• Total: 24
• Editing projects: 3
• Fiction: 11 (that’s the most fiction I’ve read in a LONG time). Favorite – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
• Memoir: 4. Favorite – Beehive Girl
• LDS commentary: 3
• Home and life: 2
• Writing: 1

Reading goal for 2024: have a rotation of 1 nonfiction writing or related to a book project, 1 nonfiction memoir or biography, 1 nonfiction religious (which has crossover with work related, but not necessarily), and 1 fiction.

I haven’t started writing about Scouts for the “do a extreme thing” memoir, because well, I haven’t started my own efforts yet to pass off all the requirements (see: adult leadership unnecessary drama). 2024 will give me a lot of material to work with – I’m registered for Wood Badge.

9: I branched out in my writing with some new publications:

• Healing Powers: an Interview with Charlotte Condie, Wayfare Magazine, November 27, 2023
• Can I Speak Aloud About Menopause?, Exponent II blog, April 4, 2023
• Steps into the Dark: an Interview with J. Kirk Richards, Wayfare Magazine, January 6, 2023

8: Marci McPhee and I tackled Listen, Learn & Love: Building the Good Ship Zion with Richard Ostler – the third installment of the LLL series.

7: I’ve heard enough bits and pieces of Marci’s personal history that I wanted more details. So I interviewed her for the LDS Women Project: Go Far, Stay Long, Look Deep. My other favorite interview of the year was with childhood bestie Rebecca Cheney, and now we know why the Tabernacle Choir sounds amazing. Because it’s REALLY HARD to get in! Nearer to the Lord Through Music.

6: I took a flying leap into the unknown of self-publishing production with Russ Hinckley and his book, Beyond Belief. Learning Adobe InDesign for producing a book has been its own version of hell. I’ve learned a lot and I’m glad I did it, but I don’t know that I’ll be ready to try this again soon.

5: A couple of years ago, I interviewed Celeste Mergens for the LDSWP – she’s the founder of Days For Girls, an international nonprofit that provides reusable fabric menstrual supplies and education to women and girls around the world. She recently released her memoir and was in DC for a book tour presentation, and I made sure to be there. So great to meet her and get my book signed!

4: It was the year for meeting people in person … I went to lunch with Charlotte Condie when she was visiting her sister about an hour from me. I broke an internet rule and invited Jeff Andersen and his family to my HOUSE for dinner just based on Instagram conversations, but all is well, he’s not an axe murderer. He is a strong LGBT ally, podcaster, and writer, and his wife is just as awesome. Instagram friends are real friends!

• Charlotte is an artist on Instagram.
• Jeff is a progressive mover and shaker in the LDS Insta-ward.

3: The LDS Women Project had an in-person event in Washington DC, and for the first time in three years of working together, the editorial board was all in the same place at the same time. Liz gave a great presentation on her dissertation about cultural narratives among LDS women and how they affect our perceptions of ourselves and our place in the world.

2: I spoke in church on Mother’s Day about Heavenly Mother – I’ve never heard a talk or lesson about Her in a church setting, ever. I was requested by the Relief Society president, and I’m still curious (although I’ll probably never know) what she said to get this idea past the bishopric. It was interesting to me that the most feedback I got was from men, who thanked me for bringing up this doctrine because they’d never thought about it before.

1: By far, the top thing of 2023 was publishing Cherish, and being with Ashli and McArthur for a 4-day book tour in Utah. More meeting people in person! Lots of them! In Utah, I had breakfast with podcasters Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward (At Last She Said It), and dinner with Monica Packer (About Progress). I met lots of contributors to Cherish. But most importantly, I met – after working together for a year and a half – Ashli. We had both spent time with McArthur in 2022 when she did a speaking tour on the East Coast, but it was the first time Ashli and I were together. All the way around, creating the book and talking about it has been one of the pivotal experiences of my life.

I’m reviewing plans for 2024 this week, but it definitely includes more Cherish, more LDSWP, more Scouts, and more writing of my own.

