Goodbye 2024, Hello 2025...

Some things I did—and didn't—do. And some changes to next year's Substack!

Happy (almost) New Year! I’ve been reading all the year-end reflections and coverage of the MAGA-Musk meltdown in my inbox and marveling at y’alls productivity. Speaking for myself, I love to slow down and do almost nothing the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I relish the languor of long days inside with just a brief interlude of a walk outside, those days where the meals blend together and many board and card games are played and the children destroy the living room by opening one gift after another, playing with it for ten minutes, and then leaving all the tiny pieces underfoot. I’ve also been watching way too much TV and reading—the new issue of the New York Review of Books is fantastic—and yes, also doing some reflecting. Now, at last, I’m starting to feel antsy to get back to it.

I have written critically of the culture of productivity that has us all feeling we have to produce all the time, and yet I’ve loved reading about everyone’s accomplishments: have been reading these notes and posts gladly, since accomplishing ANYTHING is hard these days. And so I want to reflect briefly on some things I did manage to do this year, as well as those I did NOT do, to remind us all of the not doing that is part of trying to make things. And then, last but not least: In 2025, after much reflection, and because I want to do more of them, I’m going to start making most of the posts about writing and craft available only to those who are paying for subscriptions—I’ve spent the past few months experimenting and look forward to writing this in a more systematic way next year. Please let me know if you can’t afford a subscription but want to read anyway. (I tell my students not to write for free, and so I need to stand by that in my own life too...) I’ll send another post about that this week!

Looking back at 2024

Perhaps the thing I’m most proud of this year: almost five years after I took over the editorship of The Yale Review, we won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in the category of Literature, Science and Politics from the American Society of Magazine Editors. We also surpassed 500,000 visitors to the website. All this seemed unthinkable when I took over the magazine in late 2019, when readership was at an all-time low and the magazine had lost some of its sheen and prestige, mainly because it hadn’t really made the transition to the digital era. Making a magazine is a joint project, and although in the early days I did a little of everything—including writing our social media and carrying boxes of issues here, there, and everywhere—today the Review’s excellence is largely due to our crack team of editors and student workers, and, of course, to the writers we publish, who work very hard with us on their pieces, undergoing, often, multiple rounds of edits.

The winter issue of The Yale Review, in festive red. This may be my favorite issue yet.

I’m going to be talking more here about editing in the coming months and can’t wait to start doing some live chats and, I hope, workshops via Zoom. I’ve been collecting your questions—including some about weaving research into narrative, for example— and hope you’ll post some more today. I’m also going to share a series of craft talks and prompts about writing poetry that I’m excited for.

The other things I managed to get done this year:

1. I sold my new memoir, tentatively called Acquiescence, which is about time, maturity, sexual assault, and motherhood—I hope to have a full draft in June.

2. I am finalizing, this week, a new anthology of poetry of illness, tentatively called A Story of the Body: Poetry of Illness and Healing. It’s been so interesting to immerse myself in the ways we make lyrics out of illness, the body’s fragility, and death. More on that soon

3. I wrote a piece for the Atlantic about hypochondria’s disappearance from the DSM at the very moment that health anxiety is on the rise.

4. I started this Substack, which has been a joy to play around with!

5. I also started strength training, which has both helped my health more than I ever thought it would (for those of you with mild POTS: it’s been transformative for me…) and had the added benefit of making me feel stronger than I have in a decade, and a bit as though I can forestall time. (I can’t, but it’s nice to feel you can.)

6. I spent a lot of lazy time with my kids and also helping my kids’ school while on sabbatical.

Now, how about all those things I didn’t do?

1. Well, I’d hoped to be a bit further in my book.

2. I had hoped also to have finished a magazine about Long Covid that is half-written (and has been for a year).

3. I did not go to Aspen Ideas: Health to moderate a panel because a piece of the plane I was on fell off on takeoff. (How concerning is this? So many planes seem to be falling apart midair.) But: I also did not end up in a plane crash, thank god.

4. And much more….

What about you? What do you want to do—and not do—in the new year? Or, how can you make room for the not doing that is generative and the not-doing that is a product of living a real life (with actual responsibilities to others) without feeling overwhelm about that not-doing?

Finally, a moment of micro-managing on the part of my older son that made me laugh in recognition; here is an editor in the making. He left a note on his stocking because he was really worried that Santa would give his brother the things that he himself wanted:

Happy New Year, and thanks for being here — it’s been a joy to find a space that reminds me of the camaraderie of the early days of social media. And now I must go, because my younger son had declared that I am his “emeny” for trying to write instead of playing with him.

xoxo
Meghan