2023 Year in Review
1) I find this year hard to sum up. “Back to normal” has been so much worse than the pre-pandemic normal. There is so much to do, all the time, and I just don’t have that much chaperoning and planning and parenting and attending in me. And also it’s still a pandemic! And even if somehow the pandemic were over in a more meaningful sense, like as in COVID not making a HUGE number of people very sick and/or very dead, there has been no reckoning with all that death and all those failures. In a lot of ways, however, I really got it together. I’m something approaching my best self when it comes to adulting. I use my Google calendar to track basically everything and, as a result, I rarely forget important things! If I forget anything, it’s because I did it immediately upon receiving the email, deleted the email, and then couldn’t remember what I did when one of my kids asks me about it months later. So worst case scenario is we do things twice—or I just feel really uncomfortable for a little while before we figure out what I did (or maybe didn’t) do. My therapist tells me it is important to learn how to just be—to be inside the transition—without pushing towards the finish line. But oh man, I am ready to arrive somewhere already. This has been an interminable period of in-between-ness. I am ongoing and I would like to not be, though I also recognize that sounds like I want to be dead and thus I must concede that my therapist is right about learning how to just be and endure.
2) Secretly, I have become a very prolific writer. The flip side of that coin is that I am a woefully deficient finisher of things. I have written two short stories, 25 pages of poems about me and Tracy Flick (shit you not—inspiration is weird), and begun yet another new book project I am tentatively calling “Little Creature without a Penis,” after a translation of something Freud said as quoted in by Rachel E. Gross in her book Vagina Obscura. I also made a zine with the help of friends and strangers about our favorite animals that took about 9 months of my creative time. My poem was about harp seals—specifically, these harp seals:
My zoom writing group continues to be a thing. This year we collectively read Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium and wrote things we thought embodied lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—or the opposite of those things. And despite genuine and collective warm feelings towards Calvino, we also ripped him to pieces.
I provisionally taught myself how to use Twine, a software that lets you build texts that are kind of like games. Specifically, I wrote a version of Little Red Riding Hood that unfolds like a choose-your-own-adventure book. Twine can do a LOT more than I can do with it, but if you’re interested, I recommend this open-source book: Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives by Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop. The book’s chapters are organized in pairs, with the first chapter of each pair covering descriptions and theoretical underpinnings of Twine’s features and the second chapter guiding you through specific exercises that help you use those features.
My book also continues to be a thing. I gave readings and presentations here in Pittsburgh with my editor Courtney LeBlanc and at Carlow University, in Bethesda with Sarah Kain Gutowski at the TYCA-NE convention, and in Cincinnati at the Midwest MLA convention. I did a book fair in central Pennsylvania that was basically a bust—turns out poems about abortion and how much teaching sucks aren’t really in line with the readership out there—but that’s ok because I tried!
3) For the past few years, I dedicated myself to reading through the backlog of books I bought but never got to. By the end of 2022, the end result was a surprisingly joyless year of reading. Not that the books were not good—just that I had reached a certain point where all the books I was reading were homework and none of them were fun. Not fun both in the sense of feeling like homework but also in the sense of being dense or heavy or academic, etc. Interesting and worthy, yes. But fun, no. So I declared 2023 my year of reading stupid. That is a slight against the books I read this year, which were by and large beautifully put together and engaging. But I refused to make any lists of books to read and I deliberately plucked books from my shelves based on what my heart most desired. And what I most desired was fantasy novels. Herewith, the books I loved this year, by genre, beginning with fiction because even though I am a poet, what I always want most is a novel. Also in reverse chronological order of reading.
Fiction: Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent was super fun and she managed to reinvent “Buffy” by the end of this second installment in the series, which for me is a very good thing indeed. Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson cemented for me that Kevin Wilson is the kind of novelist where I should make sure to read each of his novels. I went deep in on Naomi Novik this year, based on my love of Uprooted last year, and read all of the Scholomance books and Spinning Silver. None of those books were quite as good as Uprooted, but Novik is so good—so fucking good—that there really isn’t anyone competing for her space in my heart and TBR pile. Jeff read me A Starlet’s Guide to a Sensational Afterlife by Kendall Kulper before bed and we were both blown away by how weird and also how good it was. It is suspenseful and a crackerjack romance. Most impressively, though, Kulper manages to backwards engineer a contemporary understanding of consent and sexual assault into Golden Age Hollywood without making that understanding feel anachronistic. Also, she gave us the line “Look at this handsome dum-dum,” which we use all the time now. I fucking devoured The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen over vacation and have the sequel on my TBR pile. The Changeling by Victor LaValle was indeed, as a Goodreads reviewer put it, a book that “starts like love actually, then becomes rosemary's baby, then becomes jurassic park.” But whereas that reviewer considered such a description a not-so-good thing, I thought it was a GREAT thing. After years of haranguing by my mother, I finally read Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman—and I was wrong to wait so long. It is a fun book about teaching in an impossible school that also does a pretty good job of capturing the totality of the experience. At the end of The Wild Book by Juan Villoro, which Jeff read aloud to Willa (and me) before bed, there is a well-loved book-about-books trope that Jeff and I saw coming from a mile away but absolutely shocked and delighted Willa. I listened to the audiobook of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and it wrecked me. Then, as a chaser, I listened to “Unreformed,” Josie Duffy Rice’s podcast about the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, Alabama—and it also wrecked me..
