New Havens

Today is the last day of 2023, tomorrow is the first of 2024, and though there will be very little difference in the world once the clock hits midnight, I love the potential in this moment. It’s an opportunity to reflect, to change, to do better for ourselves and each other.

Starting an old-school blog in the face of climate disaster and catastrophic wars isn’t going to change the world. But it’s a way for me to reflect, meditate, and potentially connect with other writers, artists, teachers, and dreamers in the new year—without cluttering up your inbox.

In many ways, I feel like I’m still living in the world of lockdown: isolated and anxious. In 2019, just before the pandemic took over everyone’s lives, my family and I moved to a new town so I could start a tenure-track teaching job, a thing I had once seen as the end-goal, but had begun to understand as a bit of a trap. Academic institutions, like any institutions, cannot love you back. And struggling institutions tend to inspire panicked and myopic activity—masquerading as “problem-solving”, i.e. lots of paperwork and committee formation—rather than the kind of nurturing environment necessary for both good teaching and artistic productivity. I knew what I was getting into, and had a sense of dread about it from the start, and yet I held onto a flicker of hope that I would find my community at work and in my new town.

The pandemic almost immediately shut down that possibility. Except when it came to my classrooms, even on Zoom. Each semester since, I have been amazed at how each class becomes its own distinctive ecosystem, one I always hope will be a kind of haven from the storms of the world. A haven, not an isolationist bubble. During one semester after online learning ended but Covid protocols were still in place, a mind-bendingly talented student asked me, “What is the point of making art though, when the world is on fire?” The answer to me felt both complicated and simple: because you need to make it, and we need to read it.

Yesterday, my aunt and I were talking about this over Zoom. She lives in London and had just seen Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy. I have recently finished Hilary Mantel’s glorious The Mirror and the Light. My aunt is a musician, and like my student, she and I have found ourselves questioning what our own projects are for in the face of global disasters. Abramović and Mantel served as reminders. For both of us, interacting with these artists and their art felt transformative—not an escape from the realities of ongoing human atrocities, but a physical and psychic jolt of something larger than ourselves. We need these jolts for the connections they provide to ourselves and the beautiful, mysterious, fragile world we live in.

I have not been able to make or interact with as much art in 2023 as I would like to. That is a regret but also a hope for the new year: to put the act of making first. Not just the act of making art, but of making connections. Building community in whatever ways possible.

Here’s to finding and creating new havens for yourself and others in 2024 and beyond.