Hey! You should enter my giveaway for one of three paperback copies of Jordy Rosenberg’s remarkable book Confessions of the Fox! It is a book you might like if: 1. you love footnotes 2. you love books about academic research (which are not at all romantic about academia) 3. you like very sexy sex in your queer literature.

I am deeply in love with the whole concept of resolutions while also acknowledging that they are not in any way beneficial for the way my brain works.

Making a nice big list of unachievable resolutions is for me what buying a Powerball ticket is for a lot of people: a pitch for how great life could be, if it were only completely different in every material way from how it is now. I typically slide from “it would be nice to make a monthly budget” to “everything about me is trash and I need to renovate my entire personality if I want to continue participating in society” in less time than it takes to find a clean page in my notebook.

So this is not a newsletter about resolutions or goals, although I do have those. (I may or may not write them down in a secret place, where my failure will be known to only myself and god.)

This is a newsletter about me spending the week of Christmas absolutely mainlining Greedy Peasant videos, most especially the ones about doing experiments with fabric textures. What does it look like if we smock this fabric? What if we iron trash bags together and sew that into a dress? What if lots of tassels, or buttons, or beads? For a specific example, here he is making halos with flowers vs. ruffles vs. fringe (so liquid! so shimmery!) vs. stalks of wheat. What does it mean to see the dramatic silhouette possibilities in every questionable bit of clothing from a vintage store?

2025 has been a year heavy on “grinding it out” and light on “exploration of whimsy.” And while I expect 2026 to be filled with hard work, I would like to get my wonder-noticing muscles back into shape. I want to be joyously intrigued by the potential of beauty and the minutiae of how it is achieved.

I want to listen to five different people sing the same aria from Il Trovatore and think about what each of them did differently. I want to collect a bunch of seeds and compound flowers from the Middlesex Fells and draw them; I want to do tiny salt-textured watercolors of different gravestones at Mount Auburn. I want to sculpt a giant papier-mâché goblin puppet and make it dance salsa. I want to start a foolishly complicated tessellating botanical pieced quilt which I do not finish for five years. I want to grow willow stems in a big pot and make myself a basket. I want to check out random books from the library and read them slowly on a variety of park benches and coffeeshop patios while admiring the sunlight on the asphalt. I want to see a whale again.

I also want to be a good citizen who is well-informed about what’s happening in my city, state, and country (and the historical context which set the stage for those events,) reliable in my commitments to my community, and ready to act on new information. Honestly speaking: getting to a place where I have time, energy, and hope in my soul for spontaneous joy while also fulfilling my responsibilities — as a friend, as a writer, as an employee, as a neighbor, as a volunteer, as a politically engaged human in a politically risky time — feels pretty impossible right now.

This is not a newsletter about planning, but about letting myself hold the idea that good things may be possible even if I can’t wrap my head around how to make them happen just yet. I am choosing to believe it is okay to believe that I will be capable of figuring things out later, and it is okay to do what I am doing right this moment (finishing a book and starting another.)

It is my profoundest hope that all reading give themselves at least so much grace to figure out what we’re doing in 2026, and I wish all of us delight, discovery, and honorable effort in the upcoming year.

Sharon

P.S. What are the weird projects you are dreaming about? What materials would you like to experiment with, either in craft or research?