Books, French Toast, High School Theatre: A Year in Writing

I spent a lot of this year—as I’ve spent a lot of the last few years—teaching. It’s hard to write when there are thirty college freshmen with their hungry, brilliant, needy minds, and so much of what they need comes from me. Lessons, feedback, grades, reassurance, pressure. Along with all that, I spent a lot of time working on a big project that isn’t yet in the world. If a tree falls in a forest but isn’t published yet— Wait, I think I wrote the same thing in last year’s year in review… “If a tree falls in a forest and it doesn’t publish anything online, did it have a 2014?” And even there, I was quoting my own tweet.

And so I looked back on the year with my hands over my eyes, scared of the nothing I’d see through the cracks between my fingers.

Turns out it wasn’t such a wasteland after all!

In January I wrote an essay for The Oyster Review (RIP) about one of my favorite books, Choire Sicha’s Very Recent History: “Context and the City.” I loved getting the chance to write a weird, gappy essay about this weird, beautiful book.

I kept writing about books—sometimes, as writers ourselves, books seem like the one thing we have authority about?—with an essay at The Millions, about Sarah Manguso’s gem of a book-length essay, Ongoingness. It’s called “Cohesion is not Continuity,” and I think of it and the previous piece as an alliterative little diptych.

2015 was the year I officially finished grad school, turning in my thesis to receive a substantial square of cardstock from the trustees of the university. I’m almost done getting the essays of my thesis (i.e. my two years of grad school classes + the two years that followed) out into the world. (The only straggler now is a weird little lyric essay about nature in the city. You can do it, weird little essay!)

When Nicole Cliffe first tweeted about the launch of The Toast, I promise-threatened to send her an essay I was then working on about French toast. It seemed too perfect. And sometimes twitter proves to be a vision board: in April The Toast published “The French Toast Test,” my ode to fakey food flavors and family traditions.

I spent some of the spring hanging out at my high school, watching kids rehearse for a play on the same stage I acted on before these kids were even born. The result: “Dancing on the Edge with Spring Valley High’s Thespian Troupe 721: How one dedicated director is keeping the theatre program alive and kicking at a struggling New York school.” I’m glad I got to tell that story.

I’d pitched that story as half a joke on twitter. Twitter’s not just a vision board but, seriously, alarmingly, the way that maybe literally half of my writing gets pitched? Further evidence: my interview with Sarah Vowell. We talked for almost an hour; it is boiled way down here: “Founding Father Fails.” (With an outtake here.)

I wrote this round-up when I should have been grading. I should use this as a reminder that my students aren’t the only writers who need my time and attention. (I mean that I do, too.)