Moving into the 2020s

It's perhaps cliché and obvious to say this, but entering the new decade feels... a bit strange. Not exactly momentous, but peculiar in a way that 2010 didn't. A little more like 2000, but then 2000 was a whole new millennium, so there was widespread excitement and anxiety about that.

Since I particularly study the 1920s and 30s, I may be extra prone to feeling that I don't quite know how to take it being 2020. The days of the flappers don't seem all that distant to me. My grandparents were young and starting their families--both of my parents were born in the 1920s. Toyen and the other Czech avantgardists were in the same generation as my grandparents, although they experienced the period rather differently in Prague than my grandparents did in rural Minnesota. Still, we have photos of one of my grandmothers in short hair and jodhpur-like gear, climbing around some rocks on a California beach. She and Grandpa had driven their car to California and did so more than once, being part of that first generation to have cars almost as a matter of course. Grandpa, in fact, owned a garage for awhile and later a car dealership, in addition to farming; I'm sure he would have been very surprised to learn that his father (gone before his birth) had gone into the car business too, down in Texas.

I suppose it's this odd mix of family lore and scholarly familiarity that renders 2020 rather curious. And so, there's that temptation too to review the past decade and muse about the new one.

In 2010 I was hired tenure-track and bought a house, developments that would have surprised me some had I had a crystal ball in 2000 and that would have seemed utterly unexpected from my 1990 perspective. Academically, things went along in a fairly normal manner for me during the decade--I taught, published, and served on various committees--apart from the fact that in 2019 most of our faculty, myself included, were out on the picket line in the snow for one of the longest higher-education faculty strikes in US history. The support we received from community--students, other unions, non-union faculty, local restaurants, etc.--was impressive and we're eager to return the favor as needed (in the fall I spent some time with the UAW strikers, for instance).

During the 2010s Magnetic Woman was contracted and University of Pittsburgh Press has set a November 2020 launch date. I'm looking forward to putting together some book events to celebrate and promote it! But the 2010s also saw me gradually getting back in gear as a fiction writer, after having neither time nor energy during grad school. While for the most part I worked on novels during that decade, I did get a few short pieces published--one of which had been written thirty-six years earlier. I'm hoping that in the 2020s the speed of publication picks up a bit. It's not like I began publishing late in life; I first published fiction in a respected journal when I was 23.

For the 2020s, I worry about the climate crisis, ecological damage, and the rise of fascistic and racist activity worldwide. But I don't want to focus on that today. There are things each one of us can do (some easy, some hard) to make the world a better place, and I want to do more of those. Maybe I'll write a separate blog post about that. From a personal perspective, though, I'll just say I'm looking forward to seeing Magnetic Woman in print this year and hope to have at least one other book (either a novel or the anthology I've been preparing) accepted this year. And to finish at least one more novel this year. Aim high!