2019 Has Been: A Year in Review

I wasn't entirely sure I would do a 2019 year in review, but here we are.

That's because, despite the fomo of seeing lots of end of the-year-tweet threads and enjoying doing a 2018 year in review, 2019 has been mostly an experience in humility and patience and growth and that's not easily shown.

I had one piece of writing published in 2019 (my essay in DIAGRAM "In the City That You Can See" came out on Dec 31 2018 so I don't think it should count): "The Dinosaurs," an excerpt from my long poem/lyric essay on the American Museum of Natural History, appears in the Mad Science issue of Make Literary Magazine. This is their last print issue before they switch over to online only, which following similar moves by Tin House and The Normal School seems to be a trend. I haven't seen it yet; I'll be back in New York in a few days, where, hopefully, my copy is waiting for me. My piece in Make was solicited by Kathleen Rooney who is a general editor there and I am so grateful for the chance to get some of the AMNH work out in to the world. Another piece from this book was also accepted in 2019 (on New Year's Day!) but it never came out. Fingers crossed it will be in published in 2020—I submitted it in 2017.

I should probably also count this review Matthew Vollmer's Permanenet Exhibit I published in The Rupture, the deep background about which I went into here on Misreader.

Another big announcement in 2019 was that I became a full editor at Gigantic Sequins. I've been with GS for years (I started reading for them in 2012) and it's really awesome that Kimberley Ann Southwick and Zach Yontz trust me with this role. Send me something to read—we're open now until January 16.

Also in 2019, I spent the entire month of November revising the AMNH manuscript. It had been thoroughly rejected in 2018, but I sent it to a few more places in 2019 promising myself that if none of these places liked it I would take a long look at the MS and do a gut revision. That's what happened. I summed up my process during that experience with this tweet/meme:

I cut over 100 pages.

Here on Misreader, I had a few posts that got some traction and I achieved my increased posting frequency goal. That was largely due to the monthly Card-a-Month installments. I wrote a bit about my reservations/final thoughts about that project last month.

I was proud of the post I did on the relation of the controversial stellar observatory being built on Mauna Kea in Hawaiʻi to the dangerous building projects on and around the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif. Also, the Bloomsday post with the James Joyce playing cards was fun. I didn't really accomplish what I wanted to do with the public domain project, with only The Pigeons post to show for it. This list of things to look out for at your first AWP went semi-viral, and so did my post on New Horizons lack of a statement from humanity similar to the Voyager Golden Record.

I also managed to keep up with syncing the Misreader mirror site on Medium. Usually I was updating there about a week or two after the initial post here, but maybe I should switch to something more simultaneous moving forward.

As I began to write this post, a pop-up message from my host site informed me that they are ending support for their old blog service in favor of a new one. Not sure what this means for Misreader, but expect things to begin looking differently around here in 2020. I hope it means faster load times, because that has sucked. Whatever happens, please come back and continue to get it wrong with me.