Looking back to look forward, 2025 edition

As dear ones to me know, and as many of us are facing in one way or another, this transition into the new year was also met with large personal change. In this January threshold space of 2025, I feel myself sitting in the flames (while sending loving thoughts to all those now in literal fires), feeling massive shifts within, prompted by and instigating these outward reroutings. While I won't go into all that now, mid-processing, here are some highlights from another big year of learning, a few goals for the next two years and some favorite images from 2024.

Highlights:

• I enjoyed some sweet radio, video, podcast and print interview time with George Prentice for Boise State Public Radio's Morning Edition, Joe Golden for an upcoming documentary, Ned Buskirk on You're Going to Die, Koletta DiDio for The Arbiter, Joshua Adler on For the Wild Ones and Daphne Stanford on Radio Boise.
• I finished my 100 drawings project, part of the 100K Praise Project led by Erik Ehn. They got shared at La MaMa on Leap Year Day (!).
• My play for young audiences Wolf/Girl was produced at Boise State University. Having been a playwriting student there starting around 2004, and teaching in that department since 2017, I have hoped for a main stage production through at BSU for a long time. The moment felt at least 20 years in the making. It was an especial highlight working with the remarkable, empathetic leader Tiara Thompson.
• Three from the cast of Wolf/Girl spoke up at an Idaho Fish & Game hearing on behalf of wolves, who are facing some of the worst threats they've experienced in the last century, especially here in Idaho.
• We were able to participate in the above because of meeting the International Wildlife Coexistence Network, some of whom saw Wolf/Girl and invited us to help wolves in this tangible way.
• Then that amazing group (IWCN) procured a grant on Wolf/Girl's behalf to take a showing of that play to the Wood River Valley -- Tiara and I will be bringing a staged reading to The Liberty Theater in Hailey, in partnership with The Liberty Theatre Company and IWCN, this February 12th at 6:30pm.
• I had the official release event of my first book, 12 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle at MING Studios and a few pop up events that followed (with more to come in 2025). We sold most of the first printing, with just a few copies remaining through Modern Mythographer and at a handful of select stores. Mega thanks to my publisher and editor, Nick Jaina!
• I got 12 Lifetimes in stock at Flying M, Rediscovered Books, The Lit Room, Kuna's Book Habit and Magnolia's Books (in Seattle). I believe there are still copies at the first four locations (or will be soon for any sold out). There are many people and places I got to meet because of this little blue book, some of those connections being quite meaningful and if not life-changing, at least life-affirming. And some people I got to reconnect with for the first time in many years, which felt quite special too.
• I read from one of my new full-length plays Take Me Away: a train wreck with monsters at Storyfort.
• I served a six-month term as Boise City Writer-in-Residence, using that time to share my six-part workshop series on Refilling Your Creative Well as well as write a bunch.
• I also got to teach Refilling Your Creative Well (combined as part of the three-part series with Exploding Your Creativity and Creative Salon) for a Boise State University Theatre Arts class, my favorite teaching experience there to date.
• My micro-play DreamSong got performed live and on a podcast through Goucher College.
• My ten-minute play lift got a reading through City Theatre in Miami.
• I boogied my feet off in a combined 40th/50th birthday dance party with Kate Kraay, co-DJ'd by Ed Kraay at West of Lenin.
• Through my Writer-in-Residence summer (plus a little spring and fall), I wrote my new full-length play TrapDoor and two new ten-minute plays, You Light Me Up and On Time (is late). The two ten-minutes got public readings through two non-traditional theater venues, as part of Address Book and Beth Norton & Friends.
• Natalie Disney (the first inaugural Boise-City Writer-in-Residence), Kerri Webster (the Idaho Writer-in-Residence) and I shared stage time at Lit@Lost, a reading event put together by all the programs who make those residencies possible. (Thanks to Lost Grove Brewing, The Cabin, Boise City Department of Arts & History, Boise Public Libraries, Idaho Commission on the Arts and Rediscovered Books.)
• I took three classes through the Dramatists Guild Institute Certificate Program before that program seemed to stall in hiatus -- everything is in transition, right? In Steve Harper's class (Channeling Your Dreams), I wrote and workshopped the first drafts of You Light Me Up and On Time (is late).
• I spent time playing in Washington's rainforesty woods with Kate Kraay as we worked on our upcoming (long term) project, currently titled For Rest (A Homecoming).
• I stayed at a few non-traditional retreat spaces in Boise as I worked on some of the above plays.
• It was such a treat to see Starball at West of Lenin in July after one of two mini-retreat/workshop/devising sessions with Kate.
• I completed my second time through The Artist's Way.
• I got more into body/brain connections through another Alexander/Klein Techniques workshop with Fabio Tavares, somatic breathwork sessions at Exhale Boise, another tuning session with CL Young, playing around at Ecstatic Dance with Meg Freitag (who also gave me a stirring natal chart reading around my birthday time) and learning about the Action Types Approach framework with Brie Katz through Imaginisma's Atelier. And always lots of yoga (sometimes with Sarah Gardner), meditation, constructive rest practice -- now combined with trying on the Five Tibetan Rites upon Kate Kraay's introduction, as well as some breath practices learned from Breath by James Nestor.
• I got introduced to the team at Imaginisma, a collective of humans interested in amplifying aliveness -- and decided to join them on their journey through the first half of 2025.
• My micro-play Tree People was published through Climate Change Theatre Action's Arts & Climate branch.
• I joined up with a group of fellow Natalie Goldberg lovers and devotees, who started a weekly writing practice using Goldberg's particular methods of sitting/walking meditation (zazen) mixed with writing practice and sharing without feedback. It's wonderful to be practicing with other human beings in this way.
• In the fall, I realized I started practicing Natalie's methods of writing in a daily way for 15 years.
• I took a one-day virtual workshop with Natalie that, as always, made me thirsty for more.
• I sent Natalie Goldberg a copy of 12 Lifetimes -- who put it on her required reading list for her upcoming January retreat in Taos! What a thrill. I had no idea she'd read it.
• Who knows what will come of it, but I finally (after several years thinking about it) got my application together for The Jerome Fellowship and submitted that to The Playwrights' Center.
• Sandwiching a summer of not teaching (quite  gift, thanks Boise-City Writer-in-Residency), along with my regular classes at Boise State, I got to do some dramaturgical work with University of Idaho's Playwriting MFA Program (Thanks Robert Caisley!) and guest teach with Jenny Sternling's fabulous Creative Writing class at Bishop Kelly High School (thanks Jenny!).
  
  

3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:

• Get my project with Kate Kraay (For Rest: A Homecoming?), an environmental experiential experiment that parallels the stress of the human body/humanity's body with the earth's body, onto its feet
• Draft an adaptation of my play Rajpurr: Tale of a Tiger into a children's book that examines how we deal with grief with elementary grade readers -- with an extra-special illustrator collaborator (to be announced...)
• Adapt my feature screenplay script into a large-cast, full-length puppet horror play that explores the cycle of abuse through a possessed boarding house

This is my year of stepping into the unknown with care, into my power with audacity, finding miracles through brave curiosity and entering into new connections with adventurous joy and delight, while experimenting with creativity. May dreams become real as I stop hiding and simultaneously become my own sanctuary.

I'm asking -- how might I ignite magic by becoming myself?
What happens when I water what grows?