❝ let everything happen to you / beauty and terror / just keep going / no feeling is final. ❞

— rainer maria rilke. motto for 2020.

numbers —

• 1 novel written and completed
• 2 research trips, brimming with flowers and iced coffee and afternoon sun
• 6 blisteringly happy visits to the cinema to see 1917
• 78 new films watched
• 119 books read
• 2,495 minutes spent learning on duolingo
• 250k words written in total

a song for every season —

the artists that bring to mind every quarter of 2020

• ► winter
  • the monkees, roy orbison, jeff lynne, ricky nelson
• ► spring
  • badfinger, blondie, dusty springfield
• ► summer
  • darlingside, the killers, awolnation
• ► autumn
  • freedom fry, vampire weekend, old sea brigade

beloved literature —

• the flies ▸ jean-paul sartre
• letters to a young poet ▸ rainer marie rilke
• all quiet on the western front ▸ erich maria remarque
• the notebooks of malte laurids brigge ▸ rainer maria rilke
• the wasteland & other poems ▸ ts eliot
• under milk wood ▸ dylan thomas
• m train ▸ patti smith
• death and the downs ▸ charles sorley
• why i wake early ▸ mary oliver
• the penguin book of first world war poetry ▸ various
• devotion ▸ patti smith
• averno ▸ louise glück
• drifts ▸ kate zambreno
• journey's end ▸ r.c. sherriff
• the great war and modern memory ▸ paul fussell
• slaughterhouse-five ▸ kurt vonnegut
• love as always, kurt: vonnegut as i knew him ▸ loree rackstraw
• heroines ▸ kate zambreno

beloved cinema —

• 1917 ♡♡♡
• little women
• the last black man in san francisco
• dog day afternoon
• the king
• reservoir dogs
• the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford
• pulp fiction
• the hateful eight
• a coffee in berlin
• a beautiful mind
• the cheyenne social club
• cold war
• the departed
• breathless
• the spirit of notre dame
• cléo from 5 to 7
• atonement

cities visited —

• richmond, virginia
• syracuse, new york

looking back on the year —

• i was going to write one of these, but looking back through my monthly lists, i feel as though i've already put this year into the best possible words, day by day by day. it was a difficult year, for sure. but i wrote, and i read, and i became exactly the person i was meant to be at exactly the right time. i'm so thankful for everything, the happiness and the heartache. life is hard, but God is so good to us ♡