Today will be an odd day because I’m going to be away from home, which means I’ll be away from my two-year-old daughter. The day begins as it usually does: my wife, daughter, and I have a quick breakfast before readying to leave the house. Daycare begins at eight thirty, which means that after rising from bed sometime between six thirty and seven, we usually have time to linger over a bowl of cereal or spend fifteen minutes getting dressed. This morning, though, my flight is early, so we move at a pace, and I find myself quickly and quietly waiting at a JetBlue gate for a flight that will take me first to Boston and then to Pittsburgh for a reading. It is not yet eight o’clock.

I’m married to another writer, Claire Vaye Watkins, and because of her tremendous talents and energy, she is called away from home sometimes, asked to visit such-and-such university, or to participate in any number of lucky-to-have-her reading series. When she is home, she is a dedicated professor in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Because of these achievements, and because I do not have a full-time teaching position, I have become the lead parent in our household, the one most often at home with our daughter, the one in charge of her day-to-day life.

I was fortunate to publish my first novel this past fall, and for a month or so after its release, I was on the road and away from home most weekends. I even had the opportunity to visit Cuba for the first time (my father was born on the island). Yet despite that brief and intense period of travel and professional engagement, I still find myself, today included, suffering an insistent hollow, a pocket of air where I expect a tiny, willful human to be. Traveling without my daughter is not traveling without my heart, as I am tempted to say, cliché as it is; better to say it is traveling without one of my lungs, the void an impediment, the absence of something slowing me down. I have grown more than accustomed to and wanting of her presence, and my assumption that my travels this past fall would lessen that anxious attraction—looking over my shoulder as though I have let her out of sight, mistrusting all silence, edgy with the energy I must usually divert to her care—proves untrue. I have lost the feeling, in some ways, for my body on its own, both happily and unhappily so.

This is slightly magical in certain ways. I know I won’t be waking up with her tomorrow, and that means I don’t have to consider what clothes she’ll wear in the morning, whether we are out of milk or cheese for lunch, or what errands I should do before picking her up from daycare. Consequently, on the plane from Detroit to Boston, I read eighty pages of Masha Gessen’s The Man without a Face, and I absorb it all. I experience a reading mind that seems (though I know this is not true) sometimes impossible under the circumstances of normal parenthood. My brain wants for diversion, maybe, or perhaps another kind of immersion, something else to pour its attention into. At the same time, there is too much time. Minutes often feel precious when I am with my daughter, certainly in regard to getting work done, but also during moments of intense joy, such as at night, sometimes, when we are putting on her footed pajamas and she wants desperately to squeeze the skin of my cheeks for no other reason than to enjoy the beardy feel of them. But now, away from her, the minutes seem excessive, unfillable. Or I have been given the wrong minutes, hours just for me when I am used to sharing them.

On the flight from Boston to Pittsburgh, I read more of Gessen’s engrossing book, and I tell myself that when I get to Pittsburgh, I’ll use my “free” time wisely. It’s Wednesday, and I won’t leave till Friday morning, but I have no obligations until tomorrow, Thursday. I can write all afternoon. I can write late into the night, go to bed and wake early, and then write some more. I can finish a new short story—really an old short story, one I started over a year ago and put aside and didn’t think I would come back to, about a Cuban baseball player who defects to America, who probably has to go home in the end—and then compare it to the other finished stories I’ve composed these past six years. I sit alone and wonder if together they amount to a collection, if I can convince my agent they undoubtedly are a collection.

My accommodations in Pittsburgh are lovely and luxurious. I have been put up in an historic mansion turned ornate bed-and-breakfast near The National Aviary. By the time I settle in and touch base with my host—the marvelous City of Asylum—it’s late afternoon. I take a drizzly walk to a local coffee shop and spend an hour there reading and responding to emails. I have that story in my mind, but I don’t open the document on my computer. I think about it, and I think about a writer, Lee K. Abbott, I’ve been rereading. The story is perhaps inspired by his own style, which utilizes a dynamic verbosity this baseball narrative is finding energy from. I wonder if I can keep up the same pace and energy that Abbott does in his work. Probably not.

I walk, along the edge of a park, to a Giant Eagle, and because I’m cheap when I travel alone—I don’t like to celebrate by myself, good meals and the like being pleasures I can only enjoy in the company of others—I buy a takeout salad and a Coke Zero. I don’t drink soda at home, so it is a kind of splurge. I eat at the antique-ish writing desk in my room, and I feel the urge to read the rest of Gessen’s book and forgo any writing tonight. These days I usually do my writing in the morning, and lately I’ve even been able to get up around five thirty and write before my daughter wakes, an endeavor that is sleepy and slow, but feels palpably ecstatic at the end, as though I’ve filched something from the universe. Usually it is just an hour, and I might attempt thirty minutes of writing tonight before I go to bed. I only demand three hundred words a day from myself lately, partially because it always seems possible, within reach.

