Looking Back

What a year. What a beginning to 2021...I hope you're safe, healthy and pressing on with all the sanity you can muster. All my best to you and yours right now.

With all the losses and challenges, I'm fortunate that I can look back on some highlights from 2020. Amidst everything, good things happened. Here are a few from my end.

Highlights:

• I got to perform poetry with Thomas Paul & Friends' gorgeous live tunes at MING Studios
• My play see in the dark got a reading through HomeGrown Theatre
• I taught a playwriting workshop through The Cabin -- one particularly rewarding in how much the participants energized, motivated & inspired me
• I wrote a tiny coronavirus play Float On for Georgia's 1 Minute Play Festival
• Float On then got a digital reading through Trinity Street Players
• Despite it getting canceled, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts accepted my sister Kate's and my proposed project (that became Unwind: Hindsight is 2020) as part of their RADA Festival 2020, for what would have been my first overseas production of a full-length play
• I'm ever so grateful for grants from the CCC Fund, The Cabin, the Idaho Commission on the Arts Cares Act and Alexa Rose Foundation Grant (deferred to 2021) that helped alleviate income loss to project/teaching cancellations
• Despite not getting to co-devise the full piece in Seattle on account of the lock down, and not getting to take it to London, I wrote Unwind: Hindsight is 2020 and shared excerpts through Storyfort's Bloom series in the Idaho Botanical Garden, the CCC Fund Showcase Creation in the Time of Change and The Cabin's Writer's At Home series, and kept working with my creative team (including Kate Kraay) in moving that project forward
• I signed a shopping agreement for my screenplay The Hungry Ones so Golden Idea Productions Limited in London could pitch it for production
• Patrick Gabridge generously published quotes by me in his American Theatre Magazine article on Seven Devils Playwrights Foundry
• My short play Somewhere on the Pacific got a virtual reading through Playwrights' Round Table
• My creative team and I held a virtual table read of Unwind: Hindsight is 2020
• Unwind: Hindsight is 2020 was selected to be part of Boise City Department of Arts and History's Archives as a way for us to look back on this pandemic in the future
• My short lift got a digital production by Fargo-Moorhead Community Theatre
• I had poems published through Willow Creek Journal, The Cabin's Writers in the Attic: Apple anthology and Magical Women Magazine
• My full-length see in the dark got a reading from Women's Theatre Festival
• Trinity Street Players rebroadcasted my one-act Hoarse on YouTube
• I was commissioned to write a short play on the theme Envisioning a Global Green New Deal for Climate Change Theatre Action 2021
• see in the dark  was a semifinalist for Seven Devils Playwrights Conference and The Local Theater Company
• My play for young audiences Polar Opposites: An Impossible Tale got semifinalist standing at Campfire Theatre Festival and Purple Crayon Players
• MFA@CIIS published my article about my process on their Medium blog
• I got my student loan debt under the 10K line

I was about to list some of my losses, but looking back, most of these were related to travel, lost work and household income (aided by grants received), exciting projects put off and important personal events pushed back (like a wedding). I'm extremely fortunate to be healthy, that my family and partner are well and safe, to have a job and a home. I didn't lose close friends or family this year to illness (though it came close) or the violence that came to so many across this country and globe. I'm incredibly privileged, lucky and grateful.

Because most of my 2020/2021 goals were made less possible in COVID times, with hopeful optimism (and perhaps naïve delusion) I'm bringing a couple of them back for 2021 and 2022:

3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:

• Travel overseas/go to London
• Go on one+ silent meditation/silent writing retreats
• Get debt-free
  

As I've struggled with some mental health setbacks this past year, along with countless others, I'm setting the intention for 2021 to be  my year of courageous joy. 

How could a year when my sister and I swam here be a total loss? Photo by Kate Kraay