Taking stock of your year? Here’s mine:

Project 1: Creative nonfiction

My father was alive one day in May 2021 and dead the next of a massive stroke. As executor, I became the keeper of the paperwork: obituary, hospital bill, court filings, and on and on.

My mother, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, channeled her grief at my father’s death into rage at me.

Executrix — a memoir made of hermit crab essays, each written inside the shell of a document that crossed my desk in the year after I was named executor.

By the end of 2024 I had substantially revised this piece and was sending out a manuscript called Executrix and Other Essays.

Project 2: Novel

May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens erupted. A high school junior, I watched it from the front yard.

2017: My wife Arline and I camped near the mountain and went to the visitor’s center and observatory. Reading the exhibits sparked something in me: I remembered Harry Truman, the old man who refused to leave his lodge on Spirit Lake; Dixy Lee Ray, the governor, whose decisions were widely criticized (and who was rumored to be a lesbian); the dramatic footage from airplanes and helicopters. I began writing a novel.

2017-2024: I wrote several drafts of the novel and got excellent feedback from readers, including the members of my writing group. Writing was interrupted by a pandemic and my father’s death. Still, the novel nagged at me. Something about it wasn’t working, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

2024: I decided to make a radical revision. And with the 50th anniversary of the eruption only six years away, now was the time to do it. I replotted the novel, threw out some point-of-view characters, and began to carve out an hour each morning to write during the academic year, something that has been very difficult for me to do in the past. But somehow I have managed it this year.

December 31, 2024: I have about 27,000 words of a new draft, about half of those words brand new. It feels much stronger. As I told a writer friend this year, my goal is to write a novel I can be proud of. Of course, I would love to see it out in the world, but that’s secondary. I’m writing because I love to write and because I really, really want this novel to fulfill my ambitions for it.

Project 3: Poem

Oh, and I wrote a poem that’s going to be published in an anthology of poems about Washington State birds. Is that not cool? To go with my poem, I made a playlist of bird songs, just for fun (“To everything tern, tern, tern….”).