The night is just blurring into soft gray dawn, and my dog, Quincy, is standing by the bed staring at me. His wagging tail smacks the curtain, and the capiz shells on the bottom of it do a muffled clink-clink. I rub his head, and he smiles at me the way dogs smile, more inner than outer, as e.e. cummings might say, more fuller than mouth. It is nice to be woken up by love like this. He pads happily behind me as I get up, go down the winding flights of stairs to make him his breakfast, the kibble that my husband calls “bunker bits,” a half can of fish and potato mush, a sprinkling of parmesan cheese on the top—just because.

The view from my kitchen window is the flatness of the Jersey Shore, a wide gray stripe of Barnegat Bay, a wider stripe of sky, and, on the far horizon, a line of sedge islands. My backyard is a marshy cove—a little scoop of heaven. If there is a right place for every person on this planet, then this is mine. I breathe in the achy low-tide smell. A black skimmer slices across the cove on his last swoop of the night then arcs and flies off. I walk Quincy down the street to Dirty Louie’s house and back, put sunflower seeds in the hanging bird feeder, corn in the pan for the duck couple that comes every morning. I pull a few weeds that are sprouting out of our crushed-shell “lawn.” I make a pot of coffee-cake-flavor coffee, sit on the couch, flip through the Atlantic City Press, read just enough news to feel semi-connected to reality (but not too connected). I do a bit of the Sunday NY Times crossword, which usually takes me most of the week to do. I like going back to it every day. How did I not see that answer yesterday when today it’s clear?

Then it’s time to read a couple chapters of a book in the galvanized tray on the old pine coffee table. Pick a book, any book. At any time, I’m reading memoir, fiction, poetry, books about writing. I read it all. That’s because I like to write it all. Today, there’s a William Zinsser (love him), a book of Stephen Dunn poems (love him too), and Natalie Goldberg’s An Old Friend From Far Away (can’t get enough of her). I’ve been writing a memoir, so I’m reading a lot of book about writing memoir lately. Today I pick, Your Life As Story by Tristine Rainer. Reading gets my juices flowing, gets me thinking, “I can do this…” Gets me feeling, “I want to do this…”  Then I start writing. I use an unlined sketchpad, a big one, so I have room to sprawl. I write crooked and fast—so fast that my doubts can’t catch up with me. I rip out a lot of sheets and throw them away. I have to do a lot of blah-blah writing before I get to anything real, to where I touch a nerve ending. It’s like fishing—nothing, nothing, then a nibble and a tug and I know I’ve got something alive and pulling at me.

Today is Saturday, and I don’t have to take care of my retail stores. I’m going to a writing group at Stockton College this afternoon with some people I meet up with once a month, so I need to have something to bring. I write a poem called “Mother’s Day.” It starts, “I hate you. You are so fat, / my son wrote on his third grade mother’s day card for me…” If my poems make me laugh a little and cry a little, I think I’ve succeeded. I walk up the stairs to my computer on the second floor, to a desk made out of plywood braced on some cut-off porch pillars, to the always changing, I-can-never-tire-of-it view of the bay. My friend, Colleen made the word “Shine” for me out of recycled something-or-other, and it’s perched on my windowsill with a starfish. I type, print out, revise, print out. I use way too much paper. It takes me a long time and a lot of effort to get the words feeling right.

My writing group is six people today. All of them are good writers. We spend three hours reading aloud our stuff, hearing it read back to us, listening and making comments. The plate glass windows show the sky, the trees moving silently. I love these people. They struggle to create, they work at it, they get it. I need groups like this. I go to workshops whenever I can to get this feeling of belonging.

I drive the half-hour home on the Garden State Parkway, exiting onto Rt. 72 with its six lanes of traffic. I pass the Wal-Mart and the Kmart and finally reach the causeway with all of its construction, and I drive the bumpy roadway across the sparkling bay. Boats carve through the wavelets far below me. Long Beach Island is bustling with Saturday afternoon tourists.  The traffic signals are back on after the long winter of their blinking caution-caution. The air smells like sea salt and exhaust fumes and garlic butter. I stop at Murphy’s Market to buy steaks and arugula for dinner. It’s just my husband and me tonight, so we eat in front of the TV watching Jeopardy. “Who is King Tut?” I guess. “Oh,” I say when I’m wrong. “Eustachian tubes?” “The Rhine River?” I try every clue. My husband knows the strangest things—astronauts, Olympic swimmers, seventies TV theme songs. How do you know that?” I ask him. He shrugs.

