another year lived
reflections on living in 2025
Back in August, inspired by a letter from a new friend, I declared publicly that I would start sending out a semi-regular snail mail newsletter. (You can send me your address if you’d like to receive future mail from me.) At the time I said monthly but I have since pulled back from that word, which feels reflexive and arbitrary.
Since August, I have attempted multiple times to draft the first of these snail mail newsletters, and each time I have scrapped the thing. I have much to say to the many and varied people I love and also to those whom I’ve crossed paths with in life at some point, have found interesting, and would like to continue to know and be known by. But as I scratched out draft after draft, each felt like it was missing its center somehow.
If you haven’t heard from me in four years, do you want suddenly to receive in the mail a list of every bird I’ve seen in the recent months? I want the answer to be yes, obviously, but I suspect it isn’t.
Early the other morning, I was driving through a sudden and unexpected snowstorm (RIP National Weather Service), making my way home from an attempt, once again in vain, to capture a glimpse and ideally some photos of a mink I encountered several months ago living in a pile of concrete rubble by a water treatment plant on the shores of Lake Michigan in the far northern suburbs of Chicago. I’d been awake for over 48 hours, and I realized what it is I want to say but also that it would not be a Great Idea to send this until after I got some sleep and allowed my mind to recover from whatever short-circuiting my insomnia might be inducing. Ultimately, it hasn’t changed much since I typed it up that morning upon arriving home, and here it is:
In 2025, my life changed, and so did I, necessarily and a lot. I turned 34 years old, making this my fourth year of being a number of years old that isn’t special or exciting in any meaningful way. I couldn’t make myself go get a salaried job, one relatively secure and aligned with the career I’ve built over the last decade and a half in nonprofits and/or advocacy. The dread that filled my body at the thought made it clear to me that I needed a break. Instead, I taught children creative thinking through art-making after school and on the weekends and I worked on my paintings whenever I could find the minimum energy and time required. I squeezed lemons at the bar my best friends bought and felt grateful for the opportunity to use my body and rest my mind. I didn’t quite manage to pay all the bills, but I didn’t go hungry and my housing is secure, thanks in part to family and community.
Whatever anxious ambition I carried into 2025 I’ve lost. Broadly, people’s approval of Me as a Person has become powerless as a motivator. The opinions of others, especially where it concerns my “professional” life, no longer feel relevant. I have nothing to prove.
I wrote poetry, made art, spent time with children, looked for birds, sought quiet places in their quietest hours, and read books. I directed time and energy toward my evolution as an artist and a person. I loved and was loved.
I learned how to put into words a core truth of my nature — I am driven in nearly all things by a feeling of urgency toward living that is at least accessible, if not acutely present, in me at all times. Life, to me, is a constant, ongoing miracle.
And so I set the GPS to direct me where I’m going without the interstate where possible and drive backroads the length of the Mississippi River from here to home.
I learn the language of my grandparents and use it to write poems about the moon.
And I fight for my neighbors, for everyone who is trying to survive under the grindstone of capitalism.
I find satisfaction in reminding myself that in 34 years, I’ve created and taken advantage of every opportunity I could to live. If a plane falls from the sky and crashes into my house while I sleep tonight, in the brief moment between being woken by the roar of the engines and being gone from this universe forever, I will feel no regret, only love and gratitude, to the world and to the people who I’ve met along the way.
It’s likely you’re one of them, so thank you.
I hope in 2026 that you find a way to live a version of your life that allows you to feel that same kind of satisfaction, whether that’s through throwing yourself at a Difficult Problem, knowing you’ve done what you could for your neighbors, or just allowing yourself the rest you need to be able to know where it is you want to go next.
To close, I’ll share some highlights of my 2025:
I started writing poetry again after a ten year break and submitted my poems to literary journals for the first time. Of the poems I sent out on submission, sixteen were accepted for publication by journals.
Among those sixteen are three that will come out early this year in a feature by The Rumpus (published by Roxane Gay). These poems are from a new project I’m calling Galimacha, a chapbook of poems I’ve written in English and Kouri-Vini (the endangered Louisiana Creole language of which I’m a heritage speaker).
“Another Hurricane Poem” was published by ONLY POEMS DAILY, my favorite poetry newsletter/publication.
“A Body in Public” was published by Salvation South and named the #1 favorite of the poems they published in 2025 by their Editor in Chief.
“Subsidence” was published by January House Literary Journal and nominated by their editorial leadership for a 2026 Pushcart Prize in Poetry.
