wouldn’t have worried so much. I got lots of rejections and disappointments, and for a long time, I thought that meant it was never going to work.

Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how RAMONA AUSUBEL spends her days.

*photo credit: Michael Noble Jr., The San Francisco Chronicle