The next writer in the series: July 1, 2025

How We Spend Our Days is published twice a month—on the 15th with an introduction of the next writer and then on the 1st with the writer’s essay on how they spend their days. We’ve been publishing on Substack since January of 2023, but the first essay in the series was written by Pam Houston and published on August 1, 2009 over at Catching Days where you’ll also find a complete list of the writers who have contributed to the series.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

—Cynthia

~~~

After spending the night with a fellow art student, Rachel witnesses his dive off a cliff and the nothingness that comes after—no man, no body, nothing except a red scarf and sneakers. Megan Staffel’s The Causative Factor, a novel about art, and living as an artist, and attempting to make meaning out of life, moves forward from that moment.

The Causative Factor is filled with interesting characters and told in multiple points of view. The writing is sharp and visual. Take a look at these descriptions: pupils as “levels of darkness,” names as “four-legged tables,” and people as a “bit spinning of the wheels in the snow sort of thing.”

Early in the novel, Rachel describes an artist as “one who mixes things us, who lives by intuition and feeling, who is impractical, arbitrary, and tirelessly demanding.” She is committed to being an artist.

The chapters begin with strong sentences. Sometimes Megan grounds the reader by continuing a storyline we’re familiar with, but if we’re hearing about something for the first time, like at the beginning of Chapter 5, Megan grounds the reader in the physical, in place.

The Spanish Language Institute is on a busy shopping street in Queens, New York.

The writing is also spare. Words are important. I loved the scenes at the SLI with Rachel teaching English as a second language, which she does to earn money to support herself and her art.

In class she introduces gerunds. Building, singing, speaking. Active verbs are easy to demonstrate. Each person mimes an action and she supplies the word. “You are hopping. You are turning. I am laughing. But what is she doing? She is living in New York, going to shows and museums, getting to know the gallery world, and feeling hopeless and confused about her life as an artist.”

In Chapter 18, Rachel makes her way to a restaurant at the back of the sixth floor of a department store, which she describes as “bedding, big puffy quilts on model beds that stand under harsh lights, wholesome, colorful patterns suggesting happy lives.” She is meeting the mother of the art student who dove off the cliff for lunch. In a fabulous scene where Rachel sings—literarily and figuratively—she asks the mother if music is important to her.

“Oh yes, in my family we listen to Italian opera. Rubiat was raised on opera, you see.”

And [Rachel] can see. Right away, she understands how such exaggerated drama and passion has formed him. And in that context, maybe the dive makes more sense. And then she says, “You should choose me for your son.” It is the word choose that initiates it, and then impulse takes over, and just like him, she chooses not to edit it… she opens her mouth and then, with a startled heart beating under her dress, she sings their song in full-throated abandon…

The Causative Factor won the 2022 Petrichor Prize for finely crafted fiction, which carries with it a cash award of $1000 and an offer of publication by Regal House Publishing.

Megan is also the author of three collections of short fiction, The Exit Coach, Lessons In Another Language, and A Length of Wire and Other Stories, as well as two other novels, The Notebook of Lost Things and She Wanted Something Else. She has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Vermont College, among other places. Each month in her Substack Page and Story, she focuses on a recently published novel or story she loves and shows how the craft elements make it a compelling read. Megan splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and a farm in a small town in western New York State.

Come back on JULY 1st to read how MEGAN STAFFEL spends her days.