I write this as five movers haul our stuff out of the building in which we’ve lived for the past 20 years. It took us weeks to go through all the boxes inside of boxes, neatly kept folders of statements from long-closed accounts, student loan statements that included our Social Security numbers. (Our SS numbers appeared so casually on so many documents. Innocent times.)
As our boxes of books (still too many, even after several donation drops) go out to the truck, I have a liminal moment to look back at my favorite bits of writing from 2023. The year was full of change and work for all of us, but I still managed to keep this newsletter alive and have a few pieces published in some of my favorite places to visit regularly for compelling short writing.
In any event, the list:
My Favorites of 2023
I earned my first skull from the journal HAD this year. HAD opens submissions erratically and accepts a limited number each call, which means most calls last about a minute. I managed to squeak in my poem “Hope It’s Okay If I Love One Person More Than Any Other.”
I’m a huge fan of the journal Wigleaf, and I’m so proud to have my short story (or whatever it is) “Wound” published in October. I’m equally proud of my “Dear Wigleaf” postcard.
And some of my favorite guides from this newsletter:
How to Get There from Here — When the distance between your younger and older self can be made to touch.
How to Own Your Story — Q left us for college this year, and as she takes this huge step into adulthood, we think about what writing about another means and who gets to say what gets said.
How to Breathe — This summer the sky in NYC turned orange from Canadian forest fires. It was hard to breathe and harder not to think about what we might have done.
How to Make a Dish — When caught between everything, where do we look for finishings?
And Thanks
Since the beginning of this newsletter, I’ve framed posts as “helpful guides,” a conceit derived from DIY, but in this case the things to be done yourself — life, work, love, time, growing up and older — don’t neatly fit onto the kind of instructions you spread out while you absentmindedly keep some screws in your mouth.
What I do know, or what I’m convinced of, is that we are all stories told first by others, then by ourselves, then by those who come after us. We think we know ourselves — better than anyone else could know us — but we don’t. The coming to know is in the telling.
Thank you, dear readers. I am humbled by your attention, the likes, replies, and shares, and especially by those of you who have become paid subscribers.
Hope that you had a good year and that you managed to spend at least a little time talking to yourself. Let’s keep going.