2021 Year in Review
1) I mean, I think this year was better than last year? The kids spent it all in school, to everyone’s joy and relief. I spent the whole year as a freelancer in educational publishing and I think I actually grossed enough to consider it a respectable living. I mean, I’ve paid literally NO taxes yet on any of that money, but I did save a lot of it. So I’m hopeful that even though our tax bill will be high, we are prepared to pay it.
2) I turned 40. I wanted to go to California, but there’s this pandemic on, you know. So instead, in December, many months after my birthday, Jeff and I stayed at the Roxbury Inn in the “Beautiful Blacksmith” room for a too-brief weekend that was absolutely wonderful. I took multiple baths in the giant soaking tub, we ate good food, we explored a whole book VILLAGE, and just generally got to enjoy being adults together without all the responsibilities that come with adulthood.
At Stratton Falls in the Catskills. There is no one I’d rather spend every waking minute with than my husband.
3) My book is getting published! Dispatches from Frontier Schools is forthcoming from Riot in Your Throat Press this August! My long, hard essay about the time I named a bad man’s name and burned down a feminist poetry collective was a finalist for the Goldline Press nonfiction chapbook contest! And aside from that, publishing was pretty stingy with me. Alas and alack, whatever. I made it to 100 rejections in no small part because only three people said yes.
4) Looking at the books I read last year, I’m struck by how long the year must have been because some of these books feel farther back in my past than just a year (or less!). My absolute favorite book of the year was Uprooted by Naomi Novik: completely transporting fantasy that was also intellectually meaty enough to feel sustaining. I also read The Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler, and continued to love adrienne maree brown’s and Toshi Reagon’s Octavia’s Parables podcast about the books—especially because wow do I motherfucking hate Marcos and I really needed to not be alone with all my feelings about him. I also enjoyed the shit out of The House on the Cerulean Sea, despite the really icky stuff I read about how TJ Klune was inspired by indigenous boarding schools. WOOF to that, but that book was otherwise a warm hug. Nghi Vo’s queer rewriting of Gatsby, The Chosen and the Beautiful, was imperfect but captivating and rich. I was not surprised to see that Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley is getting turned into a movie or TV show because that book SLAPPED. I got finally got to read Sarahland by writer-friend-on-the-internet Sam Cohen, a short story collection I’d been excitedly awaiting since Sam first announced the deal a few years ago. The book did not disappoint! I also randomly requested Trash, a collection of short stories by Dorothy Allison, from the library and was BLOWN AWAY by how good they are. Not that I didn’t know Dorothy Allison could write, cuz I did. But wow, still, holy cow. What a virtuoso. And Now I Spill the Family Secrets by Margaret Kimball is a book like no other I’ve read. It’s a graphic novel but there are basically no people in it—all the images are of still-lifes, basically. If there are people, they are drawings of photographs or home movie stills. It was really unsettling and brutal, so I loved it.
On to middle grades books! Jeff and I read a number of great books aloud this year—by which I mean Jeff read them to me OR to me and Willa. The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley was so beautiful and deeply weird—not unlike Chime, really. No one writes books like Billingsley, and it was a delight to be reminded. I read The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis for a work project and found the craft of that book, and its attendant emotional effects, devastating. No wonder it’s on all kinds of lists and won a bunch of awards. We randomly found this book Pity Party by Kathleen Lane and read it to Willa—a collection of mildly fantastical and deeply bent short stories for a middle-grades audience—and I’m not sure how Willa felt about it, but Jeff and I loved it. Like The Folk Keeper and And Now I Spill the Family Secrets, there’s just not really anything else like it out there. On vacation, the whole family listened to Louis Sachar’s Fuzzy Mud. I did not anticipate listening to a middle-grades version of body horror aloud with the fam, but we were all super hooked.
