Have yourself a merry little whatever
on yuletide carols, time out of time, and seeing the shapes of things
I fucking love Christmas carols. This is the only time of year you’ll hear me singing about god or holy infants so “tender and mild” (a weird thing to say, like describing a pork roast). But I am simply overcome by their magic—the harmonies, the chord changes, the lifetime-deep familiarity through repetition. I have my gripes, though; I’ve never been very keen on “The Twelve Days of Christmas” (which trumps “Deck the Halls” as the most annoying one, IMHO).
It is the carol furthest removed from . . . any narrative of Christmas I am familiar with. My “true love” who won’t take no for an answer and who has an unusually large collection of birds wants to win me over with extravagant gestures? (Get in line, honey.) I remember thinking, as a kid, What the actual hell even are the “twelve days” of Christmas? In good news for kid-me, the internet existed and I could look this up: it’s the twelve days from Christmas Day to January 5th (“twelfth night”), commemorating the time between Jesus’s birth and the arrival of the three wise men. (So everyone on Twitter joking about Mary having to entertain those guests immediately after giving birth can give it a rest.)
I can dig it. Those twelve-ish days have often felt to me like time out of time. I like that (pending work schedules and other obligations), it’s possible then to forget what day it is. There’s always a point in December when we somehow agree the year is over and won’t be “real” again until a few days into January. The lost days in between feel like a shared ~*~liminal space~*~, a mass respite from collective insistence on striving toward production and achievement. It’s a time to throw in the towel.
It's also a time of accounting. December brings its “best of the year” roundup lists; writers compile links to our year in publications. We tally and hope it’s enough: four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a 495-day-old “In Progress” submission on Submittable. There’s something ancient-feeling about this; in the shortest days of the year, we get quiet, turn inward, and take account of what we have or don’t. But we’re counting clips (or artworks or songs or podcasts), not jerky and jars of preserves.
I’m thinking of how winter reveals Central Park. In the summer, thicc with foliage and flowers, the park obscures its winding paths; you can feel enveloped in the ramble, even briefly lost. On the other side of the year, I can look through the bare trees to paths and landmarks previously hidden; I can easily see my way through and out. Synapses form in the mental map; this shit finally makes sense.
With less clutter, with the volume turned down, I can better understand the shape of the park, and the shape of the year. Standing on this side of it, what has this year looked like for you? How can that help you navigate the next one?
I don’t usually make a New Year’s resolution; I don’t believe in a version of myself that’s just me, but extremely disciplined in a narrowly focused and unprecedented way. But I do like qualitative guidelines. For 2022, I wanted to “honor my time, energy, and attention.” Sometimes you send an intention out into the ether and the ether raises an eyebrow and goes Oh, yeah? and holds you to your word. You can’t walk back into a house with a locked front door. You walk forward because you promised yourself you would, and now you must. (Sometimes you have to flail for a while before you can take off the blindfold and see that your wish came true.) I like how, in a culture generally devoted to the hamster wheel of the present and future, December invites us to pause and look back, decide the meaning of the story.
Where have you put your time, energy, and attention this past year?
Questions/experiments/rituals:
Journal prompt: What are some tally-able things you accomplished this year, tidbits you might mention at a party or to a distant relative at a festive gathering? What about some juicy pleasures you might not mention to anyone? Tally those, too; savor them. What about the times you didn’t think you’d make it through something but you did, and are maybe still doing? This matters as much as anything. What does end-of-the-year you have to say to the yous of earlier this year?
Writing experiment: Take a (short) recent piece of creative writing. In the spirit of Things Organized Neatly, you’ll do some accounting, some tallying. Ignoring nothing-words like “the,” “and,” “but,” “of,” forms of “be,” etc., sort this text by word. You can cut them up and sort them into piles, or rewrite them in alphabetical order as I did. Here’s an alphabetized version of one of my recent poems (including the words from its very long title):
When I look at these words out of context, I see a work concerned with the first-person perspective, gender, exclusions and negations, borders and enclosures, ways of consuming, posturing, pedagogies, and the holy and the profane. I’m not sure I could have articulated exactly that before doing this bird’s-eye-view exercise. What does the skeleton of your writing reveal to you? You can do this with a finished piece to learn more about it, or with an in-progress piece to decide where to go with it.
Time/attention exercise: Place two bowls in front of you, one filled with small objects (pebbles, marbles, dried beans), the other empty. Choose a very simple thought to hold for five minutes; this could be an image you hold in your mind (a red semicircle, the Ace of Hearts) or an external object to hold your gaze (a pencil, a rubber ball). Set a timer for five minutes. Concentrate on your simple thought. Every time your mind strays from it, move one object from the full bowl to the empty one. After the timer goes off, you can see how many times your attention wavered. Try it multiple days in a row and see if the number changes. This exercise comes from the book Keys to Perception by Ivo Domínguez Jr., and it’s hard to keep the number down! (I think my record low was eight times?) But I find it really refreshing to focus my attention so narrowly, an antidote to infinite scrolling.