Adam and I had decided at Thanksgiving to move from Connecticut to the Washington DC area in the summer, so we started searches for jobs and school districts and houses.

February: I helped Richard Ostler get his website correlated better with the Listen, Learn & Love books, and started a new project with McArthur Krishna – indexing and doing a line edit for A Couple’s Guide to a Divine Marriage.

March: I conducted multiple interviews for the LDS Women Project to try to frontload my publishing schedule through the summer, because I suspected I would not be focused on writing or editing while in the middle of moving.

I participated in the first half of a nonfiction writing workshop presented by the LDS Publishing and Media Association. It was twice a week, all online. It was great for my schedule, great that I didn’t have to be IN Utah for it, and I really liked my writing group. I worked on a book idea I have about celebrating Lent.

April: Part two of the workshop, and ultimately, I didn’t get very far with my Lent book. It wasn’t what I wanted to focus on. I kept the draft writing and I plan to pick it back up at some point. But it’s not the right time yet.

I started weekly phone calls with McArthur and Ashli Carnicelli, the three of us a co-credit team on a book about Heavenly Mother. We made a lot of major decisions about the book in April and May – the how and why behind the whole thing affected the target audience, the title, and the structure. And that’s before we get to the actual words on the page. The title we settled on is Cherish: the Joy of the Doctrine of Heavenly Mother.

On a personal note, Adam and I started working on the closing part of our potential move – prepping our house to sell, sorting through everything we owned, and packing.

May: I met McArthur in person! And Liz Ostler! And Bethany Brady Spalding! The LDS Women Project presented an in-person fireside for McArthur and Bethany to talk about Heavenly Mother in New York City. My house was only 90 miles away, so of course I was going. It was Aster’s 16th birthday, so the two of us headed to NYC for the day. The fireside was small but a great conversation. And it was so great to meet all of these women in person who I’ve been working with for the past couple of years within the LDSWP.

I hosted/chauffeured McArthur for two more events. We had a brunch at my house the next day with some women in the Hartford area, including Jennie Loomis who is another Heavenly Mother writer. And we went to Boston for another fireside discussion hosted by Zach Davis, executive director of Faith Matters. It was a busy 48 hours!

Adam received two job offers this month, so that part of the move was finally taken care of. For Memorial Day weekend, our family went to DC for the DC Temple open house, and to drive around and scope out neighborhoods. We didn’t find where we DID want to live, but we definitely found where we did NOT want to live.

June: Writing and editing work did not happen this month. I was painting our entire house. Including the ceilings. We had it ready to go on the market on June 28 as planned, but the new job paperwork was lost in transit somewhere.

July: So we were in a holding pattern and our family had to take a break. Vacation 1 was to Western New York: Niagara Falls, Watkins Glen, some other state parks with waterfalls, and the Women’s Rights national memorial in Seneca Falls.

Vacation 2 two weeks later was the Palmer family reunion in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where we stopped playing board games only long enough to hike through the Luray Caverns.

I squeezed in an interview for the LDSWP between all of the drama, and occasionally checked in with the Cherish manuscript.

August: The move was excruciating. Adam had said that he felt we needed to be ready to turn on a dime – things were going to happen fast. We didn’t think it would be more than two months of waiting and then the entire move would happen in less than two weeks. But that’s precisely what happened. That is a whole other story.

September: In our new house in Virginia, I have an actual office! I’m not sitting in the corner of the living room!

Back to work on Cherish to get it finalized for the publisher submission. It is such a fantastic book and I’m so excited for it to be released to the world in April 2023. That was the priority for about eight weeks.

Marci McPhee, my Listen, Learn & Love co-editor, was in the DC area to visit one of her sons, and we got together for a lunch date. It is wonderful to be able to work with people online and get to know them through the magic of technology, but even better when you meet them in person. She’s much taller than I thought – she towers over me. I didn’t think I was THAT short.

October: Cherish went to the publisher on the 15th. I worked to get the LDSWP interviews geared back up because they’d been quiet since July.

