My days are so very aspirational … and not really related to the actual days I live, the calendar flipping between days when I never leave my house and days when I am gone from 7:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. My routine is no routine either, a lifetime spent struggling to wake in the morning—even before insomnia became my regular companion—and then working with increasing vigor as the day moves forward. Today, there is a storm—“a bomb cyclone,” the news reports say—bearing down on Maine. A day that is starting warm and toasty may end with the electricity out, the temperatures frigid, and me lucky to have a generator and a husband who knows how to start it up.

But for now, I have my assignments for the day—I will start rewriting an article for Yankee magazine, work on a new spring course (for Colby College, where I teach), attempt some time with my new novel, catch up on paperwork and emails, and do phone interviews for Maine Home+ Design, a shelter magazine for which I have written for the past eight years. In advance, I expect I’ll get to every task I set for myself, but struggle with the novel and making time for exercise, the things I supposedly most want to do.

7:16 PM

Save for folding and putting away two loads of laundry, I have spent my day in front of the computer, finishing the Yankee article. My piece is about a Gilded Age estate in Massachusetts and the history of Christmas traditions in the States. The topics relate, because the society that recently opened the house has decorated it to demonstrate the historical moment when Christmas first began being celebrated with the traditions we have today. Though articles like this are my “for money” work, and not my “real” work—by which, I suppose, I mean, my fiction—I love doing them. I learn a lot, get to visit interesting places. After I email my article to my editor, I do several phone interviews for my next Maine Home+Design article, talking with a Kennebunk architect, landscape architect, and homeowner, though the builders aren’t at their number when I call at the appointed time, and I haven’t been able to get in touch with the interior designer to set up the actual house visit. The storm, I suppose. No one is where they are supposed to be today. After the phone calls, I get de-railed. I have lost my checkbook, and since I have been in New York City for the last ten days, I feel like I should cancel my account. I call my bank, which says I will be on hold for three hours. Again, the bad weather, I assume. This sends me down an unrelated accounting rabbit hole, putting together receipts for my New York trip to submit to my college for reimbursement and adding December expenses into my end-of-the-year tax papers, all of which I organized before I left for New York. I write a letter of recommendation (not due till March) for a student applying for a scholarship. This efficiency is, I know, a form of not writing or not writing fiction. Also, not exercising.

But should I describe an ideal day or a real day?

8:50 PM

My husband’s birthday is tomorrow, so I have made a cake, ginger, a flavor he likes. (Knowing the storm was coming, I planned ahead, and bought ingredients yesterday.) I have invited six people for dinner for tomorrow night. Then, I have a phone call with my sister. When I say I have not worked on my “dumb fucking novel” all day, she says, “Wow, that’s an interesting thing for a novel to be able to do!”  I speak to my mother. She asks me when I start teaching again—the answer is Feb 7—and then cheerfully tells me that now I have a lot of free time. But I have, in fact, no free time—Colby is a half-time job, and I have two other part-time jobs, plus the ambition to write my novel–and when I say that actually I’m quite busy, four article deadlines in the next two weeks alone, she says, “You’ll have time to do things you want!” This enrages me. Why? Is it a crime for her not to listen when I speak? Of course not, and she’s spent her life being kind to me, but, still, I bristle. She asks me how my son is, my husband, wanting warm, bubbly, effusive answers, but the truth is not warm, bubbly, or effusive—we are trodding through a difficult time, and this is not news to her. I am angry all over again at the inquiry, which is not truly an inquiry but a demand for good news. She’s eighty. She’s frightened about what is ahead, knows she should sell her house, which is much too big for her, and she has been lately turning over this hard truth. What should her next step be? She’s scared and lonely, though she has dear friends and a boyfriend, whom she sees on the weekends and talks to regularly. (My father died eight years ago.) I can see why she wants the relaxing happiness of her loved ones, and yet relaxing happiness does not seem to me to be of what most lives consist. She says as much herself when we drift into how scary the world is with Trump as president, her saying that she’s never known a time quite this unsettling. This, from my mother who has such a strong memory of huddling in the basement during the Cuban missile crisis. (Perhaps the one thing that I will say about the book that I will clearly not work on today is that the tentative title is Rageopolis.)

I decide to do some preliminary snow shoveling, both for the exercise and to spare my husband’s bad back in the morning, but I bundle up, take one step out the door and am so lashed by snow, it occurs to me this is the sort of weather in which one could die two feet from one’s house. I forego the effort.

10:35 PM

The cake should be shortly done, and my husband has been in my office several times to tell me that nothing could possibly smell better. Well, that’s nice to hear. My son has come downstairs happily trilling, “You’ve made a cake for me?” No, for Daddy, I say. It’s his birthday tomorrow. I remind him people are coming over. The cake! It is going to have to be the good thing of the day, though it will go unconsumed till tomorrow.

