Setting Guardrails with Love

Some of the most poignant daily struggles that I have faced as a young writer-mother are the mornings. If I wanted to live my first-choice life, I needed to get ahead in my books in the first hours of the day, before anyone required my energy for anything else. If I woke before the light to do what nourished me, nothing could upset me. It gave me a full day’s immunity to negativity: a shield. By starting my day with writing, exercise, and solitude, I felt impermeable, calm, effective. I felt like my best self.

I would prepare: set my alarm, go to bed early, lay out my clothes—so I could out-wake my children, the earlier the better, and have a quiet two hours to myself to write. But they bested me daily, always in the most loving ways. I’d tiptoe, silent cup of tea in hand, at 5:30 a.m. to my desk—and the huge-diapered, pajama- footed baby would smell me and toddle over, big smile, ready to start the day. I started waking earlier: 5:15, 5. There felt something metallic and unkind about pushing back into the fours, but sometimes I did it anyway.

I thought of my ancestors—coal miners and ranchers—and how this was their morning time to push back into the hard, unforgiving rock or to tend to their hungry animals. Hoping this day would not swallow them. I am lucky, immeasurably lucky, to get to do work I choose (writing) in a place (home office) and time (early morning) of my choice. But I could not seem to get up early enough to do my work—my first-choice activity of what makes me feel whole and happy—before the day and its many demands took over. And as Joyce Carol Oates has observed, “The great enemy of writing is being interrupted by other people. Your worst enemy will have your most beloved face.”

Focusing on writing before spending the day focused on my household felt like the obvious, necessary guardrail—especially since my husband had a more regular daytime work schedule— but I had to stage some ways to make it work. None worked all the time, though each one worked sometimes; I jostled between them.

One was asking my husband to be on morning duty. He always said yes, but morning duty meant different things to us. I felt it necessary to acknowledge our children at the threshold of their waking and offer some form of love. My husband, on the other hand, felt it necessary to sleep past six, so this whole battle went on during his unconscious hours. If I sent the babies to him, they’d return like boomerangs to me.

The second was the most inspired. It was to set up their own desks in my office, complete with art supplies and snacks, and to try to initiate them to the truth that morning is an excellent time for projects, with its own gravitas and its own treats. We even tried using a timer for “work time.” This worked to delight the child and buy me a few minutes at intervals.

The third was to find a coffee shop that opened at 6:00 a.m. This worked every time!

So I bandied among these three, always wrapping by 8:00 a.m. so I could lavish attention on my children for a few minutes before school (my husband took them to school, I picked them up).

And then, to my amazement, the seasons changed and my daughter was no longer my early morning companion—she had learned to sleep past seven—but my son still was. And then suddenly both were sleeping heavy, long nights and no longer desiring to wake early and hang with me. Which, in the dizzy way I remember all things about early parenthood, I found myself missing.

But I have a souvenir from those seven years of trying and failing daily to out-wake my household: I still wake early and write most days before doing anything else. This guardrail enables me to live a full life during the daytime hours—showing up for my kids’ school events, collaborating with other artists, teaching a full course load of writing workshops, seeing friends, going for hikes and spontaneous dates with my husband, and tending to the day as it unfolds.

This souvenir ties me forward to my babies—my catalyst for becoming an early morning writer—and backward to my ancestors, who woke early for their own reasons of survival. I still try to write ahead in my book before anyone speaks my name.

And what is left of our work—if we are lucky, and I mean really lucky—is ourselves.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta teaches writing for Harvard Extension School and Oxford Department for Continuing Education. She is the author of ten books, including the novel She Never Told Me About the Ocean. Her shorter works have been published widely. She delivered the 2019 TEDx talk “Live Like a Poem.” Elisabeth lives with her husband and two young children.

Miah Jeffra on The Inspiration for "American Gospel"

American Gospel was actually my very first book project, a love letter to my hometown, Baltimore. I wanted to capture its identity crisis—a northern town south of the Mason-Dixon, a black majority city yet with one of the most extreme cases of racial inequity in the U.S. I wanted to also capture its beauty, its corruption, and the racialized violence associated with urban renewal projects. All three of the main characters—Ruth Anne, Peter and Thomas—are a composite and reflection of my complicated relationship with the city. However, the starring character in the novel is Baltimore itself, how it fastens itself to its history, how it stumbles into its future.

Miah Jeffra is author of four books, most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and St. Lawrence Book Prizes) and the forthcoming novel American Gospel. Work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, jubilat and many others. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing and decolonial studies at Santa Clara University and Sonoma State University.

J. A. Tyler on The Truth in Magical Realism

I love telling students of writing that whatever they put on the page becomes truth in the context of that world. This is to me, and I hope to them, mind-altering. Once you write it, it is fact, no matter what genre or style you prefer. What a glorious, unbelievable, crazy feat that really only exists in the realm of writing. Write the words, and it is so. 

For magical realism, a genre I work in almost exclusively, that joy becomes doubled, because what we’re making into “fact” in a work of magical realism is wholly unexpected and often counter to what we understand or know about our world, and yet, it becomes truth. In Only and Ever This, where a mother is attempting to mummify her twin sons in order to stop them from growing up, a kind of Peter Pan syndrome but from the parental perspective, I didn’t have to spend any time processing whether this type of mummification was possible. Some research on mummies is loaded into the structure of the novel, but I didn’t need anything else. Once I wrote that she was practicing mummification on a cat, it became so. And when that cat is reawakened, its heart wrapped in mud and rainwater, readers have to accept it. So the mother can mummify just a portion of one son’s arm, testing the waters of her abilities, while allowing me to focus on the emotional and moral struggle of the task rather than with any challenges presented by physiology or biology.

Also in the book, the boys’ father is a pirate, and because it is a work of magical realism, I don’t need to worry about what it means to be a pirate in a modern era, or even in the sort of stylistically 1980s vibe of my novel. He is a pirate and he sails off to sea seeking immortality, either in the form of treasure or, more significantly, in the form of a vampire. Do vampires exist? They might, because the father is searching for them, and he believes it, so we as readers have to believe in it too, at least in his world. Magical realism takes the burden away from fact and places it squarely on imagination.

The boys too, these twin sons, they fall in love with the ghost of a girl up the street. She is ethereal, rife with lightness and beauty, and they want to build a relationship with her before she disappears, before she becomes entirely see-through. In the novel, that becomes fact, just as the arcade they hang out in, the marbles they shoot, and the bikes they ride are fact. With magical realism, a muddy undead bully of a kid can haunt the town, a cat can be dissected and resurrected, and ghosts and mummies and pirates can co-exist in a township where the rain never ends. When we write it, it is so.

For writers (and readers) of magical realism, we don’t have to take the characters to another planet, to some faraway, fictional world. We can center them in our world, with its battered relationships and gray skies, with its sunlight struggling through clouds and waves bleating on the shore. We can take what we know and blend it with what we don’t. Magical realism allows us the horrific and beautiful ability to house any monster, literal and figurative, inside our own tragic world. 

J. A. Tyler is the author of Only and Ever This and The Zoo, a Going (both from Dzanc Books). His fiction has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Diagram, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. He lives in Colorado. For more: www.jasonalantyler.com, twitter, instagram