A looking-back ritual: I recently had an idea for a New Year’s Eve ritual. Imagine that, all throughout the year, every time something fun or interesting happened, you wrote it and the date on a slip of paper that you then folded into a tiny origami star, and, by the end of the year, you had a nice full jar of those to open and read aloud, remembering the year before you leave it. I definitely did not spend all year doing this, but I have a few little stars in a jar. I like the idea of more than one person contributing, and later seeing which memories are shared/duplicated, and which ones are surprises :)
Reading/watching/listening
Films: I loved Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, co-written with Patrick McHale (who’s responsible for Over the Garden Wall and much of the heart & soul of Adventure Time). It’s a stop-motion masterpiece with good songs, beautiful puppet acting (yeah, I said it), and a throughline about the importance of disobedience. I love so much about this movie, and one of my favorite things might be that the voice of the monkey, Spazzatura, is Cate Blanchett.
“TV”: A Charlie Brown Christmas. I don’t remember being that into Charlie Brown as a kid, but watching this again as an adult, I was struck by 1) Vince Guaraldi’s incredible soundtrack, and 2) How feral and relentless the neighborhood kids are in their quest to knock Charlie down a peg. There’s a coldness and a ferocity and a “we’ll just make do with what we have” feeling that, to me, seems more like real life than any super-feel-good holiday movie does. And it makes me laugh.
Music: Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. This whole album is a banger, the absolute best.
Misc: Did you know that Stonehenge has a live camera feed? What better way to celebrate the solstice than watching the sun rise there at 8:00 am GMT tomorrow? As their website states, “This year Winter Solstice will be marked at Stonehenge on the morning of 22 December, not 21 December. The sunrise will be live streamed on the official English Heritage YouTube channel.”
Publications/projects, a year-end roundup
It wouldn’t be a December newsletter without a list of Things I’ve Done! I’m grateful to the online journals that published my poetry this year, and to the amazing authors whose work I had the pleasure of editing, and/or who I had the honor of supporting in-house at Soft Skull and Catapult.
High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez, published 1/11/22. This hilarious, beautiful memoir on fighting machismo and finding joy in queer spaces was reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lambda Literary, and On the Seawall, with other press at Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, TODAY, NBC News, the Los Angeles Times, and Oprah Daily,. And it’s sweeping the end-of-the-year best-of lists at Goodreads, HipLatina, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere.
I got to talk about High-Risk Homosexual at Publishers Weekly on 1/28/22, celebrating Edgar and their book being selected as an American Bookseller’s Association “Indies Introduce” title.
Path of Totality by Niina Pollari, published 2/8/22. This poetry collection, on the sudden and devastating loss of a child, is incredible. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said “Pollari writes with straightforward, heartbreaking clarity. These poems are unflinching and powerful.” The New York Times selected Path of Totality as a best poetry book of the year.
MONARCH by Candice Wuehle, published 3/29/22. This novel, at the intersection of trauma psychology, Y2K aesthetic, and occult academia, received rave reviews at NPR (and was named an NPR best book of the year), ZYZZYVA, Chicago Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal, with other press at NYLON, CrimeReads, Cleveland Review of Books, and Luna Luna Mag. MONARCH is also a contender in the 2023 Tournament of Books!
The Red Zone by Chloe Caldwell, published 4/19/22. This candid, funny, searingly honest memoir on PMDD was well received in reviews at the Washington Post, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Full Stop, with other press at AutoStraddle, the Cut, Electric Literature, BBC, and Thinx, and more.
Two of my poems— “APPLICANT MUST HAVE” and “LOCAL BEAST, KIND OF A LITTLE BITCH, ACTUALLY” were published at HAD on 5/1/22.
I launched this newsletter, Curiosity & Ritual newsletter, on the summer solstice, 6/21/22 :)
Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk, published 7/19/22. This essay collection on plants, fiction, journalism, boundary-blurring, and the anthropocene was reviewed (and starred!) at Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, The Nation, and The Atlantic, with other press at The Paris Review, n+1, LitHub, CRAFT, The Creative Independent, and BOMB.
Normal Distance by Elisa Gabbert, published 9/13/22. This poetry collection on paradoxes and the tragicomedy of needing always to contend with time was reviewed at Publishers Weekly, Ploughshares, and Poetry Foundation, with other press at New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, LitHub, Chicago Review of Books, and The Slowdown with Ada Limón.
Best Debut Short Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize, edited by Yuka Igarashi and me, with winning stories selected by judges Sabrina Orah Mark, Emily Nemens, and Deesha Philyaw, published 9/20/22. Catapult published a roundtable interview with the judges and PEN America interviewed all twelve winning writers. Other press at Debutiful, Book Riot, and LitHub. An excerpt of the book—Yuka’s & my co-written intro—ran at Hobart.
My poem, “I Could Signal Dominance in Email Correspondence as Trained But the Concept Is Offensive and I’m Baby” was published at Hobart on 9/27/22, with many thanks to guest editor Taylor Byas.
After I dispatched my 9/21 newsletter, my beautiful friend Jeff Hinshaw invited me to record myself reading it for their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. The episode aired on 9/25/22.
The Tiger and the Cage by Emma Bolden, published 10/18/22. This softly fierce memoir on endometriosis and the misogyny of modern medicine received great reviews at Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and LitHub, with other press at Shondaland, Motherly, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Catapult, Electric Literature, Hazlitt, and Salon.
Annnd after ten years of freelance editing around whatever else I was doing, I officially launched my manuscript-consultation business as an LLC on 10/31/22, a nice Halloween birthday.
See you in 2023! I hope the new year is good to you.