Good Things I Wrote This Year
At the beginning of 2014 I made a mental resolution thatI didn’t tell anyone. I decided I would try my hardest to achieve what I wanted, to become a real writer. This didn’t mean anything specific. I had no benchmarks to prove I’d succeeded. And yet I know with complete clarity that I have. It’s a pretty incredible feeling.
At the beginning of this year I was broke, employed part time at a jewelry store and had only been published a few times. Over the course of this year I was published places I’d never even dreamed of, wrote pieces I’m incredibly proud of, and was hired for my first and second editorial jobs. I am able to say I make a living as a writer. Sometimes it seems too good to be true. But I think back to this beginnging of this year, which has been such a rough one for the world, and I remember my determination. Drive and skill doesn’t guarantee success in this world, and I feel incredibly grateful for all that has happened. But let’s be honest: I kicked ass.
Here are some of my favorite things I wrote:
At the beginning of this year, one of my favorite Brooklyn venues, 285 Kent, was shut down. I worked bar there in 2013 and it was a really special and unique place for me. I was really honored to be able to edit an oral history of the venue for ANIMAL New York.
What seems like a million years ago, I wrote for The Pitch about EMA and St. Vincent’s new albums and the culture of harassment and surveillance that people, particularly women and minorities, have to contend with on the internet. This piece directly or indirectly led to everything else I wrote this year, and summarizes what I feel is important right now. Later, I wrote a follow up piece around EMA’s New Hive zine and the increased importance of this topic in light of #gamergate and other internet fiascos.
I also wrote a piece for The Pitch about the death of folkie Jesse Winchester, my trip to Florida with my father and my messed up feelings about boomers and their music.
I wrote a bunch of reviews for Rolling Stone which is exciting but hard to be too proud of since each is about 100 words.
Tiny Mix Tapes let me interview EMA and Priests.
I wrote several pieces for Noisey that I’m proud of, including a discussion of the band Tacocat’s radically lighthearted, internet-inspired feminism, a piece voicing my disappointment over tUnE-yArDs’ new album, and an exploration of my conflicted feelings in light of the sudden virality of the wonderful Future Islands Letterman performance.
Later, when I was working as a staff writer for ANIMAL I wrote a weekly column called Radicals of Retrofuturism about subversive techies from the past. I particularly liked this one.
Also for ANIMAL, I wrote about the amazing avant garde video game collective Babycastles’ show on Muslim lived experience.
Finally, in my new job at Co.Design I’ve written a few things so far that I have been really excited about, both incidentally around comic books. First, I interviewed the authors of Al Jazeera’s digital graphic novel about big data, Terms of Service. Then I interviewed the guy who wrote the story for the new Ghostface Killah album and curated its accompanying comic book.
