Volume 3, No. 51: The Best of 2023 (Everything Else)

Greetings book and treat people! Today’s newsletter is the last of 2023. Thank you, as always, for being here with me this year. Thank you for reveling in queer lit with me, loudly cheering on my rambles, sending me notes of encouragement, and generally being so bookishly wonderful. It’s a pleasure to write to you each week.

I also want to thank everyone who participated in Queer Your Year, whether you did one prompt or all 48. It was a blast for me, and I hope it was a blast for you, too. I’ll be drawing the winners of the last raffle on Monday, so don’t forget to submit your game cards. I am hosting the challenge again in 2024, with some changes that will make it more fun (for everyone) and less work (for me). I’ll obviously still mention it here, but Queer Your Year 2024 will primarily be on Instagram. I announced it yesterday, and you can read all about it here. You can also check out the Storygraph challenge, and come talk queer lit with us in the Queer Your Year discord!

If you want to support me and my work, becoming a paying subscriber is the best way to do so. I have so many exciting plans for 2024. Paid subscriptions are what make all those plans possible. You can also send me a tip or a treat, if you are so inclined.

If you’re moved to share a moment from your year, or a passage from a book you’ve read that has stayed with you, the comments are open.

---

12 Moments from 2023

It’s been a hard year. It’s been a beautiful year. These days my heart is mostly broken and my body is mostly tired and I am full of so much. Gratitude for my home, my doggo love, my people. Rage at my government and its unending violences. Grief for Palestine and so many other places around the world. Deep joy for winter. Relief for the ending of this year; curiosity and fear about the new one. Determination to root myself more truly and beautifully and definitively, here.

I can’t sum up a year of reading and living, and I don’t want to, anyway. So here are twelve moments from 2023. One remembered moment from each month. They aren’t the best or biggest or most important things. They are simply twelve moments I remember. Moments of beauty, connection, surprise, delight. I’ve paired each one with a quote from a book I loved that I read during that month.

In these last weeks of December, in the welcoming darkness and the gently returning light, my wish for us all is that our days be filled with moments—tiny cascades of hereness and nowness and rootedness.

January: A moment of connection

I went to a cold, bright New Years Day bonfire at my best friend’s homestead.

To that end I would like to offer a working definition of grief, which in all likelihood I’ve cribbed from someone else, and to whom, wherever you are, I offer a hearty thanks: grief is the metabolization of change. Perhaps it’s for this reason that the bodies of the grieving so often actually transform in the process of grieving—losing or gaining weight, suddenly wrinkling or taking on a tremor, water running from the eyes, hair going gray or white, memory different, dying. It is an emotional and bodily process that calls to question the ridiculous notion that ever the two are not one. This alert to the body and mind being one and the same (which is also called the heart) is one of the wisdoms the griever offers us, though it is ancillary to, or a subsidiary of, what perhaps is the first wisdom of grief, the one they bring back to us like fire, like the tablets: everything is connected.

from Inciting Joy by Ross Gay

February: A moment of wonder

My Christmas Cactus, a cutting my mom gave me from a plant my grandfather tended for years, bloomed.

A long time ago, Leo asked him how queerness propagates, and this is Arrigo’s answer: aesthetically. Our thriving produces beauty and that beauty signals to others that there is life in this way of being. That’s how we persist across generations, by inspiring others into self-honesty. So, it’s important to show Earth that we’re alive: look, it can be done, we got here, we are thriving, we love you, hello. Whatever struggles you’re facing on Earth, look up. Behold.

from Uranians by Theodore McCombs

March: A moment of stillness

There was a huge and beautiful blizzard.

Tomorrow, who knows? Forgive me.

I cannot find the poem in all of this, but I can’t bear to let it go

unspoken. I want to make this violence a stranger in my mouth.

I want to make it something worth remembering.

from Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse

April: A moment of joy

Nessa and I took a walk in the woods. It was full of rushing water and spring green.

We treat the elegy as a pathological mode, the mourner incapable of resolving loss. But what if the point of grief is not its resolution but the extension of memory, the insistence that the listener, too, carry our history into the future?

from West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal

May: A moment of sweetness

I baked a cake I had never baked before for a dear one’s birthday: lemon and raspberry stripe cake.

One morning I came down the hill toward the square at dawn to catch my ride to the District. The birds suddenly cut loose all around me in the unbelievable sweet warm air. I had never heard anything so beautiful and unexpected before. I felt shaken by the waves of song. For the first time in my life, I had an insight into what literary poetry could be. I could use words to recreate that feeling, rather than to create a dream, which was what so much of my writing had been before.

from Zami by Audre Lorde

June: A moment of ritual

A friend and I shared morning tea by the river.

It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

July: A moment of abundance

On a misty, rainy morning, my family and I picked 20 cups of blueberries.

We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can’t afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don’t, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured. When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living.

from Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang

August: A moment of delight

I visited my new library for the first time. There was much dancing and exclaiming.

& what is care but this: to hold

that which comes too soon to harm

& set it on a safer path.

To say I’m sorry, simply—

to do this, & not dance.

from Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley

September: A moment of home

Every morning I swam in my beloved lake.

I am not a girl in that moment, or a boy, but a person-shaped beam of light, and we see each other as we are, as energy that has willed itself into these bodies because the desire to dance is the first kind of longing.

from The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

October: A moment of gratitude

I took my last swim of the season in my beloved river, surrounded by orange and golden leaves.

Solidarity is not nothing. It is a labor—like building a person, a love, a body of knowledge. And that labor, its peopled dailiness, has a tangible, vibrating effect in the world, radiating liveliness like a furnace throws off heat in the cold. And the art that I truly love, the art that has saved me, never made me just feel represented. It did not speak to my vanity, my desperation to be seen positively at any cost. It made me feel—solid. It told me I was minor, and showed me my debts. It held me together. And a little like my mom, who went on to have the kid that white woman once wanted to kill: it gave me life. It brought me here. Hi.

from How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

November: A moment of awe

I walked on the ridge in the incandescent November light while Nessa ran through a tunnel of golden grass.

Tiny Journalist Blues

Nothing to give you
that you would want.

Nothing big enough
but freedom

from The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye

December: A moment of protest

I marched with hundreds of others through downtown Northhampton to demand a permanent ceasefire and a free Palestine.

As a Palestinian, I have been brought up on stories and storytelling. It's both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to yourself—stories are meant to be told and retold. If I kept a story to myself, I would be betraying my legacy, my mother, my grandmother, and my homeland.

From ‘Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass’ by Refaat Alareer in Light in Gaza edited by Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze, & Jehad Abusalim

Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 6th.

---

I’ll be back in your inboxes on January 10th. Until then, I’m wishing you all warmth, light, and fuel in the December darkness.