I invited you, my dear friends and readers, to share words that changed things for you this year. I loved loved loved seeing your experiences named via these quotes!
Katie Defiore—storyteller and podcaster—thinking on the singular life we get to live.
"We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility."
from The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Taylor Harrington—community architect—recommends “The Power of Ritual” by Casper ter Kuile 📖 💫
“Rituals have such history. It’s a gift to reimagine them and create new ones.”
Taylor and I both attended Casper’s talk for Creative Mornings NYC, she in person and me online, and both asked questions. You can see this wonderful gathering here.
Jenna Pastuszek, connector of humans and ideas and performance, lived by this quote from Barbara Streisand in a 1963 Ladies Home Journal interview:
"Being pregnant is the height of creativity for any woman.”
Jenna Pastuszek spent the year obsessed with “Babs” as she performed a One-Woman Show around the country while she herself was pregnant and then postpartum. Be sure to catch a performance of “Me, Myself, and Barbara”—it’s so very bright and moving and interesting and dynamic and inspiring.
Map-Maker Juliana McMillan-Wilhoit found her early parenting changed by this advice from a friend:
"Live life with your kids, not alongside your kids."
What this meant to her:
One simple example is that I've been more willing to bring her into my craft room when I have been sewing. I am bringing her into something that gives me so much joy instead of feeling like I have to be entirely focused on her every moment we’re together.
Lisa Lotito—brand designer and multidisciplinary artist—created amid the tension of pursuing life and receiving it:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” —Mary Oliver
« Ce qui vous appartient viendra à vous ». What belongs to you will come to you. —A tea packet
Chris Danilo—education enthusiast, strategist, and writer of Strategic Altruism—is reflecting on what it means to build and live into his own definition of an overused word like “leadership.”
I think for me it means something about putting people and relationships over policy or authority or rule…Eliminating ego for the sake of authenticity and being real. People see it and notice it.
I fell headlong into a passion for bell hooks and her way of building definitions and working them out in her ideas.
"Definitions are vital starting points for imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up." (All About Love, p14)
Or this quote from “Teaching to Transgress” by which I wrote *fucking mic drop*
“I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to ‘master’ or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments. I suggest we may learn from spaces of silence as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism that suggest on is worth of being heard only if one speaks in standard English.” (p174)
PS. not sure why “Teaching to Transgress” is so pricey at both bookshop and amazon. I read a copy from a college library.
My 2022 Reading
I used Storygraph to keep track of my reading. I realized last week that it hadn’t added read-by dates for some of my 2022 reads taking me from 25 to 35 reads. It also didn’t seem to recognize some texts like Ama Diaka’s poetry. So I’m not actually convinced this data is fully correct. Might go back to goodreads.
But it was fun anyway so I’m sharing. The list does not include books that I read only snippets of for the purpose of some tasks such as a writing project or parenting etc.
Some observations:
I read more fiction than in the past few years. Being in Motherhood Year #1 made my brain readier for the bright and swift.
Octavia Butler is the most disturbing writers you’ll ever read and don’t miss her.
I read “Book Lovers” in one day in October and it was one of the best mental health choices I made this year.
It feels like everything is about parenting even when it isn’t. It probably always was and I just couldn’t hear it before.
Top Books Where Parenting is Central: “Easy Beauty” by Chloe Cooper Jones and “Linea Nigra” by Jazmina Barrera
Book that made me the maddest: “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change” by Angela Garbes. Because MY GOD our society really doesn’t do right by those in need of care and those giving care.
The biggest disappointment: everything by Emily St. John Mandel. I’ll talk about how much the tv show Station Eleven meant to me in another newsletter. So I read all of her work trying to pursue that haunting. But I just wasn’t into it.
Second biggest disappointment: “Atlas of the Heart” was just meh. The concluding essay was far more interesting than the rest.
Jane Austen will always have my heart. But also the pacing in “Emma” is wack.
Hannah Gadsby’s memoir didn’t get enough attention. I listened to the audio book and it was magnificent.
As I noted above, I’m not entirely confident in this data. But the general arcs do reveal something hilarious: my dips in reading correspond to massive developmental leaps or other challenges with Pippin.
January and February: I gave birth. I read nothing as my body and spirit slid towards that moment.
March: read more as we found our groove with Pippin. Read on my phone and kindle while breastfeeding.
A drop in May and June for her 4 month sleep regression.
August: Elsie started crawling. No more placing her on the ground to stare out our back window at the trees.
Aug-September: the crucible of discovering Pippin’s food allergies. The most intense and confusing and scary time of the year.
October: a spike as we hired childcare and had a routine (however briefly).
November: a sweet dip into easy romance novels that corresponded to a family wedding beach trip and recovery from a big work project. High page number, low effort, much mental rest.