This hope does not materialize, and I think that’s all right. I have spent the day learning to be alone again, and sitting still without a cause feels refreshing. There is nothing pulling me in any direction, and I can think about the story without putting words on the page. It can have the whole of my mind for the next forty-eight hours, whether or not that leads to “work.” And then I will go home, which I’m already looking forward to. I’ll very quickly see my wife and daughter again.

~

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?

• Masha Gessen’s The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. It’s a book that not only charts the authoritarian’s rise, but also illuminates with intelligence and urgency the condition under which he was able to consolidate his power. An enlightening and terrifying read, considering our current administration. I got the book after recently seeing Samantha Bee interview Masha Gessen and remembering how much I’ve been wanting to read her work.

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

• You can write a whole draft of a novel rather quickly on just 300 words a day, three or four days a week. No need to rush.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• In the past I had a—for a while unconscious—habit of needing to finish a story wherever I had started it. So if I began a story at my writing desk, I would have to finish it there. If I began a story at a coffee shop, I would go back to the coffee shop when I got to the end. This isn’t really true anymore, but every now and then I do return to the physical place where I started writing a piece, especially if I am dealing with a difficult narrative problem or situation. I don’t know why, but doing so can sometimes remind me what got the story off the ground in the first place, and where, as a result, to take it next.

~

By Derek Palacio:

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.

February 1, 2017: Derek Palacio

Ulises Encarnación did not believe in fate.

And into the hands of a storyteller I fell. In a matter of seconds the characters in Derek Palacio’s debut novel, The Mortifications, dance above a fire while I sit in rapt attention–the twins Ulises and Isabel, their mother Soledad, and Willems and Uxbal. Throw in Cuba and tobacco farming and a bit of the the unlikely in the state of Connecticut.

In their new house in Hartford, Ulises thinks,

Each room in the heavy house was its own lonely cell—the doors were made of hardwood and were as dark as volcano mud—and Ulises got into the habit of closing all the doors all the time, ostensibly to trap what little heat he found steaming from the cast-iron accordions, which were in every room, placed always under a low, milky window.

Isabel, at the age of seventeen, wonders at “the detachment she felt from her own skin.”

And Soledad, speaking to Ulises, says,

[Y]our father needed us to be miserable or, at least, to pretend to be miserable so that others would join his stupid cause. No one starts a rebellion when you can make salsa and brew your own beer and sit outside all night with one candle and tell stories. Revolution derives from discontent, my love.

In the following passage, Ulises articulates the difference between, on the one hand, his father and his mother’s new beau, and, on the other, his sister and mother:

And in that wistful look of his mother, Ulises finally understood the connection between the Dutchman and his rebel father; both men were inclined toward reason and fancy, and the tension of opposing forces, the power of separate wants, perhaps more powerful even than his mother or sister’s unidirectional wanting, was the origin of each man’s exceptional gusto.

This duality, the tension of opposing forces, can be seen and felt throughout the book–in the twins, in the two men in Soledad’s life, in the two countries, in the characters themselves. Below Willems describes to Ulises how he feels about Soledad, suggesting it’s the same way Ulises feels about his sister:

She’s two people; one you know and possess, and the other, which is the greater part, pulls her away from you.

Jason Sheehan for NPR describes The Mortifications as “hot sun and cool rain.”

Some books are storms. Others are weather. Derek Palacio’s debut novel, The Mortifications, is very much the latter. It is hot sun and cool rain, morning fog and the hum of a fan in the window. It ranges and roams, this book. When it settles onto a moment, it does so with the weight of ten butterflies.

In an interview at Fiction Writers Review, Derek talks about what of himself can be found in Ulises and Isabel.

Most obviously I gave my characters, especially Ulises and Isabel, my anxieties… Ulises’ experience is the one I imagine for myself. I have notions of Cuba handed down to me from my father, but little else to go on… It is the feeling of being drawn in by a place, but not recognizing it, or not feeling as though you could ever really be comfortable there, ever reconcile that history of distance and remove (which I think is a perpetual issue for people of diaspora). What I see of myself in Isabel is perhaps a bit more abstract. One of her major concerns is whether or not our faith in people and places can evolve in the face of change, whether or not those beliefs can find new meaning under new circumstances. This is also an element to my relationship with Cuba, one that I will finally explore in real life when I visit the island. I will be confronted by the reality of the country, and I will have to weigh that against the idea of the island I have built from my research and my father’s memories. I will have to build a new relationship with Cuba, both as a Cuban-American and as a writer …

Dinaw Mengestu, for The New York Times, writes that these larger-than-life characters are

bound to something greater than themselves through tragedy, and it’s in the depiction of that glorious tragedy, and all the love and devotion that come with it, that Palacio’s novel becomes more than just epic. It becomes extraordinary.

Extraordinary.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st* to read how DEREK PALACIO spends his days.

*In the meantime, you can read how Derek’s wife spends her days–yes, as of this February, we’ll have our first husband/wife writers in the series.