2022 Year in Review

1) I published a book! Dispatches from Frontier Schools came out in August, and it has been a wonderful and anxiety-producing experience. I am very proud of the book. I still have to figure out exactly how to promote it and stuff, but we’re moving ahead on poetry time over here. Which is to say, I’m moving very slowly.

I threw myself a book party, and it was everything I dreamed it would be. I read with Margaret Bashaar (best friend/poetry partner in crime) and Nsai Temko, who is my former student! Guests wrote poems in little blue books, decorated their Frontier Schools lanyards with stickers, and earned tickets to win prizes. We ate pizza and two teacher-themed cupcakes I lovingly handmade: vanilla cupcakes with apple pie filling that looked like apples and lemon cakes glazed like looseleaf. I realized embarrassingly late in the planning process that I basically made my book party into a high school lesson in poetry. Whatever! It was great!

2) Our Zoom writing group is going strong, which is such a delight. I’ve had so much fun just writing this past year. I’m kind of itchy to actually go back and polish/finish a lot of what I’ve written. But also I’m increasingly disinterested in hustling for publication. Who even reads literary journals—especially if the piece is by someone they don’t know? And I just will not pay people $3 a submission to read me for a few minutes and reject me. It doesn’t help that I’ve had nothing but rejections for a loooong time. But it’s also that I’m more interested in writing than in publishing. Sharing is good; publishing is a scam. What if we all built a treehouse and traded zines and chaps?

3) My stepmom died (almost simultaneously with my book coming out). It was a lot and very hard.

4) This is the year that time really and fully lost meaning. I absolutely cannot track my day-to-day life anymore. Also the anthropocene has me pretty down, with the seasons coming unmoored. Hard to not look around and feel certain that we are in apocalyptic times. Octavia was right about a lot.

5) READING, presented in reverse order as I scroll backward through my Goodreads. Jeff read The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill aloud before bed, and damn if that woman cannot WRITE. In search of contemporary British poets for a work project, I discovered Selima Hill. I loved her Bunny so much that I had to order a used copy from Britain to replace the library copy I had to return. Browsing Libby lead me to The Year I Stopped Trying by Katie Heaney, which was a fun little YA coming-of-age novel but also a super sobering mirror about what it means to be a try-hard who decides to stop trying. Aviva vs. the Dybbuk by Mari Lowe was another read-aloud-before-bedtime book for me and jeff, and it is so beautiful and heartbreaking—a monumental achievement of craft and humanity. I finally bought and read Be Recorder by Carmen Gimenéz Smith and I just love all her poetry so much. I very slowly made my way through The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories by Jeffrey Ford, another book I loved so much I bought a used copy when my library edition was no longer eligible for another renewal. I read a lot of books about teaching (to hopefully help with book promotion? I dunno what I’m doing over here). My favorite was probably Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes by Kathleen West, which is very much in the book club vein but also whipsmart in its observations about the dynamics between kids and adults and adults and adults in a high school. Honestly, one of its main characters was a different kind of sobering mirror, the social-justice English teacher. I also finally finished reading The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein, and it should be required reading for anyone in the K12 sphere. I finally got around to reading Matrix by Lauren Groff, which I had been saving long enough for it to feel like homework, and I LOVED IT. Give me all the gay nuns! I continued to read YA-novels-in-verse, and the best I read this year—and one of the best overall, in terms of page-turning plot, charming characters, and actual poetry—was Me: Moth by Amber McBride.

5a) Q1 of 2022 was dominated by a work project creating bibliographies of culturally relevant and critically acclaimed books for grades K-6. So I read SO MUCH MIDDLE GRADES FICTION. That project was marked by the backlash to “CRT” and 2020’s racial awakening. I have some thoughts about what it was like to watch a project begun in optimism spiral into fear. Most of those thoughts boil down to: it was hard and painful. Anyway, the best books I read for that project were Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer by Kelly Jones, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia, The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin (a book with frozen urine pucks—swear to god, what a detail), This Was Our Pact by Ryan Andrews (a contemplative and magical graphic novel unlike any other) and A Kind of Paradise by Amy Rebecca Tan.

6) I honestly can’t even remember what Jeff and I watched on the TV, shows or movies. I do remember that I found watching TV difficult. I grew tired of caring about characters, found it hard to invest myself. I wanted dumb and easy. “Attorney Woo” worked very well for that until it was too difficult. I watched a surprising amount of “Merlin.” It cost no emotional dollars and also Anthony Stewart Head is a real one. I finished “Deep Space Nine,” which was great. Jeff and I were suprpremely charmed by “How to Build a Sex Room” on Netflix. “Abbott Elementary” is good, too! See above about time having no meaning. Who knows what happened during the hour+ between the kids going to bed and our going to bed. Shrug.