After Jeopardy, I go outside, turn on my little transistor radio to listen to the Yankees’ game. I’d rather hear the game than watch it. I don’t know what that is. Nostalgia, I guess, from when I used to listen as a kid. I sit under the pergola, under the grape vines just starting to leaf and read while I listen. The sun sets over the cove. I sip on red wine. I am blessed, I think. The breeze touches the wind chime my son made out of shells and driftwood. Then the breeze dies. The sky is huge and pink, then stars appear as the sky turns navy blue. The dock lights start to glow and make shimmery puddles on the bay. A tinny roar comes out of the radio. Something must have happened. Something good…

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What word best describes your writing life? 

• All-over-the-place. I’ve written and published 26 gift books, a murder mystery, short stories, flash fiction, memoir, and a poetry chapbook. That’s just plain kooky.

2. Do you write in the books you read?

• Not fiction usually, but non-fiction, yes, and poetry, yes. I make little stars and underline.  Sometimes I write things like, “Holy Moley!” Mostly I’m just trying to mark it somehow so I can remember it, or, at least, find it again.

3. What is your favorite year of life so far? 

• This one. I love my life now. And next year, I’d like to love it even more…

~

By Sandy Gingras:

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.

July 1, 2017: Sandy Gingras

This past February, I got up from the Writing by Writers’ booth at AWP and roamed the halls of the book fair–part exercise, part curiosity. I was moving pretty fast, but two cute guys standing at a booth slowed me down. I stepped up to the table and discovered Diode Editions, a small press with thin, eight by six inch books that make the reader feel grateful for each page. I couldn’t resist this cover and title.

When it pays off, judging a book by its cover feels like discovering buried treasure. Which was the case with Sandy Gingras’s Not Even Close to What She Planned On, which was awarded an honorable mention for the New England Poetry Club 2016 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. On its Table of Contents page, I starred nine out of the twenty-two poems.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Light Factory.”

I have to take / the dark in my gloved hands and make / something of it, then connect it to something else.

And here’s a portion of “The Bear that Came through the Window.” 

Now I’m going to start in on the second stanza.
In this one, the idea is to discover
what emotion this whole poem is about.
Although you may not realize it, but sometimes
you have to write for a while to figure that part out.
I hope, for my sake, that’s what happens here.

“Sestina for Stephen Dunn” uses repetition to brilliant effect. You can read it in its entirety over at The Sundress Blog; an excerpt will not do it justice. “Chicken” is one of my favorites, and Sandy has given me permission to share it with you here.

Chicken

Twenty years ago, we went out.
Now he cooks the rotisserie chickens
at Costco. “Remember when we were
going to start a B&B?” I say.
He shakes his head.
“I just fell into this,” he tells me.
The chickens twirl and drip.
His gloved hands reposition them.
He used to be good in bed,
but now the fragrance of chicken
is all around him, clinging
to his apron. Once, he wore crisp
white shirts and his father’s gold watch.
I used to picture us changing bedding
together, making toast for the guests.
Maybe it would have been a Victorian
house with all those nooks
and crannies. Maybe people would
have felt cozy there. What happened
to us? I want to say. But I don’t.
He takes a chicken out
from under the warm lights
and puts it in a plastic bag. “It’s on me,”
he says handing me the chicken.
I take it because I like chicken.
Everyone likes chicken.
When I get home, I eat it with my fingers
on my tray table in front of the TV.
I watch the show I always watch where they redo
people’s houses. I keep thinking of the guy.
Tom, his name is. Tommy, I used to call him.

You can see her range. Sandy uses dialogue, humor, story, moment, and even plays with the act of writing itself. She says on her website that she wants “to say things fresh.” And that’s the way these poems strike me. Not as if she’s polishing anything but as if she’s letting go of what’s unnecessary, which makes what’s left shine without any polish. Sometimes it feels as if she dunked a bucket into her life, poured it through an orange plastic sieve, and merely lifted the pieces that caught onto the page.

After I read the poems, I googled Sandy, and that’s when I discovered I’d been enjoying her words and illustrations for twenty years. How to live on an Island was first published in 1996. It started as a doodle,  jumped onto a t-shirt, and then became a card. And that was just the beginning.

One day I brought the design to a local publisher I knew and told him that if I just split up the phrases of the design (one to a page) and did an illustration for each phrase, it could be a book. He thought it was a good idea. And that’s how How to live on an Island came to be.

Sandy says she’s always been more of a writer than an artist, but that her world is all connected, all “jumbled together.” In addition to the ”How To Live” series of books, (on beaches, on islands, in flip-flops), she has won New Jersey Council on the Arts awards for her poetry. She’s also written a mystery novel, Swamped, and her story “Beached” won the Crime Writers Association’s Debut Dagger Award in 2012. Her poetry and memoir pieces have been published in many journals.

She’s published twenty-six books with five different publishers and lives with her husband, son, and Golden Retriever on an island six miles out to sea off the coast of New Jersey, where she recently completed a memoir.

Come back on JULY 1st to read how SANDY GINGRAS spends her days.