November: I did a full manuscript review for a memoir of a transgender woman, who is planning to self-publish it. I continue to be astounded, in a bad way, at the emotional abuse people in my religion inflict upon LGBTQ people – it is the exact opposite of faith and love.

December: It’s like brackets! We got sick from Covid about 10 days into the year, and sick from Covid about 10 days to the end of the year. It was not how I had planned to spend Christmas, but here we are.

Listen, Learn & Love book 3 is now in the works, and I got the first chapter to work on the week after Christmas. Richard has already been working on it for awhile, and now it’s my turn with Marci.

Plans for 2023: 1 – I want to FINALLY hit the target of publishing every month for the LDS Women Project.

2 – the Cherish launch is going to be AMAZING. McArthur, Ashli and I will all be meeting in Utah for a couple of events in May. It will be the first time all three of us meet!

3 – I have a couple of other ideas for books that I’m tossing around in the back of my mind. We’ll see when they come to the forefront.

1 – Adam and I were balloon wranglers in the National Independence Day parade in Washington DC. We were on a team of five that steered an Uncle Sam hat down Constitution Ave.

2 – The first time I ever went to a symphony concert, it was in the auditorium of the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

3 – I have driven coast to coast across the US twice, Oregon to Washington DC both times.

4 – I was an extra for the movie “Sister Act 2,” in the competition auditorium scene at the end. No, you don’t see me on film. Yes, I saw Whoopie Goldberg and Lauryn Hill and the rest perform “Oh Happy Day” live.

5 – When I had two toddlers, I read 1000 different picture books to them. When I had three more toddlers, I read another 1000 different picture books to them. No repeats allowed.

6 – I showed up once to a wedding reception in jeans and a t-shirt because I was just dropping off a gift, but the groom greeted me in a bit of a panic. No one knew how to cut a large round wedding cake to plate for the guests … except me. (Rule 1: No triangle wedges like a pie.) I managed their cake table for over an hour. In jeans and a t-shirt.

7 – Adam and I went to DisneyWorld for our 1st anniversary and wore the bride/groom mouse ears. When we walked in the gate to the Magic Kingdom, we were asked to be the Grand Marshals of that day’s parade (we had to promise to wear the ears). We rode at the front of the parade in a car that had been owned and driven by Walt Disney.

The ones in bold have been, at some point in my life, my “home” temple.

West Coast

• Seattle
• Columbia River, Tri-cities, Washington
• Spokane, Washington
• Portland
• Medford, Oregon
• Oakland
• Los Angeles
• San Diego

Mountain West

• Salt Lake
• Provo, Utah
• Bountiful, Utah
• Jordan River, Utah
• Draper, Utah
• Mt. Timpanogos, Utah
• Logan, Utah
• Idaho Falls, Idaho
• Boise, Idaho
• Billings, Montana

mid-US

• Winter Quarters, Omaha, Nebraska
• Nauvoo, Illinois
• St. Louis, Missouri
• Dallas, Texas
• Houston, Texas
• Baton Rouge, Louisiana
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

East Coast

• Washington DC
• Hartford, Connecticut
• Boston
• Palmyra, New York
• Manhattan
• Orlando, Florida

outside the US

• Cardston, Alberta, Canada
• Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Sydney, Australia

Last but not least – the temple that I visited for the open house but have not yet been back to do ceremonial work: Philadelphia.

• The Well Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
• Why We Write About Ourselves by Meredith Maran
• The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
• Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living by Manjula Martin
• What Editors Do by Peter Ginna
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
• DIY MFA by Gabriela Pereira (do it yourself Master of Fine Arts)
• Big Magic: Creating Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert

The places I want to go with them, but haven’t yet, are

• the Freedom Trail in Boston
• Rocky Ridge, the Laura Ingalls Wilder farm in Mansfield, Missouri
• Alaska
• Yosemite National Park
• Outer Banks, North Carolina
• Hawaii
• more of the coast in Maine
• Silver Creek Falls, Oregon
• Amish country, Pennsylvania
• Stowe, Vermont

