Upon Waking
Ella, the rescue dog, stands by the side of the bed making sounds like a sea lion. It’s 6:43 am, raining, too early. I make sea lion sounds back. Technically, my day began post-midnight, reading under the covers, lost in Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name, the second book in her four-books series set in Naples. I’m captivated. For the past seven years, I’ve been immersed in the study of short fiction, and though I read ten or more novels a year, it’s been a long time since I have immersed in this way, letting everything else go, latching on to the protagonist, not thinking about what I’m reading as a writer, but enjoying myself as a reader.

Whenever I try to suss out why a book grips me in this way, in this case, a series, I eventually give up–no easy answers there. Yes, it’s about Italy, women, friendship, complexity. Yes, the characters are driving the story. But, what else? Something…Maybe John Freeman’s blurb on the cover sums it best: “Imagine if Jane Austen got angry & you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.”

My favorite novels fill a special shelf in my office, ranging from slim, small press, literary gems, to doorstop-quality bestsellers. This morning, I want to revisit that shelf to remind myself what I love, but I avoid climbing the stairs to my office. What a mess! If I go up there, I’ll see all the ways in which I am behind, and it’s Tuesday, which means Art and Meditation class at 10:00. I’ll use the early morning hours to linger in the dreamy, lazy state I woke up in.

Coffee. I stare out the window. Ella roams the yard investigating her doggie stories through scent. What porcupine dared return? What neighbor’s hound is wooing her? I look up Elena Ferrante online and read until I find that articles and reviews threaten to overlay my reader experience, so I stop, but not before I’m taken by a reply she once wrote in a letter to her publisher, “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” I will honor that by keeping my nose in her book.

On the Way to Art Class
Here’s what I see on my seven-minute drive to art class:

~ Three salt farms with harbor views and fields that roll down to the water

~ Two waterfront cemeteries

~ One bald eagle crossing the road (something I see most days)

~ Dozens of lobster pots stacked against a garage

~ One woman stooped to pull weeds from the mud surrounding the post of her mailbox

~ Four crooked barns

~ An old school bus used as a dwelling

~ Five chickens lined up on a picnic table

Art and Meditation
There are two new women, first timers, in my Tuesday morning group. Joy, the facilitator, explains: “What we do here is go around and say our names. I ring the bell. We meditate for seven minutes. I ring the bell again. We work in silence.”

The Tuesday before, I almost stayed home, spinning the wheels of my novel-in-progress, but I thought that getting out of my funk could only help matters. I’ll go paint! But during the meditation, a different plan unfolded, a way to explore the stalled workings of my novel-in-progress that might shift my process from left to right brain. I skimmed through old art magazines and gallery brochures. When an image arrested me I ripped it out. I cut around it. I trimmed. When I came across words or word phrases, I did the same. No pausing. No judging. Keep moving. After an hour of this, I spread the pieces on my table. I fiddled, rearranged, as if working an open-ended puzzle: a portrait solidified in my mind of what a supporting character could look like, a phrase suddenly honed meaning, a series of nudes, sketches, paintings, women doing everyday tasks on a lawn became the big idea, the “why” behind the series of events I was looking for. With a thick black marker, I wrote lines, made notes. I felt the novel, which had begun to elude me, come alive again. I went home and wrote four new chapters. Plus, I’d developed a plan, a structure, three acts, a forward moving narrative.

Today, I return to the process and find more layers, a pivotal event, an underlying theme. I glue images over words over images, discovering that it’s the darkness in the story that slows me down, trips me up. I pull out a large sheet of black paper, rip it in half the long way down the center and tape one half to the other, creating a long linear space. Using glue and tape, I commit images to the paper. I make pockets, flaps, pop ups. I write key phrases, whole lines. I draw arrows. I circle and erase. The collage allows the abstractions of the writing to become a tangible representation, clearly a work-in-progress as is the novel that will grow and change as I draft. It’s now got physical moving parts.

