Last week during my fiction writing class, the topic got around to choices a character makes and one of my students said, “Well, we should all do what makes us happy. We are only given this one chance.” This was a terribly loaded statement, but out of that I decided to buy new towels—heavy, luxurious, Turkish cotton—to replace the threadbare ones we’d used for years. Towels, it seems, are the least likely things to be replaced in my family.

Today I am the first up, always awakening to the pale light around the window blinds. My mornings are usually productive, but today everything is different. It is spring break. I have started a new book. And, yesterday, I threw out my back picking up a laundry basket filled with the new towels. I couldn’t blame them, though, for my back. I’ve strained it a handful of times before—once, lifting a toddler into my arms. It was a particular movement, at that particular time. There is never any one explanation.

So I am restricted by pain I pretend does not exist. Still I intend to do everything I normally do—which includes letting the cat out, turning off the outside lights, emptying the dishwasher, making coffee. It does not include the run I would have taken on this glorious morning filled with sun and bird call and a rare, Florida breeze. My three children, each six years apart, are now old enough to assume their own responsibilities. But, for twenty years I stood at the counter in the half-light and made a child’s lunch, drove someone to school or picked them up, washed and ironed their clothes, made beds, cleaned tubs and sinks, grocery shopped and cooked. And I wrote.

Twenty years ago, my husband and I purchased a slightly dilapidated two-story 1920s Mediterranean, and during that time we’ve lived with cracked plaster, peeling paint, rangy azaleas, fallen light fixtures, and a central air conditioning unit on the upper roof level that would kick off for unknown reasons. My husband would climb a ladder in the middle of the night to bang on the thing—a magical remedy that made it rumble to life. We raised children and painted and landscaped and cleaned out the garage for yard sales.

How a writing life blends with this busy, task-driven life is a learned behavior, and I learned how to do these things all at once, and they became part of the machine of writing for me. As I shopped and cleaned and smoothed and tucked in sheets, I allowed myself space to think about my work, so that when I sat down I knew the next scene. I never resented the work of the household because it had become an integral part of the writing.

So, how to handle stasis has become, for me, a struggle. There are no children requiring clean laundry. If their bathroom is dirty, I don’t notice because it is now a room I have no need to enter. Why clean, I think, just for the two of us. I can get by without cooking an elaborate meal. Our renovations of the house, too, are stalled. Now, we wonder if we should simply sell it. Isn’t it too big? Isn’t there too much upkeep?

Confined by pain, I am made even more aware of how integral my old routines have been to my writing. I know that I cannot reclaim them, that I must move toward something new. And being on the edge of that discovery, hesitant to take any step forward, is more debilitating than the pain.

I always write in the morning, and starting the new novel is both difficult and exhilarating. There is so little to go on—a house in a suburb on a spring night, one upstairs window lit. The morning is interrupted by my son, heading off to classes, and my husband, who works from home, talking on the phone. I have no desk, but the house is big enough that we have space to stay out of each other’s way. I have coffee, and a place on the couch, where through the arched windows I can view the four corners of an intersection–the light switching from green to yellow to red, the joggers, women with strollers, the backpack-bearing homeless. Some days, this is a front row seat to a major accident, the hurry of the world disrupted by screeching tires, the blunt crunch of metal.

Though it is spring break, I will head to Connecticut mid-week, so I want to get a jump on reading students’ stories. These I put off until afternoon. By then, I have written a handful of pages. In the small courtyard, the wind chimes jangle and I ease myself up and move outside so I can experience the rare spring breeze before the humidity descends and it is all at once summer. The cardinals call in the oak canopy. I decide I will pick up annuals for the flower pots, hire a contractor to paint this old house that I love. Maybe, I will make the smallest upstairs bedroom into an office. I have written a few pages I am happy with—the pages, like the striking of the old air conditioner, sparking everything back to life.

~

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?

• Emily Ruskovich’s debut Idaho. The stunning reviews were enticing, of course, but I’m drawn to harrowing stories told in beautiful prose, and I was curious about the structure of the book—the small sections told through various perspectives, like pieces of something shattered.

