process notes | #9: end of year
sharing new fiction, reading recs
Hello creative friends,
I sometimes struggle with how to begin these letters, so I think I’ll keep it simple and say: it’s so nice to get to write to you again.
December at my corporate job is performance review season, a hectic scramble to get the last design outputs to the software engineers before everyone decamps for holiday PTO. December on the Internet is gift-guide season, best of 2024 season, Spotify Wrapped season. Everywhere I look, I’m asked to either quantify my outputs or my inputs, what I produced or what I consumed.
What does a year-end reflection look like that has nothing to do with quantification? It might be about how this year felt. What did I spend time thinking about and did that feel aligned with what I want to be working towards in my creative practice? What practices felt right and what felt like trying to squeeze water from a stone? What ideas or places or conversations did I find inspiring and what did they inspire me to create? From all of this I’ll try to distill it down into some practices to carry forward in 2025, some ideas to keep exploring, and some detritus to leave behind.
Sharing: Two published stories
Two of my stories were published online last month and I’m very excited to share them with you.
* Creative Work in Glass Mountain: A story about a woman who tries to correct an imbalance in her marriage. This story came out of a couple really good writing exercises (courtesy of the writing teacher Jeannine Ouellette) and some questions I’ve had for a long time about what it means to label certain kinds of work as more creative or intellectual than others. Were I to write this story again, I might approach some of those questions differently than I did here, but I think that’s okay—a sign of growth and continued thinking.
* What I Find in My Mother’s House After She Dies in Milk Candy Review. The title is the plot. One of my favorite possessions is a small, book-shaped locket, containing portraits of my grandparents when they were newly married. I love this locket and the feeling of family history and connection it brings me. I decided to start writing, however, from the opposite premise: what if you came across this locket and the book was empty, with no photos or family history? That became the first line, though the story took a direction of its own as I wrote.
The editor of Milk Candy Review asked me a couple questions about the story’s characters. On my website, I reflected on the revision process (4 drafts!) and what helped this piece snap into its final form.
Reading: Non-fiction
A few newsletters ago I mentioned that I had read some books about trees and the destructive history of logging and forestry. I’m back at it again with The Mushroom at the End of the World by the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book is a study of the matsutake mushroom, which grows in the lodgepole pine forests of Oregon’s eastern Cascades—what remains from the heydays of Oregon timber.
Unexpectedly, but generatively, it dovetailed with another book I read this month, Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford—which shows how machine learning technology is a new form of destructive logging. The companies behind AI technologies destroy natural ecosystems in a race to source raw materials to power their servers, and turn the Internet commons into anonymized content for a proprietary training model.
Both have given me a lot to chew on. While I would only recommend The Mushroom at the End of the World if you have a high tolerance/patience for academic theory, Atlas of AI is excellent. It provided me with the intellectual scaffolding to better evaluate and respond to the AI hype so rampant in the tech industry where I work.
Poetry corner
‘Letters in Winter,’ by Maya C. Popa, is one of my favorite poems for December—it so perfectly evokes the stark, lonely ache at the heart of winter.
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Hope you’re well this holiday season,
Catherine