Today, please welcome writer DANI SHAPIRO:

A

I awake as I do most mornings to the creak of the stairs, the sound of my husband’s footsteps.  Michael brings me a piping hot cappuccino in my favorite blue-and-white striped china cup.  I roll over in bed.  I’m a little jet-lagged–we’ve just returned to our home in Connecticut from a writers conference out west.   I tossed and turned last night, haunted by unusually vivid images of my parents, both gone now.  Why were they visiting me in my half-sleep? “Five more minutes,” I beg.  But it’s nearly eight o’clock, and the mom of one of my son Jacob’s friends is coming over to pick him up.  I open my eyes–the cappuccino helps–and our two dogs Samson and Zeke are by the bed, waiting for attention.  They’re like Mutt and Jeff: a big fluffy white labradoodle and an ornery little Norwich terrier.  The whole family is up except for me.

Downstairs, we’re still in a summer routine.  Jacob eats cereal at the kitchen table.  “Sponge Bob”–bane of my existence–is blaring on the television.  I put together a tote bag for his day: tennis racket, socks, sneakers, shorts, swimsuit, sunscreen, ipod, earphones.  I’m sure I’ve forgotten something.  Mornings are an attempt to be in mommy-mode and at the same time reserve just a bit of myself in that quiet, dreamy state of just-waking, so that once my family is out the door, I can turn to my work.  The mom arrives with kids in tow–the dogs are overjoyed, leaping off our stone walls in greeting.  A sweet sight: a little girl still in pink pajamas stands in our driveway, her hair in braids.  I wave goodbye, still trying to keep that small bit of myself in reserve.

Michael leaves for his office where he will spend the day writing.  The house is quiet.  I spend the morning hours in my study, catching up.  I write a blog post, since I had fallen behind during our time in Sun Valley.  I answer several emails, some of which require careful composition and thought.  I check items off lists–my mind zinging all over the place.  All the while, I am thinking that I must do something that settles me into myself.  Usually, this involves yoga or meditation.  Recently I have begun to play the piano again, after many years away from it.  I have started to take lessons with Jacob’s piano teacher.  I’m starting slowly, with scales, exercises, arpeggios.  A lovely Sonatina.

It’s nearly lunchtime before I manage to peel myself away from my desk, the tasks at hand.  I have a new book coming out–a memoir called Devotion— along with a new paperback edition of my first memoir Slow Motion–and all this necessitates lots of seemingly small bits of writing which actually require enormous effort.  I rewrite the copy for the back of Slow Motion.  At my editor’s request, I shorten my bio.  I feel as if I’ve gotten nothing done, but in fact all of it has to get done somehow.

Downstairs, to the piano.  The light streams through the living room window behind me.  As I practice, my mind begins to clear.  The concentration on a piece of music–the notes, the fingering, the dynamics of it–makes everything else fall away.  It is not unlike the practice of writing.  An hour disappears.  My mind finally quiet enough to read and to think.

At the end of the day, family life resumes.  The three of us have dinner–casserole leftovers from a Moosewood Cookbook recipe for Michael and me, chicken fingers and pasta for Jacob–and at this time of summer, a Red Sox game is almost always on television.  “Mom, did you see that?  Mom, look at that catch!”  I glance up from my iphone, juggling the competing interests.  These years of having a young child at home, of domestic life, of writing books–these years are full and rich and complicated, and even as the hours pass by too fast, I know one day I will look back at them longingly.

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?

• The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham.  A memoir with an experimental structure–absolutely brilliant and heart-rending.

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

• How you feel about your work on any given day is meaningless.  Show up for it no matter how you feel.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• When I feel completely, utterly fried, I climb onto the bathroom counter and soak my feet in the sink while reading Elle or Vogue.

By DANI SHAPIRO:

A

B

C

D

E

C

—Other Writers in the Series—

When I got home, I looked up my notes from the two summers I went to the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop. This recording was from the summer of 2005. I had actually been there.

What was sticking in my brain this time, though, was largely different from what I had taken notes on then. Ah, I thought, I’m in a different place now with my writing–hopefully a further-along place.

Which is an argument for rereading everything.  Who knows what you will notice the next time.

Which brings me to my point…This time, the main thing that stood out was Dorothy Allison saying, “I’m a watcher.”

Until I started writing, I was not a watcher or a noticer. Now I am. And that’s a good thing. Being a watcher helps me catch days. It helps make things stick. And character, as well as life, is all there in the details.

“She bought throw pillows, for example, and buying throw pillows is in my experience the single best indicator that a female human being is feeling pretty good.”  from Sight Hound by Pam Houston

“A pot simmering on the stove helps my father to believe we are still a family.”  from Fugitive Blue by Dani Shapiro

Details, details…

“Nabokov did not believe in time…But I find it impossible to dismiss time, the very thing which has so intensely failed me.”

Dani Shapiro creates the story in Fugitive Blue using three different time periods:

1) the time from which the narrator is telling the story, which is told in the present tense, in which time is also counted in the number of days since she has stopped drinking;

2) the narrator’s childhood, which is also interestingly told in the present tense, perhaps to show that her childhood is ever present to her, perhaps to make it more immediate to the reader, avoiding the distance the past tense would add;  and

3) the narrator’s recent past in NY, which is told in the past tense until the past catches up to the present, and then with a paragraph break, it moves into the present tense, all the while dipping back into the past when the story requires it.

The transitions are flawless.  The tenses flow seamlessly one into the other, as do the different time periods of the narrator’s story.  An early example from the childhood present:

“I don’t know this now, but in the single motion of removing my white knuckles from the steel handlebars of my bicycle–a feat of which I have been terrified for months–I am entering a lifelong habit of bravado which will end twenty years from now on the steaming pavement of a New York City Street.  I don’t have that information.  I can’t see the future.  I have no way of knowing.”

Even in the present tense, the narrator can see the future and know the end of the story.  Time is on her side, so to speak.

How does a writer know what to start with?  When to reveal a detail?  What is just enough to keep a reader interested but not so much that the reader has no place in the process?

It begins:

“I lie in bed these days and watch home movies–a useless exercise, to be sure, but I can’t stop myself.  Ned’s an amateur filmmaker, and ever since we got our first video camera when Kate was born, he has documented our family’s life, not just birthday parties and anniversaries but smaller, more telling moments.

I recommend all her books.

• Playing With Fire, 1989
• Fugitive Blue, 1993
• Picturing the Wreck, 1996
• Slow Motion, 1998
• Family History, 2003
• Black & White, 2007