2024: too close to call it
It's that time of year—when I've already put my website URL on our printed holiday cards and now I frantically try to conjure a meaningful end-of-year post so my blog roll doesn’t look totally defunct. Two weeks ago at girls’ brunch, I stared across the crumb-laden pastry tray at two other women and said, “This was not my best year.” The other women echoed my sentiment, and then we unanimously agreed not to share why.
My friend Dom is working on a manuscript about wrestling, church, masculinity and body image. In it, he talks about the youth group staple of the “unspoken prayer request”: when you’re dealing with something too personal or salacious or diffuse to verbalize in front of the other teens at church, but it would look bad/prideful/dishonest to say you had no prayer requests at all.
The second Saturday of every month, I host an informal zoom call with other nonfiction writers. Lately, we keep talking about books that seem to be written before the writer has fully processed the experiences they’re writing about, where the writer seems to be trying to convince themself that they’re fine and begging the reader to play along. My friend Ben talks about this dynamic in his brilliant essay, “Long Gone Dogs” (which he and I had the pleasure of discussing over zoom for Episode 3 of PACT, Pacific Alumni Craft Talks—recording coming soon!). “In a way,” Ben writes, “I had lied. But it wasn’t the falsehood of what I said…It was the intent to deceive. I had written to fool my reader into thinking I felt something other than what I really felt.”
I am trying to say something about truth, about the obscurity of experience, especially when we are still ensconced within it, about the power of time and distance to buff the steam from the mirror and allow us to really see ourselves. I don’t yet know how everything that happened in 2024 will pan out, because the division between years is in fact no division at all—no more than a state line interrupts geography to differentiate one side from the other. The further we are from it, the more sense the distinction makes, because we are removed from the evidence of its artificiality, its imposition.
I’ve driven across so many state lines this year.
Michael and I road-tripped to Texas and back twice: once for the eclipse in April, and once for Thanksgiving. We took my parents’ vintage VW van in the spring, drove the flat direction out to Kansas, stopped at the same truck stop in Colby where I’ve been going on the way to summer camp since I was nine. We witnessed the totality in Marble Falls, Texas, lying on a dock with too many people for it to be properly quiet. The next day, around dusk, we nearly got caught out on the water for the most dramatic hail storm I’ve ever witnessed. We drove the van down the switchbacks into Palo Duro canyon—the second largest canyon in the United States, a marvel of geology you’d never know existed, some ten miles outside of Amarillo.
We borrowed my parents’ pickup truck for the second road trip, cut Kansas from the route and drove to Texas and back through Raton Pass. We learned about Colorado’s labor history and the Ludlow massacre, when a Greek coal mining settlement attempted to unionize and the Colorado State Guard got called in to break it up. We ate at the Big Texan, the Amarillo equivalent of Denver’s Casa Bonita, and for our fifth anniversary, we stayed in a cabin on the cliffs overlooking Palo Duro canyon.
Last year for my birthday, I got one of my first book review acceptances. This year for my birthday, I got my first anxiety prescription (and damn was that overdue). I got my first gray hairs this year (overdue or premature? I’m thirty-one. I’ve ripped them all out in the liquor store bathroom).
Michael and I finally found a new tango teacher we like, so social dance is part of my life again. (I’m several weeks behind on updating my dance log, a personal record of what we learned in class, but I’m trying to practice grace with myself, to let it be okay, to take what I can manage and let the rest go.)
The best parts of this year have been characterized by collaboration. In late summer, my friend Allison invited me to work on some collaborative written pieces with her, and it opened up a whole different mode of making. We wrote this gorgeous poem together (unsharable—unspoken—because we’re hoping to eventually publish it somewhere) and then we made artwork to go with it. I wrote her a letter, she spilled on the letter and the purple ink ran like dye; she sent me a picture of the blurred writing backlit by the sun, slashed with silhouettes of flowers, and I used the image as the background for a watercolor of one of the lines of the poem. Who knew a thing could go back and forth so many times, taking on meaning and resonance and energy with each exchange?
A group of friends from graduate school and I have launched a series of live video author interviews, where we all hang out on zoom and someone interviews someone else about their recently published work. Branded as PACT—short for Pacific Alumni Craft Talks—these episodes are recorded and catalogued online as a way for anyone to tune into the conversation.
One of the biggest delightful surprise developments of this year: I helped start a magazine! In June I flew out to Portland for the Pacific MFA program’s 20th anniversary celebration, and my former advisor Mike Magnuson said that we should start a magazine. Michael’s been telling me for years that I would be good at it, but that’s such an unyielding undertaking I was completely unwilling to consider doing it on my own. But when Coach Mags, as we call him, suggested that we could do it together, I was totally in.
Sneaker wave magazine launched in September and we’ve published fifteen original nonfiction stories. We release one essay every Sunday morning, all nonfiction, all kick-ass writing. We have a four person team and it’s way more fun (and way more work) than I ever imagined.
If you’re reading this, and you value good writing and the potential of storytelling to connect us, and/or you want to support me in my endeavors, THE BEST WAY TO DO THAT IS TO BECOME A PAYING SUBSCRIBER TO SNEAKER WAVE! We are working so hard to solicit and edit and publish high-quality nonfiction stories, and we really want this thing to be sustainable for the long term.
This year’s been my most successful year for writing so far. I published FIFTEEN of my own pieces this year! I got to interview the brilliant Margo Steines, and she told me she’d loved my review of her book. I wrote about the narrative structure of the evangelical testimony, and it was one of the top five most read essays at Write or Die mag this year! I wrote about killing chickens and my changing relationship to faith. I got to expand my literary tastes and strengthen my voice as a critic by reviewing books regularly for Full Stop. I finally published the purity-culture board game I designed.
And there have been disappointments, setbacks. I wrote a long essay about the boom in women's memoirs about escaping religious fundamentalism and patriarchy, and I haven’t managed to place it anywhere. I started pitching it in April, and I’ve pitched or submitted it to twenty different outlets. It’s been rejected from fifteen (my number of the year, evidently). I’m holding out hope for one of the final five. (If you’re an editor reading this and you're intrigued, hit me up via the contact page!)
Last New Year’s Eve, I stood in the backyard at midnight and said I was going to query a hundred agents this year! I haven’t queried any. The book’s not done, not ready to be sent out yet. I’m disappointed by this—I feel a crawling nervousness that says, what if I never finish? What if it’s not good enough? What if I’m just procrastinating because I don’t want to face all the rejection that querying inevitably brings?—but I'm trying to hold it gently, to see it as something to be explored rather than a weapon to use against myself. I have a sticky note taped to my computer monitor, something my spiritual director told me: resistance is discernment.
This year—2025—I want to invest in my community (literary and local), in the platforms that I want to support, in helping champion my friends and their work as much as myself. I want to keep hosting people. I want to seek and create beauty.