Research
After class, I do research. I’m looking for something. I’m not sure what. It’s my favorite kind of research, the kind I do from my car on long drives down lonely dirt roads where most of the houses are boarded up until summer. I find a road sign. Lockhart Lane. Perfect. I revisit an abandoned schoolhouse, the place I see in my head when I’m writing the difficult scenes. It’s just an old schoolhouse. I park my car, leave the engine running, leave the door to the driver’s seat open. I approach. I snap three pictures and run back to my car.

Writing
I have the rest of the afternoon free to write. Even though I long to flop on the couch and immerse in the perilous times of mid-century Naples with Elena and Lila, instead, I open my computer and the file, Heron House, working title, novel-in-progress. It’s the summer of 1976, a time I know well, the protagonist, a fifteen year-old girl. The setting is where I live now. I’m fueled by paper arts, field trips, a thrill, more coffee.

Post-rain pre-dusk walk.
Hours later, the sun appears. Ella’s tail bangs the coffee table–the tick-tock of the doggie clock–time to walk. We head down Old County to Ross Pond. We crunch the gravel of our dirt road, play ball, stir up last autumn’s leaves. Ella plunges the cold April waters. Silly girl! I toss a stick. She retrieves. I think about Heron House, Astrid and Zeke, Pastor Dave, Juniper. I think about how, for the first time, I’m taking more risks in my writing, amping the content–body politics, racism, misogyny, abuse–and the volume frightens me. I want to dive into the frigid water myself, submerge, and step out, washed clean of my writing.

Evening
Since the walk, I’ve edited forty pages and baked a cauliflower goat cheese casserole to share by candlelight with my husband. We hosted a neighbor dealing with difficult issues, issues not far from the ones in my novel. It’s been a full day, a balance of process and progress, real life and fiction.

It’s late, quiet in the house. I’m thoughtful. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t consider quitting writing forever. On the contrary, there isn’t a night when I settle into bed with a book–Ella nestled in her bed on the floor, and my husband deep in sleep–that I don’t feel certain of my path. Elena and Lila. I’m here. You’re here. What’s going to happen?

~

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 Name is Lucy Barton. I’m a super big fan of Elizabeth Strout. I’ve grown as a reader and a writer alongside her writing. While Olive Kitteridge remains a favorite among favorites, My Name is Lucy Barton hones the art of the white space to do some heavy lifting in a manner I rarely observe in longer fiction. Plus, the content­­–the mother/daughter relationship, how what happened matters, the questions of how we face what we face and when we face it–that’s all real personal for me.

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

• Let your writing do a bunch of other stuff, like dance and paint, or make a frozen blueberry, kale, and Swiss chard smoothie, or take a day trip on a train for the hell of it. I find that if I don’t let my brain out for recess, my characters just sit there like dullards, craving oxygen, vitamin D, and adventure.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Maybe not strange, and I’ve alluded to it, but I play with the connection between word and image, make art that has nothing to do with visual expression but everything to do with freeing my brain to write. I paint wide sweeping blues and greys, embedding a line from a story in black, and it settles me down. I make collages of scenes. I stare at the images on Tarot cards, attempting to divine what project out of a half dozen should move to the front burner. I fold cootie catchers and make spinners when faced with tough decisions. Let chance decide. Let my visual impulses take over.

~

By Jodi Paloni:

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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.

May 1, 2016: Jodi Paloni

I could not be more excited to introduce the next writer in the series–one of my best friends, Jodi Paloni. Jodi’s debut collection, They Could Live With Themselves, a runner-up for the 2015 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, with the official pub date of May 3rd in honor of its publisher, Press 53, was released in April at AWP, where Jodi signed books until there were no more to sign.

Jodi and I met at VCFA in December of 2009, and I’ve been reading her wonderful stories ever since. I’ve listened to her talk about the town of Stark Run where these characters live and which stories to include in the collection and how to order them. I was on the phone with her when a picture of the gorgeous cover of the book arrived by email, and I could not wait to hold the book in my hands. But I didn’t start reading immediately. I wanted to save it.

