At the ass end of a shit year, I started thinking about my neglected blog, my neglected website, my neglected writing, my neglected career. I’m wondering if neglect is the wrong word. Sure, I may have written and published very little this year, but… I pause after writing that sentence. I wrote a goddamn masters thesis. I wrote a very long project proposal for my masters certification in military families. I started dozens of short, wandering essays all summer long that I have since abandoned. I started recording what I was reading in June after I turned in my MFA thesis. Sure, I read quite a bit that first half, but I didn’t make record of it. I’ve decided at least to make an accounting of what I read here. Will I wait another year before I’m back here with another list? Maybe. Maybe not.

June 2020

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Fabrications: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning by Susan Neville

July 2020

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado

My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir by Brian Turner

Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning by Elliot Ackerman

A Girl Goes Into the Forest: Stories by Peg Alford Pursell

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

August 2020

Wow, No Thank You.: Essays by Samantha Irby

What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forche

Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

Weather by Jenny Offill

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones

Axiomatic by MariaTumarkin

Bluebird, Bluebird (A Highway 59 Novel, 1) by Attica Locke

The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story by David Crow

Jillian in the Borderlands by Beth Alvarado

The Dark Lands by John Fram

Heaven, My Home ((A Highway 59 Novel, 2) by Attica Locke

September 2020

Drifts: A Novel by Kate Zambreno

Constellations: Reflections from a Life by Sinead Gleeson

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino

In the Lateness of the World: Poems by Caroline Forche

The Crying Book by Heather Cristle

Deaf Republic: Poems by Ilya Kaminsky

Erosion: Essays on Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams

October 2020

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing

Obit: Poems by Victoria Chang

Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey by Kathleen Rooney

The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing by Betsy Bonner

November 2020

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror By W. Scott Poole

Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncovering the Cost of Saving a Life by Katherine E. Standefer

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn 

F*ckface and Other Stories by Leah Hampton

December 2020

Be Holding: A Poem by Ross Gay

Make it Scream, Make it Burn: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence by Judith Butler

The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir by Michele Harper

Anything Will be Easy After This by Bethany Maile

This summer will take me to Texas and Oklahoma where I will research my family and all of the places they have lived in the last 150 years. Most of those years were spent on the land as tenant farmers. My great-grandmother, grew up all over Central Texas and the Texas South Plains. She died in Marlow, Oklahoma, where she is buried and no one visits her. I wonder what type of silk flowers I should get at the nearby Walmart or Dollar Tree. If there is something better I can bring her after so many years of neglect.

I do not have any pictures of her. No stories, save a few, and those have been proven faulty or downright wrong thanks to what little documentation I have of her: census records, marriages licenses, and birth and death certificates. If not for the children she had, I would know even less.

So, this woman I’ve never seen is taking me to Oklahoma, a state I’ve never much cottoned to. What’s more: I didn’t know what my grandfather, her son, looked like until I was in my twenties. I once wrote a poem inspired by a picture of him eating a melon. It was one of the first things I had published: “Paternal Grandfather” (along with another poem “Turbulent Earth”) in Chagrin River Review.

it has been a while since I’ve bothered to “blog.” This will be less a space for creation and more an accounting of how that work gets done. Research trips. Accountability. Maybe weekly. Maybe a few times a month. Maybe less. You are welcome here. I appreciate you.