And the heat, of course, the delicious heat. No power outage! I fill my hot water bottle—no heat registers in the second floor of my home—and head upstairs, though not before I tell my husband that Marcos, my Italian lover (doesn’t every hot water bottle need a name?) and I are turning in, though the hanky-panky we love best is reading and that’s what I imagine I’ll be doing for the rest of the day. Instead I get on the phone with my brother, we talk for an hour about this and that. I blow off steam about my mother and then realize I am being ridiculous. The anger is about my own issues, not her behavior. Out goes the light and my night of trying to sleep begins.

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. Do you write in your books?

• Sometimes.  And often I scribble bits of my own fiction in the end papers, when I am lying in bed, too lazy to get up for a real piece of paper, though an idea has suddenly occurred to me.

2. What is your favorite part of the writing life? 

• Getting to talk about books I love with other writers.

3. How do you spend the end of a long writing day?

• In bed with a book!

~

By Debra Spark:

IAM

IA—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, 2018: Debra Spark

The Writer’s Chronicle introduced me to Debra Spark. The old Writer’s Chronicle–oversized and newsprinty, remember? Debra’s essays told stories about her, were visual, and used examples from books I had actually read. I underlined and underlined and then tore them out and added them to my ever-growing stack on how to write.

Then, late in 2016, I was in a bookstore and noticed Unknown Caller. A new novel by Debra Spark. Why, I wondered, hadn’t I read any of her fiction?

I opened the book to the first sentence:

It is two in the morning when the phone rings.

I kept reading of course. But then, three short paragraphs later, Debra undercuts the drama that trails middle-of-the-night phone calls–and surprises me by making the novel all the more interesting.

In normal families, a late-night call means only one thing: tragedy. A drunken mishap. A car crash. A heart finally giving out. Maybe a decapitation or a roadside bomb, the twenty-first-century offering, as it does, an escalating range of horrors.

But the Pearlmans are not a normal family.

Debra’s writing is alive with details so attached to our lives, I often wonder how she’s able to extricate them and get them on the page.

Oh, Daniella is a child of her generation, as who is not? Ever ready with a therapeutic pop lyric to help her understand the events of the moment, then ready to critique her own shallowness. Is there nothing more going on in her head than the Rolling Stones? Apparently not, for while she waits for Joel to return with the girl, she sings (in her head, her inner voice is perfect, her outer reliably out of tune), “You can’t always get what you wa-aaant. You can’t always get what you wa-aant.”

And notice the tone–that ability to be outside the narrator but also inside in the same moment, so that the writing doesn’t feel judgmental or superior and also allows room for breath. We are Daniella and we can see her.

After Unknown Caller, I read Good for the Jews, which begins with a prologue. I’m not a fan of prologues. But I scanned ahead, and this one was short. Four sentences in, I’d forgotten I was reading a prologue.

Smoke at the horizon. A lone tendril corkscrewing up. Probably a brush fire. That’s what Alex Decker usually thought, when he saw smoke.

Chapter One delivers an outstanding first sentence, which, as you continue reading, works to cohere and unify the novel.

As far back as Ellen could remember, she’d been told there were two categories of things in the world: what was good for the Jews and what wasn’t.

Debra’s mother makes frequent appearances in Debra’s writing. I won’t go into the fiction, but you will find her in the craft essays and also in Debra’s articles on homes.

At some point during the planning of my wedding, about the time when dresses and hairstyles and such were being discussed, I balked. All this to-do. It wasn’t my thing. I said to my mother, “I don’t really want to be the focus of attention.”

“But you’re the bride,” she observed.

Well, true enough.
Given my own way of thinking, I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I called up real-estate developer Tim Harrington to arrange an interview. My task: write a profile of this man responsible for beautiful residences, upscale restaurants, a major health and fitness center, and multiple luxury-hotel properties in the Kennebunks.

“The thing is,” Harrington said, amiably enough, “I don’t want this article to be all about me.”
But, I thought, and flashed on my mother, it’s a profile of you.

Debra lives in Maine and is the author of five books of fiction–so I still have more to discover–including her recently reissued first novel, Coconuts for the Saint, which was the winner of the John Zacharis/Ploughshares first book award. You can find some of her craft essays  in her collection, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Her short work has appeared in all the cool places, and she is a senior writer for Maine Home+Design. I don’t know how she finds the time, but she is also a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

When Debra was only twenty-three, she edited the anthology 20 Under 30, featuring stories by Ann Patchett and Lorrie Moore, among others. At the end of her introduction she wrote that with the anthology finished, she was left without a project.

So, 60 Over 70? It’s something to consider. It will be a hefty collection, I imagine–all those stories in one volume, after all; so much life to weigh in.

Perhaps Debra could find time for this too.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how DEBRA SPARK spends her days.