2019 was also a big year, though I did not travel as far as in 2018. On Twitter (which I have now joined), I’ve seen people reflecting on the whole decade since we’re about to enter the new 20s (how weird–I think “the 20s” still evokes flappers and Prohibition to me, though the pull of the 20th century feels weaker than for “the 60s,” say). It hadn’t occurred to me to look back on the decade till I started seeing those tweets. I don’t think I much noticed the dawn of the last decade; I was just trundling along in college. But if I look back on this past decade, most of the major accomplishments of my life were achieved in it: I got an agent, I graduated from college, I published two novels, I got a Ph.D…. One can, of course, debate the merits of cataloging one’s life in terms of material accomplishments. Anyway, let me zoom back in on 2019 and recall the highlights, non-chronologically:

• I finished my Ph.D. in linguistics and was hooded in June
• I published my second short story, “The Mailbox,” in The Society of Misfit Stories
• I moved to Iowa and began a post-doc at Grinnell College, where I have been assiduously documenting the Writers@Grinnell series
• I wrote some more zines (and even gave one to Maia Kobabe!)
• Thanks to Isabelle, I dabbled in various forms of printmaking, including Gocco-printed business cards
• I visited Anza–Borrego in the spring, Cedar Breaks National Monument and Bryce Canyon National Park in the summer, and Boston and Western Massachusetts in the fall
• In literary adventures, I went to Prairie Lights in Iowa City, many lovely bookstores in Western Massachusetts, and the Emily Dickinson Museum
• I was briefly in New York City in January
• I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time, but it was a modified NaNoWriMo: my goal was to write every day and produce a “short” story, which I did (12,902 words)

2020, here I come!