New Year’s Resolutions (a little end-of-the-year navel-gazing)

Earlier this decade — on December 29, 2000, in fact — the News and Observer in Raleigh featured me in a short article on New Year’s resolutions, surveying several people’s attempts (and sometimes failures) to set fresh goals for themselves each January 1. (I would link, but the article is inaccessible without a fee.) I’d only recently begun setting New Year’s resolutions myself, spurred on by my good friend Mary Ruffin Hanbury who sets an ambitious list of plans each new year, and the article discussed a couple of easy ones I’d made and stuck to the previous year. The first was to learn more about jazz, which I did, thanks particularly to Gary Giddins‘ great book Visions of Jazz and to John Bouille, then a dj and program director at WSHA, Shaw University’s terrific radio station — and that’s a resolution I continued to pursue, buoyed on further by the Ken Burns documentary series a couple of years later. Also, having never hosted a party at my own house, I resolved to get some folks over, and I ultimately mounted four big events, including a Western-themed shin-dig (I still have my cowboy boots!) and a hat party, with people showing up in baseball caps, sombreros, tiaras, antennae, and more.

But the big resolution at stake was for the coming year: My 2001 resolution was devote more time to writing fiction — something I’d long wanted to do but never quite put the effort toward, not as diligently as I would’ve liked at least. To that end, I would be taking a graduate-level fiction class with John Kessel at N.C. State University and trying to produce at least a couple of stories. I ended up writing three that semester, and one of them (astoundingly) was ultimately chosen as a finalist for the first-ever Kurt Vonnegut prize at the North American Review, where it was published in the summer of 2004. Since that semester, I’ve been fortunate to see my short fiction published more regularly (a dozen more stories), and I’ve not only finished both an M.A. at State and an MFA at George Mason University but become a professor of creative writing myself at Mason. And I’ve been grateful as well to see more nonfiction published, writing pretty regularly now not only for Metro Magazine (under whose aegis I publish this blog) but also for The Washington Post Book World, Mystery Scene, North Carolina Literary Review and others.

In short, while I still have far to go, still wish I was further along than I am, that resolution from earlier this decade was still a good one.

My wife, Tara Laskowski, and I together have set several resolutions in recent years; for 2009, for example, we decided (ambitiously, it seemed) to make two new recipes each week of the year — each of us choosing one — and then rating them, saving the best ones. Except for weeks when we were simply away, including our honeymoon in June (!!!), we stuck to the plan, and this last week of the year have even exceeded it, with FIVE new recipes: a celery root and wild rice soup, a lentil pasta sauce, a slow-cooker barbecue chicken, a new roasted asparagus recipe (with a balsamic glaze), and then a banana and chocolate fudge ice cream. That last one is chilling in the fridge as I write this, waiting to be dumped into the Kitchenaid ice cream maker. (We didn’t do as well keeping up with the blog we started about this, but you can still find some of our recipes here.)

Earlier this week, we talked about other resolutions for 2010. Because we’ve found that we enjoy hiking (a surprise for both of us!), we’re going to be doing more of it in 2010; there’s already a hiking guide for the D.C. area on the way from Amazon. We also plan to travel more, with trips already planned for Kentucky, Colorado, South Carolina, and California in addition to not one but TWO college reunion road trips: Tara’s 10th at Susquehanna, my 20th at Yale. And Tara suggested that we ditch some top-40 stations and try to broaden and deepen our music a little further by asking some well-informed friends for artists/bands that we must know; my good friend Kyle Semmel has already suggested a couple, including Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham), whom I’ve been listening to while I write this.

And as for those writing goals, I continue to give that resolution a booster shot each year: Various writing schedules have appeared (and usually disappeared); I began this blog and (until the last month) have been pretty diligent about juggling short news, reviews, and interviews; and “Finish the novel” appeared a couple of years in a row before I finally got a full draft of “First Loves, Second Thoughts” completed this past summer. After she won the Kathy Fish Fellowship at SmokeLong Quarterly last January, Tara set a goal of devoting herself to flash fiction for 12 months and has seen one of her best writing (and publishing) years yet; see her final story of the year, “When the Cicadas Come,” at SmokeLong here. And now both of us have set parallel writing goals for 2010 — which I won’t jinx by discussing in any detail. I plan to work on New Year’s Day toward that goal, and I was spurred on even further by Ann Patchett’s recent article on resolutions and writing in the Washington Post.

Fingers crossed that this resolution, on the cusp of a new decade, sticks as well as that one earlier from nearly 10 years back!