Over the years, reading versions of these stories, I’ve always been partial to Molly, but I’ve never forgotten the Wonder Woman lunchbox and what happens at the pool and the park and the store. I’ve voted on endings and suggested titles, but I was not prepared for the powerful impact of reading these stories one after another, for the thrill of sighting characters from earlier stories in the story I was reading, and the pleasure of getting inside the head of a character I had only known from afar.

Jodi nailed these eleven stories–from the order they appear in the collection to the way she saturates moments in the stories in the present. I don’t know that I’ve ever read stories with such heart. If you haven’t read They Could Live With Themselves yet, you’re in for a treat.

Here’s a little preview that is a bit of a spoiler not because I tell you what happens in a story but because part of the pleasure in reading this linked collection is who we will run into next; so you may want to read the book before you read what I have to say about it.

Molly Sings the Blues: Molly grips the broom handle and sings to Billie Holiday. Her youngest son, Sky, has just graduated from high school.

Is it too late to learn how to sing, she wonders, to really sing, deep and throaty like Billie, the blues, to buy a piano, take lessons, make some strides to catch up, this one life, to draw herself from the well, draw the wilderness out of the woman within the wife, the mother?

Wonder Woman: Rory, a 9th grader who loves a chicken named Little One, is making a life-sized replica of Wonder Woman in 3-D out of chicken wire. Along the edge of this story, we see Sky and his dad running the annual rummage sale. When Melissa, a 10th grader, talks about getting out of here, Rory thinks,

I wonder what’s wrong with here. Stark Run is what I know, how the sky turns gray in winter, how the river rushes in spring. I’d miss how the night sky lights up with stars.

Deep End: The first sentence.

Too many kids bobbled and raced in the cloudy over-chlorinated water that Saturday afternoon for anyone to notice that Jillanna’s tiny brother, Elliot, had stumbled in over his head.

In this story we meet Meredith Wade, the young art teacher.

The Third Element: From the window of her studio, Meredith sees a kid poking around her back porch.

Watching him in secret reminds her of the time she first understood the pull of solitude. She shifts on her stool. When he turns and looks out over the yard, she recognizes him, Sky, one of her seniors from last semester.

Bench Girls: Sky’s father, Jack, tells this story. Molly is off doing a yoga internship, and he takes their granddaughter to the park.

He glanced back at the girls on the bench chattering like three sets of those trick teeth they sold at the hardware store at Halloween.

From Inside: Here we’re inside the head of one of the bench girls, Claudia, who’s inside a black bear costume as part of her community service. And now it is Halloween.

She strained to hear footsteps shuffle the leaves, her heart a toy drum. She felt the muscles in her legs contract, ready to spring. Was he coming? The man was late. The ache in Claudia’s hollow gut spread and rose and lodged, now an apple in her chest.

Ms. Bellamy: The star of this story is a beloved teacher a new principal is trying to force into retirement. Ms. Bellamy lives with her mother in her grandmother’s old house. She arrives home after a day at school and calls out, “Mother!”

“I’m up in the attic.” Her mother’s voice came fluting down the banister like fresh dust. “God, is it five? I’ll be along shortly.”

Accomodations: On a night of wintery weather, Wren, who we met in “Ms. Bellamy,” has locked up the general store, but she begrudgingly re-opens for a stranger.

He smiled and Wren witnessed spousal love in his soft expression, the kind her parents had shared when she was young, before her sister’s accident, before all of their lives took a tragic turn. She looked away so not to intrude on the man’s privacy or perhaps she looked away to protect her own heart. So deft she had become at shutting off the valve of her own pain.

Mabel, Mabel: The voice of Charlotte, who turns twelve during this story, will captivate you. Here’s the first paragraph:

Saturdays at our house can be sad and mean, although no one does anything on purpose. My older sister, Emily, and her boyfriend, Sky, sleep and sleep until the silence in the house wraps around my neck. When they finally get up, they feel too sick from Friday night beer games to write papers for community college. They lounge and talk about what they should be doing instead of doing it.

The Air of Joy: Addison’s wife, Ruby, told him she wanted to feel “the air of joy on her face.” Two days later she left him. In this story, where Wren peeks in the window, Ruby drops back in.

