2025 Year in Review
+What to Do with the Book Report Now: Three Themes and Two Projects for 2026
Status Update
Where things stand, what I’m thinking about the book report these days and a bit about the general themes of my creative practice for 2026.
Books - Last week I got an email introduction to J.K. Fowler of Nomadic Bookshop, which opened earlier this year in Uptown Oakland. A couple of messages later, and the book report will be on their shelves. Sometimes it’s that easy, and I still can’t quite get over it when it is.
So: 400 books sold. About 20 bookstores around the country, most of which started with a cold email like that one. Books in my trunk that I sometimes sell at school pickup. And an interesting discovery over at Metalabel: the vast majority of sales are for the Pay What You Want downloadable PDF — which has me thinking seriously about doing electronic versions of some smaller projects in my queue.
Events - I’ve done almost two dozen events in support of this project ranging from exhibitions with 100+ people in attendance to an invitation-only conversation for five. It’s the smaller events (5-20 people) that have felt the best to me - less performative, more interactive and therefore more generative. This year I want to treat events as opportunities for collaboration rather than promotion. I recently did events with Christina Pappas of Same Page SF, a weekly newsletter about all things literary in San Francisco and Jessi Haley of Cita Press, an indie press publishing open access books by women. I hope to do more with both of them this year.
What’s Next? Three Themes, Two Projects
One of the reasons I love the book report project is that it gives me an excuse to explore seemingly disconnected ideas more deeply that I would otherwise. I’ve got three primary areas of inquiry/themes for the year for 2026. Or as Madebo refers to it “me-interest research”:
Mothering as Creative Practice - This started with my participating in Margaret McCarthy’s Art Monsters reading group at Bathers Library, continued with a number of events about the intersection of art x creativity x parenting and ended with me writing a manifesto. I’d like to tie up this work with a zine about creative practice from my perspective as a newly creative person and a mother of color.
Archives of Attention - Archives are about marking / commemorating / remembering moments in time. My project is an archive of my pandemic attention, but I keep thinking we need new archival models more generally — models that are more personal, collective, reflective. Otherwise all we’ll be left with are timelines and feeds to mark the passing of our lives.
Book Reports Everywhere - I really, really, really want to make book reports “a thing.” Not just my book reports. The reality is that I’m more interested in the book reports I want other people to make. I’m trying to solve my own problems! Number one on this secret list had been Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and boy did Courtney deliver. What are the metrics for success on this goal? I have no idea. Maybe I’ll know it when I see it?
Two projects that came out of all this
Winter Club is a time-limited series of events running January through March. It’s hard for me to motivate to leave the house in the winter, especially during the week and once I’m already home. At the same time, we live in a seasonal community whose businesses need support during the slow winter months. Some of the Winter Club events were already happening; adding them to a schedule made them a destination. In other cases, we put together something we were curious about and hoped someone else might be, too (eg two neighbors - one with a hauling business and one with a watershed nonprofit - talking at our local bar about the weirdest stuff they’ve pulled out of the Russian River). Most events have been free, open to kids and short enough to be in bed at a reasonable hour. They’ve been pretty easy to pull off and have been very sweet and fun. I recommend the format.
Togethering Lab So many of my side projects felt disconnected from each other for a long time, but through my work with Katie Donnelly, the late Jess Clark and Dot Connector Studio, I found the through lines. Colin has also been finding his own, producing a series of place-based remembering events that bring local communities into contact with their own histories. The Togethering Lab brings them together - working in person at the community level and online in the more intimate, poetic internet that is more my speed. I’m still figuring out the shape of this project, but it feels right to have everything in one place.
What to do now?
What both of these projects have in common - and what connects them back to the book report - is they’re hyperlocal, intimate, community-oriented, driven by curiosity, focused on creativity. They’ve come out of my work with the book report, but they’re not about the book report. They both offer containers to explore things I’m interested in while being invitations for others to join me. One of the things I’ve learned through the book project is that if I want to see something in the world, I may need to just make it myself. As June Jordan tells us, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” What would you make if you weren’t waiting?