Adam wants to go to:

• Yellowstone and Tetons again
• Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon
• the redwoods on the California coast
• Mt St. Helens
• Olympic peninsula
• back to Seattle
• San Francisco
• Alaska
• Hawaii – the volcanoes
• Mesa Verde – Native american cave dwellings
• Grand Canyon, Arches, Zion, Bryce Canyon – that whole area
• Rocky Mtn national park in Colorado
• Not Mt Rushmore
• Smokies
• the Adirondack mountains
• more of the White Mountains
• Acadia again
• Florida Keys
• Glacier National Park
• more of the Shenandoah Valley
• Mammoth Cave in Kentucky
• Crater Lake

Outside the US:

• back to Prince Edward Island
• Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Buchart Gardens, Victoria BC
• Iceland
• Ireland
• Scotland
• the Alps
• Mediterranean – Malta, Croatia, maybe Greece
• Australia and New Zealand

the Kankamagus Highway, Conway NH

the Library of Congress Jefferson building, Washington DC

Grand Teton National Park, Jackson Hole WY

Pike’s Market, Seattle WA

the Sacred Grove, Palmyra NY

the Oregon capitol building, Salem OR

New England fall colors, Ellington CT

Disney World, Orlando FL

San Francisco CA

Nauvoo IL

Acadia National Park, ME

• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell
• Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl
• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• A Walk in My Shoes by Ben Schilaty
• Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou
• The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
• The Only Pirate at the Party by Lindsey Stirling
• Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd
• This is What America Looks Like by Ilhan Omar

I notice that only two are from men. I’ve read lots of memoirs by men, but they were not my favorites. I apparently connect more strongly with women’s writing.

I notice that they’re about life – here’s this situation I found myself in, and this is how I dealt with it.

There are three a bit more tailored to food, which is quite hilarious to my husband and me because I hate cooking. I cook for the utility of it, to eat, not because I enjoy the act and art of cooking itself. But obviously I like reading about people who do! Ha!

When I reviewed my entire reading journal, I noticed a lot of memoirs about hiking … but they did not make the cut for favorites. Huh.

Quilt projects in process:

1 – Extreme Reader – for daughter 2, and will look like a bookcase.

2 – Tenleytown – Adam and I met in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Washington DC, and daughter 4 wants a quilt of house blocks. I bought blue fabric for the sky, and all the houses are being made of scrap fabric I already have. (Yes, these are the last two of my children who have not yet received a Mommy Made It quilt – the other three are done and on their beds.)

3 – Christmas log cabins – one year during Christmas break, I randomly started sewing fabric strips into log cabin blocks to use up the Christmas scraps that had piled up. I made a dozen 12.5 inch blocks before I set them aside to, you know, make the quilts for my kids … that still aren’t done …

4 – holiday postage stamps – this was one of my first attempts at quilt blocks. I found fabrics that aligned with the twelve months of the year and started cutting them into 2.5 inch squares, and sewing them together. The blocks are not lined up at all because my seams were all over the place, so I need to start over on the whole thing. But I like the idea, so I will.

5 – blue yabba dee yabba doo – a friend gave me a whole bunch of blue quilt blocks she made/collected in a quilting group … but then didn’t actually want to make a quilt with them. One of these days, I’ll actually put them together, make however many more it needs to get to a good size, finish it, and maybe give it away.

6 – scrap jeans – I have an entire bin full of worn out jeans, just waiting for me to cut them up and make them into 48×48 inch picnic blankets, to sit on outside. I’ve made one so far. I originally wanted an eight-foot square blanket out of jeans, but thought that might break my washing machine with the weight. So I divided the idea into quarters, and when I have four, we’ll just put them all together in a big square.

7 – scrap bombs – I randomly started sewing very small scraps together that were in the same color family, and worked it out until I had a 12.5 inch block. My sister Mindy (who is my sewing partner) and I ran with it, and now we’re working on an entire scrap bomb quilt in purples and blues.