I may not have ever kept a diary or a journal, but I have kept planners. Helen Phillips said on September first:

My strangest habit is the neurotically detailed daily planner that I keep (paper, not digital). I’ve been keeping these planners since I was in about third grade. For many years, I would erase each task as I completed it, which provided me with a sense of tranquility; by the end of the year, the planner would be blank again. But the week I turned twenty-five, I realized that it was such a loss to erase my days, and I switched to crossing out instead. So now I know exactly what I did every day of every year for the past nine years. I keep track of what I’m writing and what I’m reading, people I saw and events I attended, milestones in my kids’ lives (first tooth! first joke!). This is my little bulwark against the passage of time and the unreliability of memory.

When I was young and had trouble going to sleep at night, my mother suggested I keep paper and pencil by my bed and write down the things I was thinking about. This habit saved me many a sleepless night. Get it out of my head and on paper (or in my computer), and then I can forget about it. I live by this.

So when I became aware of planners, I latched on. Starting with Day Timers and two-pages-to-a-day (lists and such on one page and hours on the other). Each month came in a separate spiral notebook. I saved two of these: July and August 1976, when I was living in Quebec City for the summer. At some point I switched to a-page-a-day, which came two months to a spiral notebook. I saved two of these–Sept/Oct 1979 and Mar/Apr 1980, the year I was living in France.

Since 1982, when I was 25, I have saved every year.

• In 1982, my second year of law school, I switched to a desk calendar.
• 1983 and 84 were back to pocket calendars–a week a page.
• In 1985, I had a desk and a pocket calendar.
• 1986–desk calendar.
• 1987–1998–switched to Filofax pocket-sized notebooks. I LOVED these. Beautiful leather notebooks, mini dividers, all sorts of forms–one even to keep track of books read and another for menstrual cycles.

In 1999 I went digital, but that year has disappeared. Even after that, though, for the crazy summers with four kids, I would print out monthly calendars and color code the children and their activities–it kept me sane, and feeling as if I had some control over the situation.

This year with my one-true-thing practice, I’ve looked back at the paper planners a few times to make sure I was getting my stories as straight as possible. I love what Helen said about keeping a planner: “This is my little bulwark against the passage of time and the unreliability of memory.”

~

 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

Today, please welcome writer HELEN PHILLIPS.

Book Launch Party at BookCourt

1:09 p.m. on Thursday, August 13, 2015, at a shared workspace in Brooklyn, New York. Now my computer screen is in “focus view,” so all I see is the blank page surrounded by blackness. This is my favorite moment of the day, the moment when I get to write. Usually I try to arrive at this moment long before now, ideally by 9:00 a.m., but my novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat launched two days ago, and I have a book release party at BookCourt in Brooklyn tonight, and it’s a heady time, and plenty of non-writing business needs attention.

This publication phase has me reflecting on the dual and contradictory roles of a writer. Firstly, to spend years creating something in almost monastic solitude, to separate oneself from the chatter of the world, to pursue one’s inner vision and oddity to the maximum. And, secondly, to transform into an entrepreneur, a social creature, a public storyteller, in the months (and especially the days) surrounding publication. I, along with many (most?) writers, feel less at ease in the latter role. But I honor its importance; though there may be an early stage of any project during which I feel that I am just writing for myself, to explore my own questions and darkness, the ultimate desire is to connect one’s mind with the minds of others, to engage in a collaboration of sorts with one’s audience, to lessen one’s essential loneliness by using language in precisely the right way that a reader may say, “I, too, have felt that very thing, though I never thought to put it so.” This is what I take away from the books I love most, and my greatest ambition is to try to offer this to my readers.

I spent the first two hours of this dizzying book party day with my three-year-old and my eight-month-old, getting them fed and dressed, diapered and pottied. It’s staggering how many highs and lows there are in my home before 9:00 a.m.—tears and laughter, tumbles and leaps. By the time the babysitter arrives, I feel like we’ve already had a full day, complete with moments of total frustration and total joy. And the kitchen sink is leaking.

the path leading up to the workspace

My husband (an artist/teacher) and I are able to leave the apartment together today and stroll together to our respective summer workplaces (he to a café; me to the life-saving shared workspace in our neighborhood). We cover about seventeen different topics in our fifteen-minute walk. One of our jokes about parenthood is that the most basic things, things we used to take for granted, feel wildly luxurious—we got to walk together and talk together, a morning mini-date.

When I’m working on a book, I avoid checking email/internet/social media before I start writing, but in this book launch week, that’s where I begin. A lot of thank-yous to send to all of the friends and family and colleagues who have been attending book launch events and expressing their support. I think of these thank-yous as a writing project unto themselves. Then I remember to call the plumber, which seems like a great accomplishment. I talk with Emma Komlos-Hrobsky of Tin House to brainstorm about the craft class on flash fiction I’ll be teaching for them in the fall. I text my husband to see if he can relieve the babysitter at 1pm so I’ll have some extra work time (I’ll swap him for some work hours for himself this afternoon, the never-ending see-saw).

my temporary desk at the workspace

And now, the rare pleasure of catching this day, of writing this all out, of creating a time capsule of this moment in my life.