Poetry: My best poetry books of the year are both by friends. There are Still Woods is my grad-school friend HIla Ratzabi’s debut poetry collection and I was just blown away by how beautiful the poems are. I can be kind of allergic to beautiful in poetry—and I have little interest in ecopoetry, which is Hila’s wheelhouse—but the book balances the beautiful with the catastrophic in a way that never feels forced or preachy. It is numinous in the best way. Elizabeth Hoover’s debut the archive is all in the present tense tells a magical-realist story about navigating the past via an archive of all kinds of weird things that could never physically be archived, complete with white gloves and an eroticism born of scent and silence.
Nonfiction: As I made this a year of reading stupid, I didn’t read much nonfiction because that is not what my heart wants, usually. I did finally read Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton’s memoir of working in the Alberta oil sands to pay back her student loans. It is a devastating catalog of what it means to live through years of “good guys” sexually harassing you—and raping you—and still keeping your own humanity. I also read Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson. Look—is it good? Definitely true? I have no idea. But oh boy is it super fun to read. Probably fuck Beatrice Sparks forever. And though I think we should hang onto Go Ask Alice forever because it is such a wild artifact, Jay’s Diary needs to be left in the dustbin of history.
I finished my project of reading a billion books about teaching and published this list in Electric Lit: 10 Books That Show the Lives of School Teachers.
4) My music listening this year was marked by a big turn toward the ambient and pretty. Thank you, Flow State! Perhaps my favorite album, the thing that breaks my heart every time I listen, is “Shifts” by Shida Shahabi. The way the keys are miked and you can hear them clacking and shifting under the piano notes is so moving and human.
“Love in Exile” by Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily is also fucking mind-blowing and does that thing that music does that cannot be translated into prose or even poetry:
I also really enjoyed “Tropical Dancer” by Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul. You maybe saw this performance make its rounds as a meme, and if you like this you should probably listen to the whole brilliant album:
Oh! Also! There was a new Rufus Wainwright album. And I saw him live TWICE this year, once in Nashville (more on that below) and once with my mom at the City Winery that just opened here in PIttsburgh.
OK, last one: Did you all know about Stromae? Stromae was my top artist on Spotify this year, and that sounds exactly right. I watched his Tiny Desk concert early in the year and basically lost my mind over his whole thing: music, voice, vibe, gorgeous gorgeous face. I just love it all. I love this man so much, played his albums so often, that even Willa can sing along—in French.
5) Jeff and I traveled this year—and I did some solo traveling, too. Most significantly, we spent three days in Nashville so I could see Rufus Wainwright perform selections from Want One and Want Two live with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. He was so good—and holy shit, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra was AMAZING—that even Jeff came away impressed and delighted by the show. We also got to see my brother and just generally dick around with each other day in and day out for a bit. When I went to Bethesda for the TYCA-NE conference, I also spent the night with my stepsister in Gaithersburg and got to enjoy being the favorite aunt to my nephew. I drove way too far out of my way to go to Baltimore and back solely to visit Normal’s Used Books because I can’t be within spitting distance of that place and not go. You know that trope of a character dying and going to heaven and wondering why heaven looks like X place from their own lives? Well, when I go to heaven it’s going to be Normal’s Used Books. I also drove home by way of Baltimore to see my college from Meredith and had a two-hour-long breakfast with her that was so perfect.
Normal’s Used Books in Baltimore, Maryland.
6) Hands-down the best thing we watched this year on the television was “Reservation Dogs.” That show made me weep. I’m so mad we only got 3 seasons. “The Bear” was also really great, though the stress of that Christmas episode led us to ponder whether we were capable of ever turning it on again. We were; it was worth it. I really loved “The Fall of the House of Usher” on Netflix: so many allusions! so much silliness! some actual scariness, too! I actually saw “Barbie” in a movie theater with my mom and kids, and that was fun. Now that HBO is MAX and has all kinds of Discovery/HGTV content, I have spent a lot of time watching “Good Bones.” I watch “Good Bones” almost religiously while doing physical therapy exercises in my living room. I love those crazy kids.
7) Why am I doing physical therapy exercises in my living room while watching “Good Bones”? I broke my ankle on vacation while mini-golfing. Yep! Turned it on a little raised green, finished the game (with another hole-in-one, thank you), and then spent the next morning in a beautifully sunny and golden emergency room in Maine. I fully do not recommend breaking a bone in your 40s. Turns out it is nothing like breaking a bone when you are 10.
8) I also turned myself into an LLC this year in furtherance of my freelance career. I tried to get a full-time job. I found out I didn’t get the great full-time job I was super qualified for while on vacation and spent a night unable to sleep because I cried so much. Then I didn’t get a bunch of other jobs. And then I got two job offers. I took the slightly less secure offer of a full-time contract gig with the woman I’ve been working closely with since Emmett was born—and that’s why I had to become an LLC. The process was extremely frustrating. I also realized that we have not been taking the self-employment health care deduction because Jeff is the primary taxpayer (which basically just means his name is first on the form), Jeff gets a W-2 but not health insurance, and Jeff is the policyholder. Why does this mean we can’t deduct our healthcare, you ask? I do not want to take the time to fully explain it. All of this is to say that we’re caught up in a lot of arbitrary paperwork/bureaucracy/bullshit that should not be meaningful but is. It is $10,000/year of meaningful. The long transition out of teaching and into freelancing has been hard. The transition into full-time contract work has also been hard. I want things to stop being so hard, please.
9) So, yeah, it was another year with a nice long depressive streak running through late winter and into early spring. Then I broke my ankle. Then I realized our taxes were fucked. Then I tried to become an LLC. I am most certainly at the beginning of perimenopause, too, in a way that I don’t think the gyno will wave off as “but you’re so young” this time. Layer life in the Anthropocene and its mass death on top of all of that and it is bad. So I end this update where it began: it is all too much and all the time. The only thing to do is learn how to move through it.