Every year, I devour things and love them hard. The ones that stick with me most get shared in my newsletter throughout the year, and the loved list is a collection collaged together from there. In this edition, you’ll find the books and essays that had the most impact on my head and heart as I moved through 2022.

BOOKS

Maybe I could rewrite the fairy tale of my life, transforming every blow to the head, and every cut to the cunt, and every crucified doll into some kind of an initiation.

It was only January when I read it, but I knew immediately that We Were Witches by Ariel Gore would be a strong contender for my favourite book of the year. It’s a fictionalised memoir of the author’s experiences attending college as a young mother in the early nineties, and explores so many themes near and dear to my heart; queerness, identity, poverty, intergenerational trauma, subculture, shame, literary ancestors, and using both writing and witchcraft as tools for empowerment, agency and reclaiming and re-writing our stories. Bruising, fierce, visionary and absolutely magical.

In March, I read That Old Black Magic by Cathi Unsworth. Cathi’s an incredible author; her writing is so transporting and vivid, whether she’s writing about punks, goth schoolgirls, serial killers or spiritualists. She was one of the first writers I ever interviewed, and she performed at the first ever For Books’ Sake event way back in 2010. She’s an amazingly cool woman, with a recurrent fascination with weird and wonderful concepts like psychogeography and writing as a form of justice and tribute to the real life people who so often inspire her work. That Old Black Magic is a blend of fact and fiction, set in wartime England when superstition was endemic and certain factions sought supernatural support for their various endeavours, including espionage. It’s an odd but brilliantly immersive book, and one which really enrichened my understanding of the time and culture in which it’s set.

​Happy Fat: How to Take Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You by Sofie Hagen was my favourite read in April. It’s joyful, furious and unflinching all at once, Sofie’s voice is so brilliantly funny and incisive, and I loved the intersectional lens it brought to fat activism, fatphobia and embodied justice.

In June, I was thrilled to be part of the launch of The Modern Craft, an essay collection about ethics in witchcraft edited by two brilliant authors, Alice Tarbuck and Claire Askew. My essay explores witchcraft as a form of activism for working-class, queer and otherwise marginalised humans, but I loved diving into the other essays in the anthology too.

July came and went, and so did Stranger Things 4, and I know I wasn’t alone in being left disappointed and needing so much more Eddie Munson and Steve Harrington. Thankfully, the fanfic community came through once again with everything that canon left out, and I especially loved sub-culture, a beautifully-written novel-length exploration of trauma recovery, found family and 80s queer culture.

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones was another favourite from this year: a must for 90s horror fans (we all know how obsessed I am with Scream), it’s an atmospheric, smart, gory and gloriously written page-turner about a high-school student attempting to define slasher films while simultaneously realising she’s in one. There’s also some stuff around queerness, growing up in poverty and survivorship, so you can see why it was a big yes from me.

Human Blues by Elisa Albert had polarised reviews but I bloody loved it: menstruation, fertility, music, internet culture and middle-aged feminist angst. Unapologetic, blunt and chaotic, this fever dream of a novel is told over the course of nine menstrual cycles of a musician who is desperate for a baby, obsessed with Amy Winehouse, and furious with the entire world.

In September, I read The Wild Kindness by Bett Williams after a recommendation in Jane Charlesworth’s newsletter. It’s a brilliant book, exploring healing through psychedelics in the New Mexico desert while also weaving a joyfully weird story of growing mushrooms, becoming part of an international psilocybin community, and the transformative potential of drugs, ritual and collective connection. As with We Were Witches — marketed as a novel but fitting more closely in this ‘memoir plus magical realism’ category — The Wild Kindness was an equally enjoyable and transporting example of an author bringing a ton of originality, trust and unapologetic oddness to their work.

Spooky season saw me sharing this trio of books about monsters that I read this year.

As the nights started to draw in even further, I turned to Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May, which is the author’s account of ‘a year-long winter’ to recover from the impact of sudden illness in the family, and which gave me some much- needed reaffirmation of my beliefs about the necessity of rest, the cyclic rather than linear rhythms of being human, and how we can shift our relationship with the idea of ‘wintering.’

​Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart was my final read of 2022, and another of my favourites. Exploring the biochemical and community experiences of ‘extreme’ activities from ultramarathons to cold water swimming via BDSM and hot pepper eating, it’s a loving, fascinating deep-dive into the attraction and rewards of intentionally engaging with pain.

ESSAYS + ARTICLES

Nothing is universal, not even the period at the end of this sentence. Okay, maybe trauma is universal, but not what trauma, who is traumatized, or how it feels to each of us, certainly not in language. Isn’t this why we write? Sure, we all must breathe to stay alive, but we all breathe differently. What language can we conjure to shift the breath? Sure, we all experience rain, sun, water, earth. But as soon as we write about them, they change too. Try it. See if we can all agree about any of this. Eileen Myles writes, “As soon as I hit the keyboard I’m lying,” and we all know the truth in this. The world is full of liars, and the ones in power get to decide what is true. This is what it means to be part of the publishing industry, or that’s what the industry tells us. To believe in the lie involves its own art, but not the art that allows us to breathe.

I absolutely loved this essay by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore from January 2022. It explores writing on our own terms, gatekeeping, writing as healing and restoration, and why connecting with other creatives matters and is also available in audio form via the brilliant Tin House podcast.

I look forward to Monday mornings to hear [my colleagues] tell their best stories again. They always make me fall out of my chair laughing or just say the saddest shit you ever heard. Being around people so fully aware how weird and hilarious and heart-breaking life is, you can’t help but pay attention, you can’t help but learn from them and become a better storyteller. I mean, you’d have to be or they’d kill you for opening your mouth to say something not worth saying.

​This article of seven writers talking about their day jobs – and balancing their creativity alongside the daily grind of capitalism – is a truly beautiful read.

I was idealistic in the way of the clueless outsider. I just wanted our small group of women to show that we could write. We published stories about abusive relationships. About the Zapatistas. About stepparenting. About chronic illness. About gold mines in Peru and gangs in Ecuador and the lingering impacts of genocide in Cambodia. None of our work was paid. Our crew put in hours and hours of writing, of editing each other’s work, of copyediting and designing and promoting and participating in epic rambly email threads. All of us had day jobs: grad school, teaching, editing. We wanted to prove to ourselves and the gatekeepers that we could do it. And we did.

Another one  I really enjoyed on that same tension between creativity and capitalism, Telling Stories in Order to Live: On Writing and Money

You can also check out previous editions of the loved list from 2020 and 2021.