7) Kind of samesies about music. I listened to a LOT of Flow State while working. Almost all the music I bought myself for Christmas sat neglected on my phone and Bandcamp app. I did really love “Outside Child” by Allison Russell, which I rushed to buy almost immediately upon seeing this performance from last year’s Grammy’s (she plays the clarinet!):

8) I will not say much about my kids this year, or going forward. They are old enough to have their own lives, etc, and they deserve to share—or not—their own stories. But I will say that for the first time in their lives, I feel like I am a good mom. I am available and engaged. There is room in me for active mothering. I fucking love it.

My family in a nutshell.

9) My hip is still a little fucked up, but this year I finally made some progress on fixing it. I continue to do a lot of Barre classes and dang if I am not super strong.

10) All year long, with no dry spells, my work was actually a sustainable career. I made well more money than last year—woot!—and I paid my quarterly taxes like a good citizen. I found work through my usual channels and added a new, big client. Like, I can actually make this freelancer in educational publishing thing work on a long-term basis. I am enormously proud of myself and just so much happier than I was when I was killing myself to teach for a system that did not care about me.

11) I continued to do therapy. I did EMDR for depression and it was super hard and also super helpful. I learned how to let myself rest. I told my therapist that the baby books all tell you that it took you nine months to grow the baby and it will take at least nine months for your body to recover from it. I feel similarly about my step away from teaching. It took me five years inside Propel to wreck myself, and I feel like it might take me the same amount of time to rebuild my heart and mind. That makes me at least halfway through, and it feels like it—it feels good, like I turned a corner this year, and I am enormously grateful. And, again, I am very proud of myself. I am not the same Sarah!

12) I caught COVID, at least. It happened right after Christmas, and it wasn’t so bad. But I can say definitively that the fatigue is no joke. It is only recently that I can work out without being aware of my lungs and throat kind of aching. So six weeks until I felt completely normal, though I was functionally recovered much sooner. The best things to come out of COVID were the realization that I could in fact sit my ass down on the couch for days on end and not feel compelled to “do something”—see? not the same Sarah!—and rediscovering “Bones.” I watched a lot of “Bones” because it was so soothing. And then our kids got into “Bones,” and they were fucking amazed by it. Poor babies did not grow up on cable and syndication and literally do not know anything about the genre tropes and beats of the procedural. So watching them discover the procedural has been a full delight.

on Being Seen

“The Sisters Dream of Battle” by Martha Edelheit

Our house is shielded by many trees, and I have a deficiency of modesty (in more than one way). I don’t concern myself very much with whether someone can see me, naked, through the windows of our bedroom. I mean, I still pull the blinds closed in the back of the house after the sun has gone down—I’m not asking for someone to watch me change into pajamas and wash my face.

When I was newly postpartum, I was hyper-aware of the windows in our bedroom. I covered myself, cowered, anytime I was less than fully clothed in front of them, day or night. I wasn’t afraid, but my body was. It was an animal fear of exposure. Too much of me was too soft and too slow; I was just too vulnerable to be seen.

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When this school year began, and I knew I wasn’t returning to the classroom, I told my husband I had to move out of our shared office. I needed an office of my own. I want to build an actual writing career, and that is just outside my wheelhouse. I write, sure. I know how to write poems, essays—both lyric and less lyric—and curriculum stuff. But pitching and publishing is a whole different thing. I can’t do that in full view; again, I am too vulnerable to be seen trying these new things.

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My hip continues to be really fucking jacked up. I told my massage therapist I was going to pursue physical therapy, as it feels not quite like but not unlike what this exact same hip felt like after pregnancy wrecked me and physical therapy fixed me. Weeks later, and I had another appointment with her so I knew I had to make some phone calls to make this plan actually happen before I saw her and she asked a follow-up question. And I had to make those phone calls while also fielding detailed questions from my children about what physical therapy is and why I need it. I had a teletherapy appointment with a doctor to get the prescription, hiding in my (new) home office in the hopes of some, any privacy. I never like it when they eavesdrop or look at my computer over my shoulder or crowd around me as I look at a meme on my phone. But it’s become intolerable now that we all have nowhere to go. Plus, you know, the part where probably some part of what is happening inside my hip is emotional pain. Please can we not talk about my emotional pain.

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I have a phone appointment with a therapist to see if we will be a good fit this coming week. I am some horrible combination of depression and, like, traumatized? I think “trauma” is too strong a word for how I feel now that I am some months away from having to go into my school on a regular basis. Jeff thinks my resistance to using the word “trauma” is proof of how little I can look the problem directly in the eye. Regardless of whether it counts as trauma or something slightly lesser than trauma, I am pretty comfortable saying that my school district is both toxic and abusive. And I don’t know how I’m going to look at myself while in this house under the all-seeing eyes of my family. My family who love and support me, but oh my god, there is nowhere to go. I am vulnerable and I do not want to be seen.

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I feel often now like I felt when I was postpartum and naked. How many tender spots have I carefully plastered over and reinforced? When will they begin to feel less tender?