2022 Year in Review

1) I published a book! Dispatches from Frontier Schools came out in August, and it has been a wonderful and anxiety-producing experience. I am very proud of the book. I still have to figure out exactly how to promote it and stuff, but we’re moving ahead on poetry time over here. Which is to say, I’m moving very slowly.

I threw myself a book party, and it was everything I dreamed it would be. I read with Margaret Bashaar (best friend/poetry partner in crime) and Nsai Temko, who is my former student! Guests wrote poems in little blue books, decorated their Frontier Schools lanyards with stickers, and earned tickets to win prizes. We ate pizza and two teacher-themed cupcakes I lovingly handmade: vanilla cupcakes with apple pie filling that looked like apples and lemon cakes glazed like looseleaf. I realized embarrassingly late in the planning process that I basically made my book party into a high school lesson in poetry. Whatever! It was great!

2) Our Zoom writing group is going strong, which is such a delight. I’ve had so much fun just writing this past year. I’m kind of itchy to actually go back and polish/finish a lot of what I’ve written. But also I’m increasingly disinterested in hustling for publication. Who even reads literary journals—especially if the piece is by someone they don’t know? And I just will not pay people $3 a submission to read me for a few minutes and reject me. It doesn’t help that I’ve had nothing but rejections for a loooong time. But it’s also that I’m more interested in writing than in publishing. Sharing is good; publishing is a scam. What if we all built a treehouse and traded zines and chaps?

3) My stepmom died (almost simultaneously with my book coming out). It was a lot and very hard.

4) This is the year that time really and fully lost meaning. I absolutely cannot track my day-to-day life anymore. Also the anthropocene has me pretty down, with the seasons coming unmoored. Hard to not look around and feel certain that we are in apocalyptic times. Octavia was right about a lot.

5) READING, presented in reverse order as I scroll backward through my Goodreads. Jeff read The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill aloud before bed, and damn if that woman cannot WRITE. In search of contemporary British poets for a work project, I discovered Selima Hill. I loved her Bunny so much that I had to order a used copy from Britain to replace the library copy I had to return. Browsing Libby lead me to The Year I Stopped Trying by Katie Heaney, which was a fun little YA coming-of-age novel but also a super sobering mirror about what it means to be a try-hard who decides to stop trying. Aviva vs. the Dybbuk by Mari Lowe was another read-aloud-before-bedtime book for me and jeff, and it is so beautiful and heartbreaking—a monumental achievement of craft and humanity. I finally bought and read Be Recorder by Carmen Gimenéz Smith and I just love all her poetry so much. I very slowly made my way through The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories by Jeffrey Ford, another book I loved so much I bought a used copy when my library edition was no longer eligible for another renewal. I read a lot of books about teaching (to hopefully help with book promotion? I dunno what I’m doing over here). My favorite was probably Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes by Kathleen West, which is very much in the book club vein but also whipsmart in its observations about the dynamics between kids and adults and adults and adults in a high school. Honestly, one of its main characters was a different kind of sobering mirror, the social-justice English teacher. I also finally finished reading The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein, and it should be required reading for anyone in the K12 sphere. I finally got around to reading Matrix by Lauren Groff, which I had been saving long enough for it to feel like homework, and I LOVED IT. Give me all the gay nuns! I continued to read YA-novels-in-verse, and the best I read this year—and one of the best overall, in terms of page-turning plot, charming characters, and actual poetry—was Me: Moth by Amber McBride.

5a) Q1 of 2022 was dominated by a work project creating bibliographies of culturally relevant and critically acclaimed books for grades K-6. So I read SO MUCH MIDDLE GRADES FICTION. That project was marked by the backlash to “CRT” and 2020’s racial awakening. I have some thoughts about what it was like to watch a project begun in optimism spiral into fear. Most of those thoughts boil down to: it was hard and painful. Anyway, the best books I read for that project were Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer by Kelly Jones, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia, The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin (a book with frozen urine pucks—swear to god, what a detail), This Was Our Pact by Ryan Andrews (a contemplative and magical graphic novel unlike any other) and A Kind of Paradise by Amy Rebecca Tan.

6) I honestly can’t even remember what Jeff and I watched on the TV, shows or movies. I do remember that I found watching TV difficult. I grew tired of caring about characters, found it hard to invest myself. I wanted dumb and easy. “Attorney Woo” worked very well for that until it was too difficult. I watched a surprising amount of “Merlin.” It cost no emotional dollars and also Anthony Stewart Head is a real one. I finished “Deep Space Nine,” which was great. Jeff and I were suprpremely charmed by “How to Build a Sex Room” on Netflix. “Abbott Elementary” is good, too! See above about time having no meaning. Who knows what happened during the hour+ between the kids going to bed and our going to bed. Shrug.

7) Kind of samesies about music. I listened to a LOT of Flow State while working. Almost all the music I bought myself for Christmas sat neglected on my phone and Bandcamp app. I did really love “Outside Child” by Allison Russell, which I rushed to buy almost immediately upon seeing this performance from last year’s Grammy’s (she plays the clarinet!):

8) I will not say much about my kids this year, or going forward. They are old enough to have their own lives, etc, and they deserve to share—or not—their own stories. But I will say that for the first time in their lives, I feel like I am a good mom. I am available and engaged. There is room in me for active mothering. I fucking love it.

My family in a nutshell.

9) My hip is still a little fucked up, but this year I finally made some progress on fixing it. I continue to do a lot of Barre classes and dang if I am not super strong.

