Being a writer isn’t just a job. It’s more accurate to call it a vocation, since a writer never really turns it off.  Though I have turned it down, considerably. My last book Faith. Virtue. Wisdom was released in October 2023, and in the time since, no new book-length writing projects have emerged. However, the work continues in various forms.

Probably the biggest change this year has been my return to the faculty of the college where I teach. This is my fourth academic year at the college and my twenty-third as a teacher, and this fall I’m back in the classroom full-time. For the last two years – 2023 and 2024 – I’ve worked in areas that could be lumped together under the term “student success,” while teaching a part-time course load. In Fall 2025, I’m teaching freshman composition, writing support labs, and a music-focused literature survey course, while continuing as the advisor for our literary magazine The Prelude and as the academic writing help guy. The load this fall has kept me busy with prepping, teaching, and grading. Aside from classes, I am particularly proud to be a part of the long tradition with The Prelude, which was founded in the fall of 1928. The 100th anniversary is approaching in 2028, and I’ve got plans in the works to celebrate that centennial with a commemorative anthology.

Speaking of anthologies, Nobody’s Home passed its fifth anniversary in the summer of 2025. I published two new essays in August 2025 during the Open Submissions Period: one on Halloween in the South, the other about rural healthcare. Today, there more than fifty essays in the anthology on a whole range of subjects, as well as lesson plans, book and movie reviews, and my editor’s blog Groundwork. The next Open Submissions Period doesn’t open until mid-April 2026, so my plan is to pursue reviews and interviews in the interim.

Back to the teaching life, I finally attended a National Writing Project summer workshop! Now in its second year, Auburn University’s Village Writing Project is a new site, established since the old site – the Sun Belt Writing Project – shut down several years ago. (To be clear, Village Writing Project is not a rebranding of Sun Belt. It’s a new site.) I had been looking into possibly of attending Sun Belt, found that it was gone, and was glad to sign up for the VWP’s June workshop. Prior to arriving, we read the Teacher’s Guide to Multimodal Composition by Angela Stockman, then did our two weeks’ worth of exercises and collaborating on campus. Some of what we focused on was multimodal writing, the idea that writing does not exist in isolation but appears to us surrounded by design, format, colors, fonts, and imagery, all of which influence our reading. Basically, the lesson of the workshop was: if we don’t encounter writing in context-less ways, then we should teach writing in the context of the ways we do encounter it. At the end, we also read The Writing Revolution 2.0 by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, which is centered on teaching the individual skills involved in writing. I highly recommend this professional development experience for any teacher whose curriculum involves writing. We had high school and middle school English and social studies teachers in our group last summer, so it’s not just for the ELA folks.

As for readings, this year’s have varied widely, depending on the reasons. Prior to the Village Writing Project workshops in June, we were asked to read the two books that I mentioned above. In addition to reviewing three volumes of poetry for the Alabama Writers Forum – More Poems for Hungry Minds by the Highland Poets, Out Loud Huntsville’s Year in Review 2024, and Charles Ghigna’s Southern Bred – I also read Burgin Mathews’s Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America for a review in a journal that will be published later. For my editor’s blog on Nobody’s Home, I read and wrote about Morton Sosna’s 1977 historical study In Search of the Silent South. Our English department selected How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell as our freshmen class’s common read, so I took it on this fall. Just for pleasure, I’ve gone through fewer books than last year but still got through a couple: Wendell Berry’s essay collection Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, Richard Hague’s memoir Earnest Occupations, Yushi Nomura’s translation Desert Wisdom: Sayings from the Desert Fathers, Shen Fu’s ephemeral Six Records of a Floating Life, and Edmund Burke’s political essay A Vindication of Natural Society, while picking through Ada Limon’s edited collection You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World and John Dear’s commentary The Gospel of Peace. Books in the pipeline, which I already have copies of, include Chris Smaje’s A Small Farm Future, bell hooks’s Homegrown and Outlaw Culture, Richard Hasan’s The Real Right to Vote, Angela Carter’s folk-horror collection The Bloody Chamber, Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance, and Richard Grant’s Dispatches from Pluto.

Even with teaching, learning, editing, and reading, I’ve still managed to do a little bit of writing on shorter pieces. I’ve already mentioned the book reviews, and I’m currently working on an article for the Encyclopedia of Alabama. This year, I wrote eight Dirty Boots columns and six more Southern Movies posts, as well as two Road Trip posts for my editor’s blog on Nobody’s Home. Of course, I’m often jotting a haiku or other kind of poem about something or other.

Finally, though it’s not related to my current writing work, it was sad to lose Clark Walker this year. He passed away in February. Born in 1940, Clark was a working artist in Montgomery for about six decades, from the late 1950s until the 2010s, and he was the subject of my book I Just Make People Up. I hadn’t seen him in some time when he passed, but I know that he will be missed.

After writing a similar post a year ago, it seemed like time to look around once again and make an assessment. I’ve accepted the fact that there’s no such thing as a normal year anymore. Considering that, in the last twelve months, I am still vigorously writing, teaching, publishing, and reading. That said, there’s no telling what 2026 will hold!