I have a roundup of everything I published in 2023 below, but first a reminder that I’m teaching an online, asynchronous, and awesome class on spiritual nonfiction, starting January 29.
And I want to brag about a couple of students who took the class and have recently published essays they worked on in it.
When Abigail Myers (a two-time Jeopardy! champion, by the way) took the class, she worked on an essay called “The Sower” that braided multiple narratives and themes: fear of death, home-making, and tending to other living creatures, including one’s children. All of this was held together by Abigail’s reading of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, “The Sower.” I saw Abigail work through multiple drafts of the essay, and I’m really impressed by the final result, which was just published in Willows Wept Review (jump to p. 29). Abigail has publushed a ton of things across genres this year. See more at her website.
I also saw Christine Eberle work through multiple drafts of an essay on the four women mentioned in the genealogy that begins Matthew’s gospel: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. There was much to be said about these women, whom most Catholics know little about. The published version of “This Advent, Let’s Pray With Our Foremothers in the Faith,” which appeared at Busted Halo, wastes no words in telling their stories and showing what each one can represent for Catholics today. You might also check out Christine’s memoir essay about Christmas dishes (the kind you eat off) published recently on the North American Jesuits’ website.
I recall how these essays developed in response not just to my comments but also those of the other writers taking the class. A big benefit of a class like this is the literary community it fosters: We develop a shared vocabulary based on the class lessons, but each writer, as a reader, also brings their own perspective to bear on each other’s drafts.
If you want in on this, find more info and sign up here.
I published 13 essays in 2023. That’s about what I seem to be good for, year in and year out. (My full archive of published essays, 2004 to present, is here.) The pieces numbered below address a few common themes: college learning (1, 2, 5, 9), knowledge (2, 3, 8), work (4, 6, 9, 10, 13), colleges’ missions (7, 10), aesthetics (8, 12), and our dumb culture war (3, 5, 13).
One of the essays doesn’t fit into any of these categories: “The Velvet Rut” is a personal narrative about the year I spent between finishing graduate school and starting a full-time, tenure-track job teaching theology at a small college in Pennsylvania. (And so I guess #11 is linked to #4.) In part because “The Velvet Rut” is so unlike what I typically write, it’s probably my favorite of these essays.
If you have time before the new year roars to life, perhaps you’ll read some of them:
The Key to Success in College Is So Simple It’s Almost Never Mentioned, New York Times, January 3, 2023. That key to success? Wanting to learn. That’s it. This piece led me right into writing #3. Read both, and you’ll see why.
What ChatGPT Can’t Teach My Writing Students, The Atlantic, February 9, 2023. Love. It can’t teach them to love. (That’s not really the answer — or is it??)
Our Big Problem Is Not Misinformation; It’s Knowingness, Psyche, March 27, 2023. But you already knew that, right?
It’s Not How You Play the Game, Notre Dame Magazine, Spring 2023. This one is about being a professor and a D&D dungeon master, which are similar roles in some key ways. In the bigger picture, this is an essay about quitting.
College Students Have Something to Say. It’s Just Not What You’d Expect, New York Times, April 7, 2023. This was my deep dive into college newspaper op-ed sections. I had so much fun working on it.
Making a Living Is More than Work (review of Henry at Work by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle), The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2023. I thought this book on Thoreau & work would be really good; it wasn’t. I tried in the essay to suggest what Thoreau, despite these authors, does have to tell us about work.
Catholic Colleges: Do Less if You Want to Save Your Religious Mission, America, July 19, 2023. A college in financial trouble is not likely to get out of it by trying to do all sorts of new things it has never done, doesn’t know how to do, and that conflict with its central mission. I don’t know, maybe they should do what they’re actually good at. See also #10.
Letter of Recommendation: Almanacs, New York Times Magazine, August 27, 2023. I love the useless facts that fill the World Almanac, but for weird reasons having to do with Immanuel Kant.
College Students: School Is Not Your Job, New York Times, September 4, 2023. Students have been telling me for decades that school is a job. I’ve been trying to tell them — and now you — that it’s something different. I also recorded a TikTok video to promote this one. (Almost no one watched it, but everyone who did wrote a negative comment.)
Do One Thing: Academic Vocation in the Age of Burnout, Intersections, Fall 2023. When a college tries to save its mission by doing more and more, that “more and more” ultimately falls on faculty and staff shoulders, increasing their risk of burnout, which in turn makes it harder for them to accomplish the mission the college was trying to save.
The Velvet Rut, Notre Dame Magazine, Autumn 2023. Several powerful forces coalesced on the night of the Neko Case concert. The essay is accompanied by two Steve Keene paintings you won’t see anywhere else.
Cartography of Abandonment (review of Julian Montague’s The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America and his artwork), Commonweal, November 2023. This was also a lot of fun to work on; I found Montague’s graphic art, and his book, to be both fun and thought-provoking.
How We Obscure the Common Plight of Workers, The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2023. We do it by distorting concepts like burnout, emotional labor, and the professional-managerial class and making them about identity and privilege. Cf. #9, which is sort of also about how “privilege” discourse makes everyone dumber.
In addition to writing these things (well, publishing them; several were written months or years earlier), I did much more in 2023.
I gave talks at colleges, universities, and conferences on the Atlantic, Pacific, Great Lakes, and Gulf Coasts, as well as on the banks of the Mississippi River and a in few landlocked places. I led an all-day workshop in Geneva. I taught great classes in which students learned a lot and had fun.
I walked in the mountains of Switzerland and Idaho. I visited Florida for the first time. I bicycled more than 3,000 miles, not all at once. I cheered on and fretted over the frustrating professional sports teams from Buffalo, New York. I hung out with my friends. I made a really good steak frites at home once. I was unhappy for much of the summer, because it was very hot the whole time.
I tried on an Italian sport coat that felt like God’s embrace. I didn’t buy it (too expensive), but I found one by the same maker on eBay, much cheaper. I bought it and then wore it every chance I got. I bought an excellent pair of shoes in a thrift store and wore them a lot, too.
I don’t have Spotify, but I can still say for sure what album I listened to the most: The War on Drugs’s Lost in the Dream. It has held the top spot every year since 2015 or 2016, because I listen to it when I work. Second place was probably ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres.
I read (or listened to) more fiction than I had in decades. Lots of John Le Carre (A Perfect Spy is not good — my contrarian take of the year).1 Many campus novels (Stoner and The Secret History were great — an echo of conventional wisdom). I read assorted nonfiction, most recently Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning and Hua Hsu’s Stay True. (Both are recommended.) I went to the opera. I went to the movies.
I saw a rabbit in the unlikely habitat of the landscaping outside DFW airport terminal A. I took this as a token of tremendous good fortune for the trip ahead of me. I wondered how a rabbit would even get there, since it’s concrete and asphalt for at least a mile in every direction. I learned that rabbits are not, contrary to my longstanding belief, rodents.
I did other things, too. This is not an exhaustive list.
In 2024, I’ll try to do about the same. I don’t have anything cued up for publication right now, so I had better get to work if I’m going to hit my usual number of annual essays. Happy New Year.
The problem is, when you make your protagonist a bad writer trying to settle scores, and much of your novel consists of his writing, then all you have done is written a bad book of your own. I’ve seen people say A Perfect Spy is Le Carre’s Freudian killing-the-father book. I think he’s actually killing his fellow writers, or possibly himself as a writer, just as he did in The Honourable Schoolboy, which is even worse. Tinker Tailor, Smiley’s People, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — the other of his books I read — are much better, because the protagonists are spies who spy, not spies who write.