Looking back to look forward, 2024 edition

This 2023 reflection is coming a bit later than planned, as 2024 has started in a full-throttle way. For that reason, it's short on the reflective side, with fewer processing thoughts than usual. Regardless, here are some highlights from a big year of learning and moving forward, a few goals for the next two years and some favorite images from 2023.

Highlights:

• I traveled overseas for the first (and second) time, first to London, then to Iceland. In London, I got to see my sister Kate Kraay perform in David Glass Ensemble's The Brides and check out other shows that were part of the final London International Mime Festival (sniff) after five decades.
• I got to meet the Nervous Theatre people and learn new devising practices from them in their residency workshops at Surel's Place.
• Thomas Paul and I put out a chapbook album of poem-songs called Drown to Resurface, which Grant Olsen listed on his top ten albums of the year for his show It's Now Right Now on Radio Boise. We shared tracks from it at Couch Surfer Series, Treefort Music Fest, Campfire Stories and performed the album in full at MING Studios 7o'clock series. MING played tracks from it for their podcast My on Mondays, too. I got to feel a bit like Patti Smith with a live band behind me during our performances.
• I was commissioned for the second time for Climate Change Theatre Action. I wrote them a new micro-play Tree People that was performed worldwide, specifically in Texas, Minnesota, Ireland, Massachusetts, British Columbia, Georgia, Austria and Pennsylvania.
  
• I facilitated the last of my three-part Refilling Your Creative Well workshop series I created through The Cabin, finishing off with a Creative Salon workshop. Then, our new Department Chair Raquel Davis at the Boise State University Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing let me design that series into a class for the Theatre Department. We started this week.
  
• My play for young audiences Wolf/Girl was selected for production at Boise State University. Director Tiara Thompson and I worked with our incredible, brilliant, inspired design team in pre-production, assembled a fab cast of student actors and started looking excitedly forward to our rehearsals (that started the first week of January) and production (we open February 8).
  
• My micro-play Deer You was published by Literature Today.
• A monologue from my play Unwind: Hindsight is 2020 (a project Kate Kraay and I still want to make into the fully devised, physical, environmental theater piece we initially envisioned -- maybe this year?) was published in Writing for Change Journal.
• I applied and was accepted into the Dramatists Guild Institute's Certificate Program. I started in the fall with my first class with the amazing Andrea Lepcio. Thanks to that class, I drafted the play I've been scared to begin for years, Take Me Away: a trainwreck with monsters. I got some of my favorite artists (Jaime Nebeker, Matthew Cameron Clark and Tracy Sunderland) in a room to hear the new play in a private reading.
  
• I took part in David Glass Ensemble's The Brides Workshop in Seattle, something the ensemble does during their early connections with a new country for their international phenomenon series of performances. During that time, I played onstage with Kate Kraay for the first time...at least the first time since we were kids and she had us and our brother act out fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel for our parents.
  
• I took part in two virtual workshop/retreats led by Natalie Goldberg. Once I shared something for her in a giant Zoom room with hundreds of participants. She asked if I was a poet and said "It's obvious you've been practicing for a while." I could hardly breathe.
  
• I had my first real dramaturgy gig, working with Wolfgang Jones on his haunting play A Beginner's Guide to Self-Loathing & Why We Say Goodbye at Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. It sure felt good to be back at my favorite company working with those wonderful artists, especially for Jeni Mahoney's last year as Artistic Director.
  
• My full-length play Ark, based on Elisabeth Sharp McKetta's middle-grade novel, got its first public reading at Rediscovered Books in Boise. Elisabeth and her family joined us all the way from the UK for the event!
• I participated in an Alexander/Klein Techniques workshop with the fabulous Fabio Tavares and felt like an infant again, relearning how to stand, sit, walk.
  
• I got two poems published in The Cabin's anthology Writers in the Attic: Three. I got to read one of them during the release party, my first time giving a reading at the Gene Harris Bandshell.
  
• I had a streak of eight months with at least one public reading/performance scheduled per month.
• Natalie Disney and I were selected to be the inaugural Boise City Writers-in-Residence.
  
• I applied and was a semi-finalist for a Dramatists Guild Foundation National Fellowship.
  
• I published my first book, 12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle through a friend, writer, musician and artist I admire and his new small press, Modern Mythographer. Thanks, Nick Jaina! Of the intentionally small first edition printing of 200 copies, we've sold over a quarter in this soft opening stage, before any official events and without publicity (beyond social media and my newsletter). Erik Ehn, Cindy Shearer and Elisabeth Sharp McKetta were early readers and gave me such encouraging blurb quotes to include in the publication.
  
• I turned a sometimes meditation practice into a daily meditation practice.
• I drew 100 drawings in a project led by Erik Ehn. From recent news, it sounds like the final projects might get shared at La MaMa this February on Leap Year Day (!).
  
• I had my first and second tuning sessions with CL Young. Highly recommend.

3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:

• Travel to 1-2 more new (to me) international countries.
  
• Complete the Dramatists Guild Institute Certificate Program.
• Start a playwrights group or collective that fosters community and helps playwrights in the Boise area support each other -- through feedback, encouragement and/or more formally showing each other's work.
  

While I do want to continue stepping into my power, letting go of what I don't need and inviting what I want into my life, I also notice that as this year begins, I am in a time of enormous happenings, which may continue all year long. Many are big for me. Many I've wanted a long time, worked hard to receive and have gotten thanks to immense help from loads of dear ones. I am grateful for all of it and don't want to rush through these events tense and intense, without taking stock, appreciating and experiencing in full.

Through this year and all the steps/milestones underway, I want to practice being with those happenings. By this, I don't mean resting on my laurels, but actually enjoying what I'm doing while I'm doing, staying present with those actions as they're happening -- so they don't all pass me by with an attitude of mental frenzy. Therefore, may this be a year of softening inside, to feel the glow of my inner flame amongst such activity and forward movement -- without letting it/me burn out. I want to slow down in my body while going with the flow of the momentum -- while not trying to control the outcome.

Last year was a major time of growth that continues into 2024. Many of those days, I'm feeling the turbulence. I know there will be even greater need this year for finding moments, days, weeks to go on airplane mode, decrease the tempo and go solo into retreats, to see who I am as a human being apart from all the doing. As we/many of us keep walking/running/sprinting forward, in a time with such regional/national/global chaos, change, uncertainty and violence -- I know this year I must cultivate inner peace, so my actions don't just add to the noise, but help us/me pay attention with greater intention...and so my own well doesn't dry up.

May this be a year of finding grace within the fire, while enjoying the warmth of those flames.