10) All year long, with no dry spells, my work was actually a sustainable career. I made well more money than last year—woot!—and I paid my quarterly taxes like a good citizen. I found work through my usual channels and added a new, big client. Like, I can actually make this freelancer in educational publishing thing work on a long-term basis. I am enormously proud of myself and just so much happier than I was when I was killing myself to teach for a system that did not care about me.

11) I continued to do therapy. I did EMDR for depression and it was super hard and also super helpful. I learned how to let myself rest. I told my therapist that the baby books all tell you that it took you nine months to grow the baby and it will take at least nine months for your body to recover from it. I feel similarly about my step away from teaching. It took me five years inside Propel to wreck myself, and I feel like it might take me the same amount of time to rebuild my heart and mind. That makes me at least halfway through, and it feels like it—it feels good, like I turned a corner this year, and I am enormously grateful. And, again, I am very proud of myself. I am not the same Sarah!

12) I caught COVID, at least. It happened right after Christmas, and it wasn’t so bad. But I can say definitively that the fatigue is no joke. It is only recently that I can work out without being aware of my lungs and throat kind of aching. So six weeks until I felt completely normal, though I was functionally recovered much sooner. The best things to come out of COVID were the realization that I could in fact sit my ass down on the couch for days on end and not feel compelled to “do something”—see? not the same Sarah!—and rediscovering “Bones.” I watched a lot of “Bones” because it was so soothing. And then our kids got into “Bones,” and they were fucking amazed by it. Poor babies did not grow up on cable and syndication and literally do not know anything about the genre tropes and beats of the procedural. So watching them discover the procedural has been a full delight.

the Dreams of Teachers

I am ready to rip open my current poetry manuscript. Finally, I can see how to move from the first draft to the second. It’s not that I haven’t revised individual poems or fiddled with the order at all. It’s just that now I can see individual threads, and I have ideas about which threads to tug on, which threads to add to sew the pieces more tightly together, which threads to clip and which to unravel. This is a long-winded way of saying I’ve been thinking about dreams a lot and also teaching. I’m working to unionize my district while I’m on leave, so that struggle is also forefront in my mind, even though I will not put any of it into the manuscript—a book has to end somewhere, and the end of last year is a clear place to stop.

A few years ago, one of my closest friends/coworkers was telling me about a dream he had where he was eating a delicious meal. He had carefully saved one tiny bit of everything so he could finish his meal with a single, perfect bite. Only in the dream, once he had all his perfect food carefully speared on his fork, I reached over and knocked it all out of his hand. “Boy, that’s messed up. Why would Sarah do that?” he mused upon waking. (Or something like that—it’s been a minute since this breakroom conversation and this dream.)

A large part of recent union organizing conversations has been about what kind of stories we need to tell to the people who are reluctant to sign an interest card. Do they need a story of reassurance, so they can move past their fear of retribution? Or do they need a different story, one that delicately points out that maybe, this whole entire time, they have been working inside a toxic institution and they could in fact use some class solidarity?

America is so doggedly attached to individualism—it is deadly clear. But there’s something especially insidious in a school that has cultivated and encouraged individualism, competition, and hierarchy. Part of union organizing, then, becomes trying to undo that narrative. And that narrative is baked into both the organizational culture and the national culture, making it a double-lift to overcome. As one of my co-organizers said (also one of my dearest friends and coworkers), there are people in the organization who have developed their own toxic coping skills, who have worked very hard to be successful in the context of their classroom. So asking them to step outside of their classroom and find solidarity with people who haven’t been as successful is in a way asking them to acknowledge MANY horrible things they have built walls around for their own sanity and protection.

It is tempting to say you don’t need a union because you have been successful without one. But what if the people around you—among them your students—are suffering because others in the school district have not been so successful. Some people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but they can’t pull a whole school up along with them. Honestly, most of them don’t even try—that’s the deal they make when they commit themselves to individualism, competition, and hierarchy. School becomes a zero-sum game where they will lose the favor they have so carefully curried, or lose the freedom they so need to do their jobs, if they sign on to organize with others into a union. I wonder how to show them that they will gain more than they will lose. But also, maybe they won’t. Maybe the argument is instead something about how the students will gain from a strong, united staff of educators.

We got word back that a few people in my school are not interested in joining our union pursuits because they like things how they are, things are going just fine for them. And boy if that isn’t just a kick in the nuts. How easy it is for people to say things are fine for me and thus I am going to sit on the sidelines while you continue your little struggle. How easy it is in a school to close your door on your peers and compatriots. And god, it hurts me. But it hurts our students more than anyone.

We work in a place where it is normal for others in the district to reach out and dash our dreams and hard work with little thought or care. (Ask me about the curriculum team. Ask me about standards-based grading. Ask me about almost anything I’ve tried to build there.) It is normal for work shared in good faith to be appropriated or taken without thanks or appreciation. It is normal for one person to rise above the others and reap enormous rewards while the rest of a school struggles to make it through the day. So many success stories turned into sound-bites and newsletter fodder, and we, all of us, know they are not representative. We know these individual stories paper over larger problems. Or, more accurately, they are like that silly motivational poster hung at an awkward height on the wall of the senior hallway that hides a very large hole made by a student.

It all feels like my friend’s dream, where I took his perfect bite away just as he arrived where he thought he wanted to be. And for what? Spite? Domination? What was happening in his psyche that even a small thing, though meaningful, is something he is afraid to lose, and to a co-worker at that? There is something afoot in this dream, some truth about where we work, something about how no matter how hard you try to build your perfect kingdom behind your closed classroom door, the rest of the school and its toxicity is still right there outside the door, waiting to barge in and fuck you over.