Her eyes were rimmed with the kind of exhaustion that Addison did not know how to show with his body, but he had felt it, fatigue as dark and deep as a cavern, endless tunnels of exhaustion, in those final years of the marriage.

The Physics of Light: In this final story, what we’ve been leading up to, getting into Sky’s head. In the words of Dave Jauss, who both Jodi and I were lucky to have as an advisor at VCFA,

[A] young man who aspires to be a photographer decides ‘to do a series, tell a story’ in ‘twelve images’ and ‘invite his audience to feel.’ That’s what Paloni does in this masterly collection of linked stories set in fictional Stark Run, Vermont…

For more about Jodi, check out her cool new website, created by the author/artist herself. And while you’re there, buy They Could Live With Themselves, read it, and then go back to buy some more to give to all your friends. And,

Come back on MAY 1st to read how JODI PALONI spends her days.

How We Spend Our Days / OCTOBER: DAVID JAUSS

As part of the How We Spend Our Days series, writer Jodi Paloni talks to October’s writer David Jauss about point of view.

JODI: A book that I think should be required reading is one of yours—your essays, On Writing Fiction and particularly “From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance and Point of View,” a version of which is archived at The Writer’s Chronicle in the September 2000 issue. In Glossolalia, as well as in your previous story collections, you tell stories in both the first and third person. You’ve also used multiple points of view, such as in the story “What They Didn’t Notice.” In your essay, I remember clearly how you take point of view to a much deeper level than a lot of material I’ve been able to find in other craft essays. You discuss long-range and close-up perspective and that point-of-view is not just the use of “person.” Would you be willing to talk a little about your point of view on point of view?

DAVE: I think point of view is the most poorly taught, and therefore the most misunderstood, aspect of fiction. Most craft essays and creative writing textbooks focus on the narrator’s person, not on the techniques the narrator uses, and the techniques are vastly more important than the person. To make matters worse, the authors of these essays and textbooks tend to write prescriptively rather than descriptively, asserting that certain techniques, like omniscience, are available only to certain types of narrators. If we look at the actual practice of writers, however, we’ll see that all of the techniques that comprise point of view—the presentation of only what can be seen and heard, as in drama; omniscience; indirect interior monologue (aka free indirect discourse); direct interior monologue; and stream of consciousness—are available to any narrator regardless of person. There are innumerable examples of first-person omniscience throughout literary history, for example, including the Decameron, Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and, more recently, works by Barth, Beckett, Borges, Díaz, Eugenides, García Márquez, Grass, Kundera, O’Brien, Rushdie, and Welty, not to mention our most recent Nobel Laureate. Still, virtually everyone who’s written on the subject of point of view claims that omniscience is the sole province of third-person narrators. And the most commonly used term for indirect interior monologue these days is “close third,” a term that belies the fact that first-person narrators can, and do, use this technique as well.

Also, because it’s generally a bad idea to shift person in a work of fiction—to have a first-person narrator suddenly morph into a third-person one or vice versa—textbook authors have leapt to the conclusion that point of view should be singular and consistent. That may be good advice when it comes to the narrator’s person but it’s definitely not good advice when it comes to the narrator’s techniques. As I tried to show in my essay, the techniques that truly constitute point of view are inevitably multiple and shifting. For example, the point of view we call third-person omniscience may be consistently third-person but it is not consistently omniscient, for the narrator must of necessity shift from omniscience to the dramatic point of view whenever she deals with a character whose mind she doesn’t enter. And narrators shift from one narrative technique to another not only within a story or novel but also within a single paragraph—and sometimes even a single sentence. In one brief paragraph from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example, Joyce shifts from omniscience to indirect interior monologue to dramatic point view.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of your ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned.

Joyce starts simultaneously inside and outside his protagonist’s consciousness, then goes deeper and deeper inside, and then concludes completely outside the character. In short, in this one paragraph he does what he and every other writer worthy of the name have done in their works: move from outside to inside, from long shots to X-rays, and back, modulating the psychic distance between the reader and the character to create the effect and meaning they desire. 