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

• My bit of writing advice is to read—widely and with inquisitiveness. Reports, history, song lyrics, pamphlets, plays, cemetery records, manuals, cookbooks—anything can be useful and fuel for the work.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• My mother, exhausted by five young children a year apart in age, always had us in bed by 5:30 PM. For the youngest this was no problem, but I was the oldest, and at five, I found it impossible to fall asleep, especially in the summer months when it was still light outside. To occupy myself I made up stories—serials with recurring characters. I still do—either before sleep or if I find myself awake in the middle of the night—returning to my work-in-progress and playing out scenes.

~

By Karen Brown:

O

—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.

April 1, 2017: Karen Brown

I first heard of Karen Brown when I opened a manilla envelope from Henry Holt. I used to get these sorts of packages more often, back when I was reviewing on a regular basis. Inside the package was a book–The Clairvoyants—with a haunting, soft-toned cover. The ARC was thick in my hand.

I always have piles and piles of books waiting to be read. But for some reason, shortly after it arrived in the late fall, I picked this one out of a stack. Maybe I thought I could read a few pages and quickly pass it on to someone else. But once I started reading it, I never stopped.

And The Clairvoyants is not the type of book I usually fall into. Rather, I tend to choose books with both feet on the ground. This one has a mystical element. Some have called it a ghost story. Call it what you will. I loved it.

Karen’s story “Galatea” was first published in Crazyhorse. Then Salman Rushdie chose it for The Best American Short Stories 2008. That story grew up and became this novel of 37 chapters.

Here’s the first paragraph of Chapter 1.

I was named after my great-aunt, a nun I first saw in my grandfather’s barn on my seventh birthday. The barn was in Connecticut, where I’d grown up, and Auntie Sister sat in her black habit on a bale of hay in a shaft of sunlight. Pieces of her dark hair snuck out of her wimple. I knew her from the photograph my grandmother kept in her living room–Sister’s pretty face framed by her coif, her head tilted to one side, her eyes laughing. My grandmother had two older sisters, Martha Mary, destined for the convent, and Rose, who would languish in the old Fairfield State Hospital in Newton.

This opening is solid and full of details–name, age, place, hay bales and wimples. Three pages later, here’s the last paragraph of Chapter 1. [spoiler alert]

I waited in apprehension for Sister to emerge from the barn and join us, but she did not. I would eventually learn that in 1962, driving back to the convent upstate with three other sisters after a convention of the American Benedictine Academy, Sister had been in an accident. A blowing veil, perhaps, had obscured the driver’s vision, and they’d all died on the New York State Thruway, many years before I saw her sitting in the sunlight in my grandfather’s barn. This explained her smooth, youthful face when my grandmother’s was creped and sagging, the outdated serge habit. It did not explain how I saw her, but I have never questioned what most people might. A door had opened and I had left it open and maybe because of that things happened the way they did. That was all I knew, and as a child all I cared to know.

Karen does such a good job of grounding us in reality that I am stunned but in an eerie, dawning kind of way to learn that what seven-year old Martha saw at the beginning of this chapter was a vision. Such good writing to have the older narrator use logic on that vision–no wonder she looked so young; she was dead already. And then right up front, the narrator points out what is not explained. And then the hook–maybe that’s why things happened the way they did. Karen leads the reader smack into the story.

There are lines I loved throughout. This one on page 79 will give you a feel for Martha’s character:

Talking to him had filled me with some sense of promise that I might become someone other than myself, and I wanted time to fashion this person. 

So often descriptions on the backs of books are hyperbole. Not this one.

Karen Brown’s most hypnotic novel to date–gothic-inflected psychological suspense that unmasks the secret desires of a young woman with a mystical gift.

The Clairvoyants is Karen’s second novel. The Longings of Wayward Girls was her first. She has also published two story collections–Pins and Needles, which won The Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and Little Sinners, which won The Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the 2013 Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how KAREN BROWN spends her days.