A Review, A Preview
2025 has stepped through the door. The gregorian calendar that governs the collective movement of the world (presently) offers its own openings to sense into the arrivals of personal time—time notched by the soul on its path. And, it must be said that other ways of understanding time too have adapted this calendar to their own purposes: for example, in the Dagara cosmology as interpreted by Dr. Malidoma Some, 2025 is a Fire year.
Usually, I like doing a year-end reflection—in December, I found myself going into hibernation over several days to give my mind a chance to rest. It had been a year not only where proliferant media technologies confronted us in real time with the gaping wound in the soul of humanity that can wreak, withstand, and enable horrific oppression.
At a personal level, I was settling into a new rhythm, new position, new city, new home, new collegial and social environment. Besides, those ones threw two curveballs in my direction—but this is not unexpected by now.
Moreover, after returning from India in the summer, and then a fortuitous Oregon workshop where I was witnessed and held as I processed pain that was both recent and accumulative, I found myself facing a small part within that did not quite believe in what I held up as my values and vision. Was I willing to commit myself fully; was I willing to erase the small protective distance I realized I had maintained between myself and the latter? I took the leap. Still, there was a cost to the year. It was as if I had lost a spark. The hibernation helped. And, now, I can look back and retrieve, so as to move forward. So then.
This past year, Wild Fin came out (and I got to design its front cover). A couple of my favorite poetry events included the reading/conversation for Women’s History Month hosted by the Women’s Spirituality Program at CIIS and the conversation with Sophia Naz for The Bangalore Review (which was a lead-up to our poetry reading together at SFPL). I enjoyed reading with my SB-Goleta colleagues at a few different events, and got to appear on TV Santa Barbara’s Creative Community show. Then there were the readings I did in India. Each of these was a pleasure (whether there were more or fewer people in the audience).
Sophia Naz, Vivek Narayanan, and I proposed a panel for AWP titled “Rewilding Mythopoetics: South Asia and Beyond” which was not accepted—I hope we can present this panel elsewhere.
I finished revising and sent off the manuscript based on my dissertation to the publisher for peer review. I also presented on alternatives to posthumanism and building decolonial and indigenous epistemologies at a Pacifica Graduate Institute conference after my attempts to interrupt a top-down process and start an institution-wide dialogue about AI did not take off.
I am very proud of the work I have been doing within the program where I teach—both in terms of teaching and curricula, and revisioning the direction of the program. When work is intrinsically tied to purpose—and you understand that letting yourself be transformed is part of the work—the rewards are clear.
Finally, I’m in the midst of a visa process again—fingers crossed, this will be the last time I would need to go through this. This is not, in many ways, a fun process for me—but, bureaucratese aside, it has been tremendous and meaningful to receive encouragement from my colleagues who have written (and will hopefully re-extend) their letters in support of the visa.
Reads for Pleasure
A fellow writer on X asked what we read in 2024. While I don’t keep track of or could list the scholarly/other articles and books I read for teaching purposes and when creating syllabi—or even for academic writing—they would run, I suppose, into thousands of pages—thanks to my library histories, here are some of the books I read for pleasure in 2024, in no particular order:
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott
Alchemy of a Blackbird by Claire McMillan
Weyward by Emilia Hart
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries and Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett
An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell
The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, and Lethal White by Robert Galbraith
Ten Thousand Beloved Communities by Kristen Lynn Zimmerman (partial)
The Mimicking of Old Successes by Malka Older
The Alchemy Fire Murder: A Mary Wandwalker Mystery by Susan Rowland
The Bodies in the Library and Murder is a Must by Marty Wingate
The Unkindness of Ravens and Shadow in the Glass by M.E. Hilliard
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I am not going to list movies here, but here are two I watched and liked: Minnal Murali and Shōgun (which is actually a TV series).
Who or what is inspiring and/or keeping you in lightness as you do the work that is yours to do? I realized last year how a tendency towards heaviness sludges and slows me down, and it is in embracing my ‘frivolous’ parts that I become more fully me. (The story of women being called frivolous for so many of their pursuits is an old one and we can retire it now.)
In the year to come, may we know ourselves more. May we all become more of ourselves, so that the memory of the world we are making glides wholly into place. Happy new year, community.