A Year In Reading: 2024

And an education in not knowing.

Dec 31, 2024

This year, 2024, was marked by my acceptance into the Bennington Writing Seminars’ MFA program. In January I attended my first residency in Vermont and I was enthralled to be in the presence of such talented writers. It felt like going to church. Masses of like-minded people with similar interests and values gathering together for sermon-style readings and lectures from authors we revere where we frantically scribble down what they preach into our notebooks.

My first mentor was Saeed Jones. When I met with Saeed I told him there was a story I had been working on about my past that I wasn’t ready to deal with. Instead, I wanted to get better at writing essays. So he assigned me a lot of essay collections and memoirs to read. But my writing was… restricted. We came up with so many incredible essay ideas together, but I couldn’t write them. I could only write in these fragmented, broken paragraphs. Themes were barely emerging. There was no real through-line, no spine. No connective tissue. I wrote to him and said the reading assignments were great, but they didn’t inspire me in a way that freed me up creatively. He wrote to me in agreement and said that my writing felt scared. When I sent Saeed an older piece I had written from the story I did NOT want to work on, his response was enthusiastic. There you are! he said.

There were/are so many things I’d love to write about, but what has become clear is that I have this other story inside of me that needs to be written first. The story has been sitting in the driver’s seat and I have been idly sitting in the passenger seat beside it, gripping onto the grab handle telling it not to go anywhere yet.

In June, my mentor was Sabrina Orah Mark. When I met with Sabrina I told her I wanted a reading list that focused on the mother-daughter relationship because it was the thing I was most afraid to write about. I didn’t stick to it as closely as I’d intended but just saying that much aloud gave my work more focused energy. That same story I’d been avoiding was sitting with its foot over the gas, ready to accelerate, and Sabrina helped me understand how crucial I was as the co-pilot. I wasn’t just along for the ride. I had to give the story directions, tell it which way to go. When to stop, when to slow down.

I’ve been sitting in my metaphorical car with this story, letting it hold me in captivity for years. But I’m the one holding onto the key. My creative freedom is just a matter of saying, let’s go. Let’s go some place new. And yes, new can be scary but it is also oh so exciting. It’s rarely what is expected. For me, to drive is to move forward is to write. I’m still in the first act and there’s so much discovery. I’m finding new roads to take. I’m basically learning off and on the page how not knowing is a thing to strive for. How embracing what I don’t know now and what I didn’t know then is the key to ignition.

In ten days I’ll be driving back to Vermont for another residency. This term I’ll be studying with Garrard Conley whose use of detail and skillful scene building are wildly inspiring. He gave a lecture back in June that offered approaches so outside-the-box and generative, and I hope that our term together is nothing shy of such.

I read a good amount of fiction this second half of the year (for my being a non-fiction student) and it took me much farther than I thought it could. Now every time I open up the glove compartment to look for a map, I find a new essay pouring out instead.

Needless to say, I still have no idea where I’m going and it’s never felt so right.