Year in Review 2024

'I will build a boat in the desert place'

2024 began in grave uncertainty; we knew that the English Department at SPU was shrinking and that I was being tossed overboard so the storm could subside, but ashore what harbor would we wash? 🌊

• Eventually, I secured a position at ACU, which has been a great fit so far. This then is the year we left Seattle and move to sunny AZ. 🌞

• We swam every single day from July to September. 🏊‍♀️

• I started seeing concerts again: The Get-Up Kids, Over the Rhine (sounding better than ever), Sixpence None the Richer, and Peter Furler were standouts. 🎵

• This was the year I first went to a high school reunion. Since we were here in AZ, I took my family and showed the kids were I used so sing choir, the corner where I had my lunch, the field were I played football. We met my old French teacher and I still had the Psalms memorized he gave us all those years ago.

  

• I wrote less this year than usual, being busy with the move and my new job, but still tried to make myself useful. In 2024, I published:

  • this review of Charles Taylor’s very bad new book of poetic theory

  • This set of recommendations for Christian poetry anthologies

  • This piece about recent poem books and friends in pubs

  • This essay about bears, and Shakespeare, and Frederick Buechner

• I also published individual poems in Radix, Whale Road Review, Ekstasis, and Heart of Flesh.

• And, I put together the manuscript for Poem Book #3, about which (stay tuned) more in the new year. 📖

• This was the year of AI ‘s🤖 broad adoption: mostly by students using it to avoid learning to write.

• File under “Aging”:

  • I got glasses for the first time! 👓

  • Also: arthritis. Goodness, that’s no joke. I’ve had my wrists in braces since April and can hardly hold a pencil or open a door without wincing most days.

• Let’s put this under bad-news-that-may-turn-out-to-be-good, i.e. eucatastrophe: This year, Image Magazine announced its closure. We were stunned and saddened so. But then: they’re back with a new editor and a new locale (having also severed ties with SPU).

• Then, in similar fashion, Camp Casey on Whidbey Island was abruptly sold, severing their ties with SPU. That place is my favorite and suddenly it was gone. But now I’ve heard YMCA is the buyer, and that they’re going to fix things up, and that some of us will still be allowed to hold writing retreats there, so utter tragedy was again averted.

• Hmmm…and.. we got a new car—ours died fantastically and we got into one without a gas engine, so here I am navigating the world of public charging stations. ⚡️ It’s pretty great.

• I took the train 🚂 to the Lilly Conference at Westmont in CA 🌴

• Also, I won a grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and spent much of the year trying to actually receive it from various institutional stakeholders.

• We spent a fair bit of the year trying to buy a house in Seattle. It didn’t work in the end (and good thing too) but that took a lot of energy, a lot of prayers and dreaming.

• Oh yes, and I did that lovely interview for Rabbit Room this year, which was so fun, and also recorded this podcast, and these radio spots. 🎤

• Most who’ve been round our house have seen my vintage stereo set-up, driven by a McIntosh 250 monoblock amp from the 60’s. This year, it too died. But then, my electrician Uncle gave it a once, twice, three times over, replacing the capacitors and shining everything up. The thing is 🍒 again and sounding better than ever.

• In the poetry world, these were my favorite books 🪶 (some of which I endorsed)

  • Garrett Soucy Between the Joints and the Marrow

  • Betsy Brown City Nave

  • Luke Harvey Let’s Call this Home

  • J.C. Scharl Ponds

  • Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. Burrows)

• Very little new music moved me this year. I was intrigued by lots of albums—esp by Julie, Karate, A Sequence of Echoes, Thomas Austin—that may someday earn a place on the favorites list. But the only one I loved was the new Luxury Like Unto Lambs. 🎧

• I saw a few more films this year than is my custom, the best of which were 100s of Beavers and Riddle of Fire.

• Improbably, I became this year a youth soccer coach. If success therein is measured in games won, I am terrible at it; if in character-building and boys having fun, pretty great. I think this is a one-off, but who can say? ⚽️

• Toward the end of it, we hosted a huge Thanksgiving! 🦃

  

  Okay friends, things are going well enough for our family, all things considered. Cicley is toddling around and can just now say all of our names, the MFA program at Whitworth received full accreditation and will go public soon, and I live, for now, just down the street from my parents after spending most of my life thousands of miles away, and—not to be too schmaltzy, but, you know, for auld lang syne—I have you smart readers and friends who send encouraging notes and come to readings, and generally make this work worth doing.

  Bless you all. Happy New Year! 🎆