On the poetry front, I decided I’m going to write a novel-in-verse, so I’ve read a LOT of novels in verse. Honestly, I find most of them wanting. Mostly what they want is actually be poetry, but sometimes what they are wanting is a coherent plot. Anyway, The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, much like The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, deserves all the massive love and adoration it has received. It is page-turning, lyrically written, and just built so fucking elegantly. The other novel-in-verse I couldn’t stop myself from aboslutely loving was Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. It is a weird book that I kind of doubt kids will get, but if you are a teacher of poetry, you will probably cry. As to poetry written by grown-ups, Rachel Mennies (also a writer friend from the internet but also I know her IRL) released The Naomi Letters, a book so good I kept pausing as I read it to say to myself, “Rachel!” My old professor Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Was Then is so good and captures my sense of who Vijay is so delightfully.
It was a slower year for nonfiction for me, apparently. Honestly kind of a slow poetry year, too? (I think I mostly just needed to slip into fictional worlds and away from all this.) Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford was a truly impressive memoir, weaving together a horrific sexual assault, boarding school culture, institutional malfeasance, and also just kind of garden-variety young love and innocence. I really appreciated Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell. She gets at all kinds of things that I am always wondering about when thinking about my own past and sexuality, hinging on the question of how desire lives in uncertainty and anticipation and the way that complicates consent. Our coffee maker broke, absolutely saturating the copy of Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication fo Natural Life by Darcy Steinke that I had borrowed from the library. Just as well, cuz that meant I could keep it! I mean, I had to buy it and my copy is now really busted. But I loved this book, and it covered a lot of the same territory as Unmastered, surprisingly. You know, as ever, I’m interested in reading about sex, bodies, and desire.
5) I listened to a lot of disco this year. Here are my favorite three tracks:
6) Why do I love Channel Tres “Top Down” so much? Because of HBO’s Betty. The second season was not as good as the first. But oh my god I love those girls, and I love watching all those kids skateboard all over New York City. Jeff and I continue to watch too much “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Jeff doesn’t like “DS9” so much, so he left me to just finish it on my own, which I am doing because it continues to delight. Fuck them killing off Jadzia and making Worf sad, though. How much did I cry in the bathtub—a lot.
7) I started a Zoom writing group. We meet every other Saturday and share planning duties. At the first meeting of the month, we read and talk about work on any given theme. Then at the second meeting, we share our writing based on the work we read and the theme. It’s so great! It is so amazing that it actually worked, and we’re now over a year into it so I think I should be less surprised now that it is still working. But oh what a gift. I’ve written a LOT, and a lot of it is weird and random because I’m responding to other people’s obsessions and ideas and favorite texts. Let me know if you want in!
Making Christmas cookies with my kids.
8) Maybe, finally, I like to cook again. Jeff and I have managed to get ourselves back into a groove where we cook at least two or three meals from scratch a week. It happened without my noticing, really. I kind of looked up a month or two ago and realized we were much less dependent on takeout, and it isn’t such a struggle to start cooking dinner when the time rolls around.
9) I see my friends again, and talk to them more. I have monthly dinners with my friends Elise and Theresa. I text people more, I message more. I even—gasp—talk on the phone with people. We had a lot of evenings with friends around our firepit. Which reminds me! How could I forget!
10) We unionized Propel. I spent a lot of the year working on the union campaign with a dozen or so other Propel employees from all across the district. Many an evening was spent with me and Elise drinking wine by the firepit discussing strategy and Propel politics. Boy did we win the shit out of that campaign. And then, once it was done, I quit. No more year-long leave. I fucking quit. What a gift, leaving that place. I still worry a lot about my friends inside, not to mention the kids. Schools all over are terrible with the pandemic, you know, but Propel started off in a bad spot. Anyway, I miss teaching, but I’m getting better at missing it. But I do not miss having a job that devours my life and spirit.
11) It was a rebuilding year, for the whole family. We’re all in a better place than we were this time last year. The pandemic continues to be emotionally difficult for me to navigate. But even with Omicron (and Delta) and the way the possibility of yet another deadly variant haunts me, I feel like things are getting better? Whatever, don't correct me. We’re in between waves, and I need the brief respite from pandemic anxiety.