I Did It! 2025 Edition

Since 2013 I've taken a moment every December to look back over the previous year and, instead of lamenting all I did not accomplish, enumerating what I did, primarily in the writing department, but also in other areas of my life. This year I felt like I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels. Let's see how it actually shook out!

Writing
In 2025, my creativity group went through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, over the course of 12 months rather than the prescribed 12 weeks. Part of this program is to write "morning pages"--three pages written long hand every morning. Although I missed a fair number of days, and occasionally did not fill three whole pages, this practice resulted in my filling up six Decomposition Books (by contrast, in 2024 I filled four of the same notebooks), plus two small travel journals. Also, in an effort to be less precious about writing tools, I stopped buying refills for my favorite jell pen and instead tried to use up some of the several million ball-point pens cluttering up the house. The good news is that I used up a lot of them. The bad news is that my husband replaced them with ones brought home from work at least once a week.

Whether any of this morning "brain dump" writing did me any good is still an open question. I did not have any major epiphanies, but I do often mine my old brain dumpings for essay material, so you never know...

Aside from journal pages, I wrote:

• 1 short (flash) story
• 2 articles
• 3 essays
• 4 chapters of a nonfiction book
• 10 newsletters (still one to come)
• 20 blog posts
• 8,700 words of one (unfinished) novel and 1,700 words of another

Submissions stats:

• 4 unsolicited essay submissions
• 1 solicited essay submissions
• 2 solicited article submissions
• 2 book proposal submissions
• 1 contest submission
• 1 residency application
• 4 acceptances (1 unsolicited/3 solicited)
• 4 publications

2025 publications:

• "The Saltwater Cure" Echoes in the Fog: Literary Reflections on the Liminal Spaces of Maine's Coast, December 2025
• "Hit the Beach this Winter" Green & Healthy Maine Winter 2025
• "Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail" More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, July 2025
• "People-Powered Science: How Volunteers Add to Our Understanding of the Natural World" Green & Healthy Maine Summer 2025​

I also:

• Continued meeting with my writing group and my creativity circle
• Attended 2 writing conferences (Terry Plunkett Poetry Festival and Maine CrimeWave)
• Filled in as a Senior Editor at Literary Mama for three months
• Taught 5 nature writing or nature journaling one-off events
• Taught a 4-week bird journaling workshop
• Chatted with Jared Champion about writing and hiking on the YouTube channel Outside Comfort Zone

Travel & Adventure
Trips taken in 2025:

• Solo trip to Colorado to visit family
• Family camping trip
• Anniversary trip to Québec City, just C and me

I recently read the advice to "local like a traveler" (an inverse of the "travel as a local" philosophy), and this is something I want to intentionally put into practice, although I think I did a pretty good job making the most of local cultural opportunities and attractions, in addition to taking a few trips. I didn't set out to visit two museums (or museum-like places) a month, like I did in 2024, but I still managed to visit 21 museums, some of them more than once, which averages out to about two a month:

1. Victoria Mansion
2. Portland Museum of Art
3. Zillman Art Museum
4. Danforth Gallery at University of Maine at Augusta
5. Colby College Art Museum (2x)
6. Schupf Art Gallery (several times)
7. Ticonic Gallery
8. Waterfall Arts Gallery
9. Bowdoin Art Museum
10. Langlais Art Preserve
11. Farnsworth Art Museum (2x)
12. South Solon Meeting House (2x)
13. Bates College Art Museum (2x)
14. Maine Historical Society (2x)
15. Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art
16. Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (3x)
17. Salem Witch Museum
18. Musée de la Civilisation 
19. Musée National Des Beaux-Arts du Québec
20. Wander at Longwoods Sculpture Park
21. Alnoba Nature and Art Preserve

I also saw four plays and a ballet at local theaters. I went on a few local hikes (and did one volunteer trail maintenance day on the trail nearest me) and paddled a few nearby ponds.

Arts & Crafts

• Finished painting all the watercolors for my Europe journal (from 2023!!!).
• Took some online tutorials in general drawing and watercolor as well as travel sketching in particular.
• Took a weekly art class in Oct/Nov in which I really stretched myself, exploring three-dimensional art, messy art (like printmaking), and making art by just exploring with a range of materials rather than working toward a specific idea. I really feel like I grew a lot, and the art-making had a positive effect on my writing.
• Started a 100-day project of painting all the birds I saw on our property in 2025, and I got 47 done (of 82 species seen and recorded).
• I've had the same knitting project sitting in a bowl on my coffee table for at least three years now. I bought some yarn to start something else, in hopes of jump-starting knitting, and got as far as winding the skeins into balls.
• Made a few potholders for holiday gifts.
• The only thing I can recall sewing this year is a pencil roll for the new set of Inktense colored pencils I bought recently. I did help Z make a pair of fleece pants and have been helping E make a quilt (perhaps I've passed on the crafty torch to the next generation?).​

Overall, some things I want to keep doing--traveling, making art, visiting museums--and some things I want to concentrate on doing a lot more of--writing, submitting (and publishing), hiking, kayaking--in 2026. NATIONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS DU QUÉBEC