How We Spend Our Days: MEGAN STAFFEL
July 2025
In the summer I live in the country, and the first thing I do every morning is get outside. This June has been unusually rainy, and in this part of rural New York State where deer inhabit the fields and woods, the deer ticks, which thrive in damp weather, have been abundant. Our daughter struggled with Lyme disease for years, and since I seem, like her, to be a magnet for ticks, I walk on the road instead of the beautiful paths we have throughout our property. This is how climate change has altered my relationship to the land. Because the winters are milder, the temperature no longer dipping down to whatever threshold destroys disease-carrying ticks, I can no longer walk the land freely. I walk on the road most days and when it’s dry enough to walk on our paths, I wear clothes that are treated with an insecticide that keeps ticks away.
But wherever I walk, I am always listening and looking for birds. They are my passion, and I’ve become pretty good at identifying the songs of the more common ones. Surprisingly, from the road, which has few cars and is lined with trees and meadows, my June walks are rich with songs and sightings, and each day I usually see something memorable. Today I saw two killdeer flying low to the ground, calling to each other. Further on, there is a stretch of road where I am sure to hear an indigo bunting, and today I saw it at the top of a tree, and happily, for once, it was at an angle that revealed its beautiful blue color. I also saw a bluebird sitting on a branch close to a birdhouse.
Because I am retired from teaching (I taught in the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers), my days are blissfully empty of obligations to others. But truthfully, I am as demanding a task master as any of my jobs ever were, and everything I do is preparation for the writing. After breakfast, I spend a few minutes doing tai chi on the front porch. Many years ago, when living in Detroit, I learned the short form Yang style from a wonderful teacher whose words I still hear in my head as I do moves which I’m sure have evolved in nonstandard ways, but it doesn’t matter, the practice calms and settles me and with a few minutes of standing meditation at the end, provides a focusing that is necessary after reading the news at breakfast. Tai Chi creates a division between my regular morning life and the quiet time I will have upstairs in my writing room. It is good preparation for the hours when I will be engaged in a completely different way of thinking. When writing, I want to be intuitive, spontaneous, alert to every hint and suggestion.
Once at my desk, I get right to it, whatever the “it” is. Right now, it’s continuing to build on pages I’ve already written. Will it be a novel, a novella? I don’t know at this point, I’m simply following the impulse I began with, curious to see where it takes me.
I write my first drafts longhand. I have piles of scrap paper, saved from the days when printers only printed on one side of the page, and my big loopy cursive gives me a feeling of freedom. The deeper I go in my imagination, the larger my script gets. The pages that contain fewest lines are symptomatic of the condition all of us writers strive for: being IN it, a state where we are minimally attached to the place that surrounds us and existing instead in the imagined. I can sustain this for hardly more than an hour so my first draft builds at a slow pace. This is the stage I am at now, and I have learned to be patient. Revising, which I can do for hours, mostly happens on the computer. That’s when I invite my obsessive internal editor to participate in the process. When I’m in the rough draft stage, I ban her from the room.
I work until lunch, which I eat outside on the porch, looking at my flower beds. Then back up to my room to do the other business of daily life: I answer emails, practice Spanish, something I’ve been doing for years using language apps on the computer, and work on the essay I write monthly for my blog, which I also post as a newsletter on Substack, where I discuss an aspect of craft in a novel or story I have read and loved. Late afternoon finds me outside working in my flower beds: I bend down to pull the weeds that have appeared since my last weeding. In the evening, I go up in my writing room, sit in my comfortable chair and speak to a friend on the phone. Then I turn to the novel I’m reading. It’s News of the World by Paulette Jiles, which is sitting in my book holder waiting for me.
THE NEW SAME 3 QUESTIONS…
1. What one word best describes your writing life?
Listening.
2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?
Currently, I am reading for the third time News of the World by Paulette Jiles because I get so much pleasure from her imagery and rhythmic prose. This line, for instance, which describes two cowboys standing at the edge of a room where a speaker is addressing them, sings to my sense of language and timing: “They held their hats in their hands, each with one booted foot cocked up against the wall behind them” This sentence is followed by a short sentence, “The hall was full,” and that variety in length and sounds is something I love. Not only that, it’s a wonderful story as it describes the growing affection between an old man and an abandoned ten-year-old girl. News of the World is a literary novel that lets me spend time with a character who, despite various hardships, cares for a person who has been thrust into his unwilling arms. These days, I have little tolerance for sensationalized violence and cruelty, and in Jiles’ 2016 novel, the reader knows from the start that this is a protagonist capable of feeling love. There are two short stories I have reread many times: “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin for the way it recreates music and the tensions between siblings. It’s about jazz in many ways, besides the obvious ones, and that’s the music I mostly listen to. The other short story is “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor for its pitch perfect dialogue and its authoritative narrator. Reading O’Connor is helpful because it wakes up my own humor and rage, reminding me how useful they can be.
3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?
Like others who have written for this series, I never talk about what I’m working on until it’s complete and revised and I’m ready to pass it on to my first reader (always my husband.) So perhaps that’s not a strange habit at all since it’s common for writers. Music is important to my writing life, that is, I am always working with sound and rhythm when I’m writing, but it’s important in my daily life too. Though I love jazz and blues, my favorite music for dancing is swing from the big band era. I don’t go to swing dances anymore, but when a song comes on, my husband will join me in the kitchen, and we do our favorite moves. If he’s not around I dance by myself, trying, as always, to do the impossible, to lose myself completely in the beautiful sounds.