One final point: defining point of view in terms of person ignores the fact that first-person narrators use third person whenever they talk about other characters and that they sometimes even talk about themselves in third person (witness Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and, more recently, Kevin Brockmeier’s O. Henry Award-winning story “These Hands,” which begins, “The protagonist of this story is named Lewis Winters. He is also its narrator, and he is also me”).

As for how I choose what point of view I use in my fiction, all I can say is “I’m not sure.” It’s a whole lot easier to analyze point of view choices once they’re on the page than it is to explain how those choices were made. Basically, I just try several approaches until one feels right. I wish I could give you a more specific and helpful answer, but if I did, it wouldn’t be an honest answer.

JODI: For writers wanting to learn more from Dave on all aspects of craft, I highly recommend, On Writing Fiction, previously published in hardback as Alone With All That Could Happen. Thanks so much for the interview, Dave. Enjoy the rest of October!

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Many thanks to JODI PALONI for Catching Jauss.
Jodi can be found at a Stone’s Throw, where she sometimes blogs. She is a freelance writer, as well as a creativity coach, and her writing has been published in Carve Magazine, upstreet, Whitefish Review, Contrary Magazine, and Spartan, among other places. Her story “Deep End” won the 2013 Short Story America Prize for Short Fiction and will be anthologized in Short Story America Volume IV. She also placed second in the 2012 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest for her story, “The Third Element.”

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October 1: How We Spend Our Days: David Jauss

October 2: Dave and Jodi discuss Munro,Chekhov, Carver, and the short story

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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How We Spend Our Days / OCTOBER: DAVID JAUSS

As part of the How We Spend Our Days series, writer Jodi Paloni talks to October’s writer David Jauss about Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, and the short story.

JODI: What was your reaction when you heard that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature?

DAVE: I had pretty much given up hope that the Swedish Academy would ever recognize someone who wrote short fiction rather than novels—after all, not one of the previous winners wrote short fiction exclusively—so I was thrilled when she won the prize. I took it as reparation, 110 years late, for failing to give the award to Chekhov, and it made me feel that short stories just might finally start to get their due.

JODI: I’ve heard Munro referred to as Canada’s Chekhov. How has her work instructed your writing and teaching?

DAVE: I wish I could say that my writing shows her influence, but alas, I don’t think it does. Her work has definitely affected the way I teach writing, however. By subverting so many of the so-called “rules” of fiction, she has made me aware of possibilities available to fiction writers that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Munro’s fiction is frequently described as “traditional,” but it is anything but. Like Chekhov, to whom she’s often compared—indeed, it’s become almost obligatory to call her “the Canadian Chekhov”—she is an extraordinarily innovative writer. Like him, she breaks every so-called rule in the book, and by doing so she reveals new ways to convey the depth and complexity of human experience.

But she hasn’t been merely following Chekhov’s playbook. They share subtlety, a self-effacing, unprepossessing style, a sympathetic but unsentimental understanding of an enormous range of human beings, and a willingness to depart from the conventions of their times, but her approach to story-telling is quite different from his. Her stories are far more capacious than his—and certainly far more capacious than mine. It’s not unusual for her stories to cover decades, and they loop backwards and forwards in time in unexpected but always enlightening ways. And her handling of point of view is also more complex than Chekhov’s and virtually anyone else’s. Anyone who believes the contemporary shibboleth that point of view should be consistent throughout a story would have that belief seriously tested by Munro’s brilliant modulations of point of view.

The best description of Munro’s original approach to both structure and point of view is her own: “A story is not like a road to follow,” she said, “it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” Ultimately, it is her innovations, especially in structure and point of view, that make her stand in relation to our time as Chekhov stood in relation to his, not any superficial similarity in their styles or their attitudes toward their characters.

JODI: I like that analogy of entering a house; it’s useful to think about writing a story in that way, especially about the way in which “the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.” Do you think this kind of notoriety–a Nobel Prize in Literature–will serve the short story form?