I wrote a full-length debut poetry collection titled Tooth Gaps in the Archives. It won(!!!) the 2025 Button Poetry First Book Award. This award comes with a $1000 honorarium and a book contract. It will be out from Button Poetry in the fall and available to purchase from your nearest bookstore!
I joined a weekly writing workshop called Undercurrent led by Desireé Dallagiacomo. Desireé, alongside Donney Rose, was one of the two poets who I first learned from in a writing workshop they led in Baton Rouge a decade ago. That workshop has led to beautiful friendships with a few brilliant poets who I am excited to continue swapping work with for the decades to come.
I went to my first writing retreat, The Heart of It 2025 at Oz Farm in Mendocino County, California, also led by Desireé and a team of incredible writers — Olivia Dudding Rodriguez, Sebastian Grace, Karla Hernandez Torrijos, Sam Slupski, Oodie Taliaferro, and a small handful of folks who poured their efforts into making this such meaningful experience from behind the scenes. I started some of my favorite pieces of the year at THOI and my cohort grew my heart to 15x its previous size.
California Quail, Mendocino County, Francis Dylan Waguespack, 08/2025 I started a teaching practice called SPARK Studio, run out of my painting studio space at the Cornelia Arts Building in Chicago. I brought on two after-school families whose kids I teach once a week: Nico (11) and Rami (8) and their older neighbor Ashton (13). Those three taught me more about teaching than I taught them about art, and I’m excited to keep working with them in 2026.
I also started “art babysitting” Astrid (8) and Freya (6) once a week. I pick them up from school and we hang out at my studio, where they have free drawing and painting time, and they’ve quickly become my artistic collaborators, a source of regular inspiration, and just an absolute joy to have in my life. Our car chats are often the highlight of my week. We talk about anything and everything from national politics to the basics of risk management, from school culture to smooth jazz, and of course, we regularly discuss the genius of the TV show Gravity Falls.
I started teaching a group class on Saturdays for kids ages 5-8. I have a bunch of regulars who I had so much fun teaching this year, and we did an end-of-the-school-year art show in the lobby gallery space in my building in June. That show was definitely a highlight of 2025, and I’m excited to do it again this year.
I held three holiday camps: two days during the week of Thanksgiving, two days the week of Christmas, and two days the week of the New Year. Tucker and Rachel were gracious enough to allow me to run these camps at their book bar, Kibbitznest Books, Brews & Blarney, which they become the new owners of in August. The bar is closed Mondays and opens late on Tuesdays, so we had lots of room the stretch out. I hired two assistant counselors and welcomed 15 kids ages 6-10 for each camp. I was able to make a sliding scale for tuition, and around half of the families who participated didn’t have to pay at all. Running a group of kids that large was a new and fun challenge, and I am looking into camp licensure to be able to do more of these in 2026!
I started birding and got into bird photography. I’ve long been an enthusiastic hiker and backpacker, but since moving to Chicago in 2021, I had struggled to motivate myself to spend much time outdoors. I was spoiled by the dramatic landscapes of my previous homes in Louisiana and later Washington, D.C. (the city itself is not geographically that interesting, but the Appalachian mountains are within a couple hours driving distance, an easy commute for a day of hiking or a weekend of backpacking). Chicago seemed geographically boring. I’ve never been much for a flat walk through some suburban forest. In June, I decided that maybe I could get into birds as a way of getting back outside. It worked, and I spent much of the summer and fall driving out to forest preserves and state parks within a 100-mile radius to hike and take photos. I’ve started selling some of my prints at Kibbitznest.
I participated in my first art fair! It was a very small one hosted by the Illinois Environmental Council’s Young Professionals group as a fundraiser for climate change work happening here on the state level, and I was one of three artists invited. It has inspired me to start looking for venues to sell my art, and I’m planning on applying to some local art fairs soon. This year was my first doing prints of my paintings and taking on regular commissions, so I’m going to keep that going as well.
There was plenty else that could be worth mentioning, but I’ll save it for later. As I said, I plan on sending out a semi-regular newsletter, so there will be plenty of opportunity to keep y’all in the loop. Again, you can sign up for that here.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And feel free to be in touch — you can email me at francisdwaguespack@gmail.com. Let me know how your life is going! I’d love to hear from you.
xoxo
Dylan
It’s been such a treat catching glimpses of your life and pursuits since we first reconnected at the end of 2024! I am amazed at how everything you touch seems to turn to gold. Big things in the horizon for you, I can taste it!
Can’t wait to swap poems for the rest of forever