Year in Review 2021 📆
Oh my dears!
The world so changed! Fewer things of note happened this year that might have: I threw fewer parties, attended fewer conferences, gave no public readings, but for all that lack, it was still an eventful one, full of growth, mostly on behalf of the wee Willetts, and of grace. I met inspiring students, welcomed new colleagues, and said goodbye to old ones. Here are some bits I'd like not to mislay.
⚾ This year, I took the children to their first baseball game
and to their first concert (TobyMac at Evergreen State Fair).
✍🏼 I began teaching in the SPU MFA program in Creative Writing! It is such a constant joy to work with and to get to know these talented writers.
In the Evangelical culture world, this was when the Mars Hill Podcast was coming out--a brilliantly-done bit of media, though tough for me to listen to sometimes--and when The Chosen really took off, a show that left me in tears of gratitude more or less every episode.
Sebastian’s first soccer camp happened in Summer. It wasn't a complete success, but I foresee many more of these in our future.
We got new bikes for the kids! Now we have two little riders, even if the smaller of the two still insists on my running alongside him just in case. 🚲
In 2021, I listened to these records the most.
When my niece Hannah got married here in WA!
Early in the year, my pre-tenure file at SPU was completed. That was a whole ordeal which I may tell you more about sometime: it was fun to assemble, but thinking through the feedback dominated the second half of my year.
My wife, Amber, hardly lets little things like theater closures or lacks of live audiences slow her down. This year she made all those dances for SPU--Dance Monkey and Restless-- then performed for Lucca's school, and then choreographed her first music video (to be released early 2022).
We got vaccinated. 💉 Mine was a weirdly fun experience at the Microsoft campus, which brought me back to my early days in Seattle, when I worked there all the time.
I went to Boston for the first time in over a decade (it’s exactly the same, whereas Seattle, over the same time-span, is all but unrecognizable).
On the publications front, the most read/shared things I wrote were these: my miracles essay over at Mockingbird, my being nice to students essay at Chronicle of Higher Education, and my Future of English departments essay at Christianity and Literature as well as these two poems: See, my Hands and Dice will Land.
Significantly, painfully, this was when there was all that hullabaloo over at SPU over mission.
We flew down to Colorado and Arizona to see grandparents, siblings, pools, and mountains.
It was the first time I’ve built out a garage gym. 🏋🏼♂️ COVID kept not going away and I despaired of ever returning to the gym, which I have only done haltingly since the kids were born. But now—no excuses! It’s better than I thought it would be, walking right outside and getting to work. It’s stupid, but I love my barbell.
🥂 We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary exactly as we hoped to, with poems and friends and new champagne flutes.
We had Thanksgiving at Camp Casey on Whidbey Island, one of my favorite places in the whole world.
Finally, it’s the year Festus came out. I spent a fair bit of the last four years thinking about and working on it, so this is the fruit of long germination and to have it at last in hand was an exclamation point, a cascade of fireworks right at the end of the year.
As those poets, the Counting Crows, have it, "maybe this year will be better than the last..." Not too high a bar, eh?
Happy 2022!