In a few minutes, I’ll pack up and head home (don’t let me forget to pick up those things at the grocery store on the way). Arriving home, seeing the kids: my other favorite moment of the day. May the magical plumber arrive at three as promised, may the babysitter arrive at five as promised, may I figure out something to wear to the book party tonight (have I worn that black jumpsuit a few too many times?), may I feel tranquil rather than jumpy as people arrive at BookCourt, may I take my parents’ advice given to me throughout my childhood before any public performance: “Just pretend there’s nowhere you’d rather be.” But today, it’s easy, because I don’t have to pretend: There’s nowhere I’d rather be.

~

I saw this sign on a tree on my walk to the workspace. I stood underneath the tree. I think I will use this in a book someday.

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 Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. I was fascinated by her book Bluets and have been awaiting this one. I love The Argonauts even more than Bluets. It’s an important, courage-giving book, and I will definitely return to it over the years.

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

• It’s a cliché but I can’t top it: Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.” I think about this on good writing days and on hard writing days, and it always helps—takes the pressure off, paves the way for risk.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• My strangest habit is the neurotically detailed daily planner that I keep (paper, not digital). I’ve been keeping these planners since I was in about third grade. For many years, I would erase each task as I completed it, which provided me with a sense of tranquility; by the end of the year, the planner would be blank again. But the week I turned twenty-five, I realized that it was such a loss to erase my days, and I switched to crossing out instead. So now I know exactly what I did every day of every year for the past nine years. I keep track of what I’m writing and what I’m reading, people I saw and events I attended, milestones in my kids’ lives (first tooth! first joke!). This is my little bulwark against the passage of time and the unreliability of memory.

By Helen Phillips

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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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.

photo credit: Brooklyn College

September 1, 2015: Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips first appeared before my eyes back in 2011 when I was the Reviews Editor for Contrary Magazine. Before I had even finished reading Harriett Green’s review of Helen’s first book, And Yet They Were Happy (the book she’s holding in the above photo, the title of which I LOVE), I had ordered the collection. Here’s the first paragraph of the review:

In her first book, And Yet They Were Happy, Helen Phillips doesn’t begin at the beginning, or even, as some writers do, at the end. Instead, she selects themes—some sacred and some intimate, some ordinary and some fantastical, some political and some apocalyptic—to weave a complex tale of one couple’s life journey into a series of miniature, interconnected stories.

Here’s a sliver from the final section of the collection on “the helens,” where the narrator is named Helen Phillips and is

a wife who had transformed from a human into something else. The plaque beneath the cage bears only her first name: Helen.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat, Helen’s debut novel, is now out from Henry Holt. Her Facebook status update announcing the publication date read as follows:

For the past seven years I’ve been working on a weird little book. Now it has a pomegranate. And a bug. And a pub date (8/11/15).

This new novel opens in the middle of Josephine’s interview for a data-entry job with an interviewer who has no face. Josephine gets the job and on page 26 you will find this irresistible paragraph.

Still, the distance between four o’clock and five o’clock, between 148 files and 166 files, often felt interminable. Sometimes, in the depths of the afternoon, Josephine would have a thought–an intense, riveting thought, incongruous with her current task and location, something she ought to share with Joseph, a hind of a scene from a dream or a forgotten memory from when she was a kid, a complicated pun or a new conviction about how they ought to live their lives–then the moment would pass and the thought would be lost, trapped forever between the horizontal and vertical lines of the Database. She’d spend the rest of the workday mourning the loss, resenting the jail cell from which her thought would never escape. In the late afternoon, frantic for respite of any sort, she might pull a yogurt and spoon out of her bag and peel back the foil and shut her eyes and begin to eat it blind.

Helen did in fact have a data-entry job herself, and that’s where the idea for this novel began. She said,

All of us are, to the bureaucracy, simply a series of pieces of paper: a birth certificate, a voter registration, a visa application, a marriage license or two. We don’t feel like a piece of paperwork, and yet these forms and licenses gesture toward the entirety of human experience: the vitality, the lust, the grief, the loneliness, the hope.

Although Josephine’s job is tedious, Helen’s book is not. As did her collection, The Beautiful Bureaucrat mingles the mundane and the absurd, the common and the magical. Throw in some Kafka and some suspense and voila. On August 9th, The Beautiful Bureaucrat received a smart, full-page review, “God and Data Entry” by Jamie Quatro in the Sunday NYT.

What makes The Beautiful Bureaucrat a unique contribution to the body of existential literature is its trajectory, as the story telescopes in two directions, both outward to pose macro questions about God and the universe, and inward to pose intimate inquiries about marriage and fidelity.

Please follow the link below to check out Helen’s new website and to read more, more, more about this cool writer.

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how HELEN PHILLIPS spends her days.