Today, please welcome writer JOSHUA MOHR.

One of the last things I say to my wife as she’s getting ready to go to bed is this: “I’m off to the mine.” Then I wander to our basement and turn off every light. I open my computer, pull up whatever file I’ll be clacking on. The only light shining in the room is my work’s glow from the laptop–everything else is pitch–and that’s how I do my best writing: when the only thing illuminating my surroundings are words.

Of course, it isn’t just visual. My process is equal parts audio. Namely, terrible punk rock. Take last night, for example. The Cramps cranked in my headphones. I wrote from about ten pm to three am, then got a few hours of shut-eye. My daughter wakes up around 6:30 and she and I will fry eggs, read about the venerable Winnie the Pooh. We might even play a full contact game of hide and seek, all before I shuttle her to daycare at nine.

There are those mornings that just gift you something, too. For instance, I’d been giving Ava a bath a few days back and we heard something pelting our house, and I said, “Hail!” and she said, “Hail?” and I said, “Let’s go!” and I bundled her up in a towel and we went outside to play in the storm. It was a perfect moment.

I’m lucky in that I have the sort of disposition that I can function on a few hours’ rest. I actually sort of like being tired if it’s for a GOOD REASON, like honoring my craft. Like everyone else, I despise being tired for other inaner reasons (aren’t bosses the worst!?), but, at least in my world, being overtired, being cranky, being whatever is the price you pay if you want to write consistently.

It’s up to every artist, after all, to show up and honor our books-in-progress. It falls under no one else’s jurisdiction. If we want to write consistently, then we need to set aside the time, and once it’s a habit, that’s the muscle memory component of being a novelist/memoirist. I show up in my darkened basement with The Cramps screaming in my ears. I do pull-ups and pushups to keep my blood moving. I even shadowbox, hoping, tenderly hoping, that nobody peers in the window and wonders if I’m having some kind of extended seizure.

I’m sure there are people of means who can carve out time during the banker’s hours to scribble, but, well, we are a family without much money. I teach. I edit. I hustle freelance gigs. All that plus being a husband and a dad doesn’t leave much time for writing.

But what other choice is there? If writing is truly a passion, you do what you have to do. You brew coffee. You stay up. You hope your muse likes punk rock, and the two of you are off on an adventure together.

FUN. Did I mention how much I dig writing? Can you feel that from what I’ve put down here?

I’ve identified a process that’s fun for me. When I write it feels like eleven minutes has transpired, and I look at the clock and it’s been hours. I’m thirsty and hungry and bleary-eyed and aging prematurely, but I don’t care. I can’t care. Artistic expression is one of the few things that makes sense to me on this planet. Besides that–and let’s keep this between me and you, okay?–I’m a confused person.

But I do know how to lope down into the mine. I know how to turn off the lights. Know how to open up a file, use its glow as sunshine. I know how to let terrible music blast through my head.

And hopefully, there will be a sentence or six that I publish and you get to read. And hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, you can hold that book up to your ear like a conch shell. Then you can hear my heartbeat.

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What writing advice do you give that you rarely follow?

• That people should write every day. I am a binge and purge author, writing like crazy for a week or so until the cupboards of my imagination are bare. Then I take a few days off to regenerate.

2. What one word best describes your reading life? 

• Knowledge-Transfer.

3. If you find yourself with an extra 15 minutes, what do you do?

• Ava, who’s four, digs writing “books,” too. I never change any of her reckless syntax or nonsensical word choices. I’m just her underpaid secretary. I write down exactly what she dictates, and it’s always the highlight of my day.

~

By Joshua Mohr:

BLUE

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—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.

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June 1, 2018: Joshua Mohr

Fear spills out of me like the milk rolling down my daughter’s chin. I shake my dead hand back and forth, back and forth, and say to Lelo, “Something’s wrong,” and she says, “What?” and I say, “911.”

Three strokes before he turned 40. And then they found a hole in his heart. Josh Mohr writes about all of this and his addiction and recovery and relapse and recovery in his memoir Sirens, published by Two Dollar Radio in 2017.

We all have piles of books, and lists of more books to read. There aren’t enough hours in a day. You may think, well, at least this one I can skip. But you can’t. You have to read this one. For so many reasons.

cool Chagall-esque cover by Haejin Park

#1: The writing. It’s solid–each word like a brick, no fluff. Here’s an excerpt from the addiction-story thread:

I said, “What’s funny?” and she said, “You’re crazy,” and I said, “You got that right, pretty lady,” and leaned down slipping off one of her shoes and my wife was at a corner table having no idea that I was being such a scumbag, simply chatting with her friends, waiting for me to come back with a round of drinks, enjoying a normal night cocktailing until the moment she couldn’t stand me anymore, though that was still moments away, me trying to convince one of the Brokeback blokes to pour whiskey straight in this girl’s shoe and either Rick or Brian asking her, “You okay with this?” and she pointed at me and laughed and said, “He’s crazy,” and Rick/Brian already knew that, of course, and he poured whiskey in her shoe, my chalice, and the music thumped some Chicago break-beats, and most people at the bar started cheering when I brought the shoe to my lips and slurped out all the booze and the woman whose shoe it was clapped and made some sorority-style squeals and me asking the debutante if she wanted to dance and she said, “Sure,” and I said, “Not here,” and she said, “Where?”

#2: The craft. At a recent Writing by Writers‘ event, Josh described his process. First, he said, he wrote the story in a boring, linear fashion. Then he went to work to understand the universe of the story he wanted to tell. He told the LA Times,

There are examples of all three notes that Josh writes about in the above paragraph in this introduction. For the addiction-story note, see the excerpt under #1 above. For an example of the second note, see the opening quote. And for an example of the third note, the meta-narrator, see the final quote below.

#3: The story. Or maybe story should have been #1. For the book starts with a prologue that grabs you and won’t let you go. The first excerpt above is from the prologue. And each note is a story in itself, and together they create the bigger story.

I’m thirty-nine now, writing this as a father, someone sober six years, writing this wondering if a look backward can make sense of who I am, what I am.

Come back on JUNE 1st to read how JOSHUA MOHR spends his days.