DAVE: I’m not expecting the world to reverse its novel-centric view of fiction anytime soon (or ever), but I do hope the prize makes people recognize that, in Munro’s own words, “the short story is an important art, not just something you play around with until you write a novel.”  For me, the short story is the most demanding and beautiful of all fictional forms. But don’t take my word for it; take Gabriel García Márquez’s. A few years ago, he said, “I’m convinced more than ever of the supremacy of the short story over the novel.”  The short story may be small in size but not in ambition. As Stephen Milhauser has said, the “ambition of the short story” is “to body forth the whole world . . . in a grain of sand.”  Whereas novelists all too often make a molehill out of their mountain of material, short story writers can make a mountain out of a tiny grain of sand. Amy Bloom summed it up best: both forms scale Mt. Everest; the short story just does it faster.

JODI: Besides Chekhov and Munro, what other short story writers would you recommend to short story readers and why? Or, to use the old familiar question, if you were to be stranded with five story collections on a desert island, which ones would you hope they’d be?

DAVE: Chekhov and Munro would definitely be on my desert island list, but since you’ve asked for other choices, I’ll be greedy and take five nice fat ones: the collected stories of Hemingway, Faulkner, García Márquez, Kafka, and Flannery O’Connor. But these are all books by established masters and your readers have probably already read them (if they haven’t, they should do so pronto). So here are five of the many lesser known contemporary collections that I admire and wish were more widely read: Leslee Becker’s The Sincere Café; Jack Driscoll’s Wanting Only to Be Heard; Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater; Ann Pancake’s Given Ground; and Eric Puchner’s Music Through the Floor.

JODI: And, Carver?

DAVE: Raymond Carver was a very big influence on me, as many of my stories probably make all too clear. I was drawn to his work in the same way, and for the same reasons, I was drawn to Chekhov, who is to me the Lord God of short fiction. They both have a cold eye and a warm heart and write sympathetically about people quite different from themselves. I think of them as the literary equivalent of defense attorneys, writers who make the case for even the most flawed of us while looking unblinkingly at those flaws. O’Connor’s been a big influence on me as well, but I see her more as a prosecuting attorney, someone who is doing her damnedest to convict her characters. Even though she sees these “convictions” as ultimately for the characters’ good—her goal is to show them, and her readers, the way to salvation—I think sometimes her heart is almost as cold as her eye, so I’m less drawn to her. But lordy, can she ever write. I marvel at her stories—and her essays, too. I think Mystery and Manners should be required reading of anyone who wants to be a fiction writer.

How We Spend Our Days: David Jauss

Catching Jauss: David Jauss on Point of View

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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one of my favorite writing views

Since I started Catching Days back in 2008, it’s been my policy (also my personality) not to do the group blog things. Which made it easy to decline the first time someone asked me to join the my-writing-process blog tour. It was less easy to say no the second time because by then I had enjoyed reading many writers’ posts about their process. Then I discovered Robin MacArthur’s post about her process, where she wrote about how she had also said no and then changed her mind,  joining “this ever-expanding web of voices.”

So when Catherine McCall wrote a couple of weeks ago and invited me to participate, I changed my mind. Cathy is a friend of a friend, a marriage and family therapist, and the author of the powerful memoir, Never Tell. In her post on process, she writes about “surrendering to summer’s requirements for a nearly constant process of re-prioritizing the activities of my life.”

At the end of this post, in appreciation of the earlier invitations I received, and in lieu of new names, I will give you a link to the two writers who first invited me to participate, as well as a link to Robin’s post.

Here we go…

What am I working on now?

Novel number four. In fact, on Sunday I printed out a very-close-to-final draft of this novel that I’ve been working on since January 2013. But because it’s still a WIP, I don’t want to say too much about it. But I can tell you that it’s about a young couple just starting out, who love each other to pieces but who want different things in life as far as family and daily rhythms. And this novel is the reason I’ve been scarce here.

How does my work differ from others of that genre?

I bet I’m the only writer who mentions an Etch-A-Sketch in each of her novels.

Why do I write what I do?

I write about relationships because that’s where the mystery is for me. How they work. What makes them survive. What destroys them. How to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the couple. How time changes things.