December: everyone was sick but I was sick the longest and so didn’t do as much childcare and tore through over a thousand pages comprising Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy.
Buying Books
I purchased more books this year too. It feels really good to buy books as they are just published or even pre-order. Sarah Peck of Startup Parent describes buying books as a vote for the ideas you want to see in the world and the writers you want to keep writing.
Here’s my list of books purchased:
“Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women” by Alissa Wilkinson
“Essential Labor: mothering as social change” by Angela Garbes
“The Best Most Awful Job” edited by Katherine May
“Bad Vibes Only (and other things I bring to the table)” by Nora McInerny
“Inciting Joy” and “Book of Delights” by Ross Gay
“What Kind of Woman” by Kate Baer
“Easy Beauty” by Chloe Cooper Jones (the audacity of this book in refusing a subtitle! What perfection!)
“Set Boundaries, Finding Peace” Nedra Glover Tawwab
“Unreasonable Hospitality” by Will Guidara
“Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism” by Amanda Montell
“Woman, Eat Me Whole” by Ama Asantewa Diaka
“Wintering” by Katherine May
“My Broken Language” by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Best Book Cover:
A Year of Bookstores
I love bookstores. You know this. You’ve heard me to wax lyrical about them. I especially love a well curated shop which usually means it is not solely a used shop—new books are more specifically chosen by the owner and the community of patrons . It feels like walking into someone’s mind and heart with a warm welcome. I leave inspired, thinking new thoughts just by touching titles and turning over their descriptions in my hands. Every store is a knickknack shop of designs and colors and types and paperweights and typeface and I just love it.
When I had energy or was traveling, we always went to a bookstore. It was an easy win in a year when I needed some easy wins.
Midtown Scholar (Harrisburg, PA)
With more trips to see family with Pippin this year, we made it a habit to stop in at Midtown Scholar on our way out of town. As such, I visited it more this year an any other time previously, which is wild considering I grew up in the area.
Yes that is actual daylight hitting those floors. Swoon.
Perelandra at Wolverine Farms (Fort Collins, CO)
This shop was an experience in self-recognition for me. The books there reflected my journey among faith, mysticism, humanism, and literature. It was philosophy, fiction, and poetry arranged not by genre but by some conversational thread the owners are clearly conducting amongst themselves, one I felt welcomed into and seen by.
Lost City Books (Adams Morgan, D.C.)
Observation: I clearly have a thing for beautiful rooms with a good staircase.
I also have a thing for shelves with the cover front facing. Browsing amongst cover design > book spine design.
Not a raging success but a still fun to share recommendations with you each week. Yes, I use affiliate links to… myself.
Made us a little list of some of my faves from the year.
A Bookshop on Home, Power, and Money with a focus on new publications. I was going to make my own list along these lines but this is far more extensive and worth checking out. But if you’ve been reading this year, you’ve seen me refer you over to Meg Conley before and this might not be news!
The internet had some good writing
I loved becoming an avid substack subscriber and reader this year. There’s a lot happening here that feels like the blogging days of old. I started (publicly) blogging in 2005 on blogspot. I was blogging well before on a secret xanga that had three readers—two friends and my sister, a cohort that formed via a late night hang out as camp counselors where our young selves first experienced what it is to tell the stories from our lives that felt revealing and difficult under a full moon and built lasting trust in the process that became our secret blog circle. And while my readership remained people I knew personally, I did love those winding, emo, declarative musings and the feeling of being received in them.
Anyway. Here are some internet writings that I loved.
And you liked some of my writing too!
It was so fun to switch from one email platform to another. I know that doesn’t really change your experience as much as it does mine. But it did make it easier to write here on a regular basis. And with a small human and zero childcare, reducing the silly barriers is as important as reducing the real barriers.
Honestly, this one was my fave and it was the first. It felt so good to put words to the thing I want to think about. ^
Most opened newsletter entirely because the title was so great and it was a steal from Jason Reynolds but you didn’t know that when you first clicked on the email subject line so I win ^
In conclusion:
Many words were shared. Many thoughts moved through. Names came and went and came. Clarity gained, lost, and gained again.
Thank you for being part of these words.
If you loved anything here, please share with someone who might also love it. It matters. Social media infrastructure is crumbling. So when you have any affection for a small fish like myself, the direct share is how we keep getting to do this thing of thinking and writing and sharing and running odd businesses.
Thanks for the mention!
Holy cow, that’s a lot of books. You’re an animal. One thing I realized while reading this was that both my writing and reading have dropped pretty significantly in the last two years. They’re not perfectly correlated, but I’m sure they’re related somehow.
Also, that Existentialism book cover. Wow. That might be the best thing I’ve seen in a while. You have such a nose for good content! What great taste!