Oregon Coast, Summer 2023
I like this time of year for many reasons. The holidays are over, students are trudging back to the classroom, seed catalogs appear in my mailbox, and if I look hard enough, I can see little green buds on the plants in my yard. And winter has officially started, so we can look forward to returning increments of light. Spring is only a few months away.
At the end of every year, I look back at what I accomplished. Where did I go? What trips did I take? In 2023, I traveled a bit. In March I went to Seattle for AWP, then to California in May to visit my mother. In June I spent four amazing days at Tipi Village, a writers retreat near Eugene. July was especially wonderful, as I spent a week at the Oregon Coast with my extended family. In October, I went back to California to visit with my brother Thomas and nephew Charlie, who I hadn’t seen in six years. Even though I took several trips this year, I hadn’t actually challenged myself to get out of the house and travel more. It just happened.
During the first four months of 2023, I wrote over ninety thousand words as part of the draft of my memoir. Every day, I sat at my desk until I’d written a thousand words. Some days were easy, but most were difficult. The topic of the memoir is deeply painful: my eldest son’s descent in mental illness and the resulting chaos that engulfed our family. These memories are ten years old, but revisiting them refreshed the pain and frustration of those days until it felt as if they’d just occurred. In April, I finished the first draft and told myself I would get back to it in six months. Well, it looks like I’ll get to in January. Turns out I needed those months to recover and get some much-needed distance from the material in the memoir.
I also wrote and published reviews, poems, essays, blog posts, and my newsletter, Sticks & Stones, taught classes and workshops, and made major revisions to my website (coming soon).
But I’m more interested in what’s to come, not what’s past. When I ask myself what I want to accomplish as a writer in 2024, the answers come back loud and clear. I want to take more risks in my writing, to challenge myself in what I write about and how I write it, and to help others with the same goals. I want to make this blog more useful to my readers, whether they’re writers or not.
Whatever it looks like, I want to work as hard as I can for as long as I can at this craft called writing.
These lines from Denise Levertov’s poem, “Writing in the Dark,” express that longing I have:
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices…
words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
If you have any goals for 2024, writing or otherwise, please share them in the comments.
In 2024, I want to live in my art, to experiment with animation in poems, to paint more, to combine my poetry with my drawings and paintings, to read my poetry before a live audience. Also I have a contract with a London press for a pamphlet (chapbook) so editing that will take up a large amount of time!
YES, may my work be “strange birds crying with human voices”! Thank you for the prompt.