How does my writing process work?

In the fall of 2012, my youngest son left for college, and that December, my oldest son got married. In January of 2013 my writing process changed. I began to travel to Provincetown once a month for a week. This week away from the life I’ve lived for thirty years allows me to put writing first for seven days in a row. It allows me to cover a room with pages. It allows me the time to take a novel apart and put it back together without being interrupted by things like the exterminator or dinner. It allows me to live where I want to live and look at what I want to look at. And on travel days, I do some of my best work waiting in airports and sitting on planes.

I can write anywhere anytime. When I’m really in the middle of something, words will wake me up at night and cause me to pull over on the side of the road.

I am discovering a new rhythm. For so long, my days were similar and filled with family, and I had to squeeze writing in. Now that the kids are gone and I have this whole week once a month, I don’t feel as if I need to hold the reins quite so tightly at home. I still feel uncomfortable if a whole day goes by without any writing, but I’m trying to learn to be comfortable with that. These days, family comes in quick, huge doses, and then they’re gone again. Or I’m gone again. I’m traveling a lot. The wind is shifting.

If I’m able to choose all the little details around sitting down to write, I will light a candle and face some large body of water, like Cape Cod Bay for example. Some people prefer a wall. I prefer water. A wall would make me crazy. Nowhere to go with my eyes. Nothing to draw out the right brain. A wall would send me into myself and awaken my left brain. The water coaxes me out.

You know how in Ron Carlson Writes a Story (a book I love), he writes about staying in the room? Well, I have discovered that for me, staying in the room doesn’t always produce results. If I get stuck, getting up for tea or to do some other mindless task often allows me to get out of the way of the death grip I have on the words. I’ll sit back down, raise my fingers over the keys, and the words run free.

The particular process around each of my novels has been different. The first one took ten years–I was learning how to write. With the second one, the left brain was still pretty much in charge, and the right brain was just angry–the ugly teenage years. The third novel is where my right brain came of age, putting on a chiffon skirt and sandals and flitting around Europe. And with the novel I’m working on now, the brains seem to be working together in a mature thirty-something kind of way that I am very proud of.

May you find the process that works for you.

Next up (but actually up now)

Claire Guyton at Daily Shorty. Claire was my co-editor at Hunger Mountain, who went on to write a story a day for a year. An excerpt from her process:

I developed my current (tentative) manuscript using index cards, each bearing a story title and notes on voice, length, form, themes, and arresting images and phrases. As I arranged and rearranged and arranged again my stack of cards, I kept drifting, mentally, into the fetal position, marveling that the gift of wordskill can morph into manacled ankles before you can say, “A speculative flash piece in narrative form exploring mortality, confused identity, and ruptured familial ties, with metaphors and analogies using water and blood.”

Jodi Paloni at A Stone’s Throw. Jodi publishes a story a month : ) Anyway that’s what it seems like. An excerpt from her process:

I’m also pleasantly engaged in the heart-of-my-heart project, my novel-in-progress, which takes place in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. I’ve just returned from what I call “a gathering retreat.” I didn’t have a plan or schedule any research appointments. I walked the coast and smelled the air. I slept and ate pastries from the French bakery. I collected artifacts from the beach, and took long drives to re-acquaint myself with the presence that got this thing started two years ago this May. That was also when I also discovered the French bakery. 

Robin MacArthur at Woodbird, Them Mornings. In addition to being a writer, Robin is also a singer/songwriter. An excerpt from her process:

I am working on finding a way to make a living, raise two young children, build a house, lead a sustainable life, and write. This is, as anyone who has been here before me knows, no easy feat. I recently started an editing business for myself, which is how I’m paying the bills. My writing—oh, sweet writing!—is simmering in the background in multiple pots. At the front of the pack is my nearly-finished-for-two-years collection of short stories. They take place in Southern Vermont where my father was born, where I was born, where my children were born. They are about women and ghosts and animals and the ways in which we humans are shaped by the landscapes we inhabit.

Happy Writing…however you do it!