Cog's best essays of 2024

Editor's Note: This essay appeared in Cognoscenti's newsletter of ideas and opinions, delivered weekly on Sundays. To become a subscriber, sign up here.

I was at a writing and meditation retreat in western Massachusetts last weekend. The purpose of the retreat wasn’t so much to generate new work, as it was to explore different ways of establishing a “practice.”

Author Dani Shapiro led the weekend; she has 11 books to her name, including “Inheritance,” “Still Writing” and “Signal Fires,” plus a popular podcast. For most of the weekend, she sat barefoot and cross-legged in an armchair at the front of a church-like sanctuary. We didn’t spend any time together one-on-one, but she had a serene, thoughtful sort of energy. I can imagine she has a Joan Didion quote for almost any scenario, and has managed to stay grounded and remarkably likable, despite all of her success.

In between lecture and guided meditation, Dani asked attendees to respond to several writing prompts. And a couple of times, we read our responses aloud in small groups of three or four people. We weren’t critiquing or even analyzing the writing, just listening closely, in the hopes we might glean some “shimmer” of truth.

For me, this is a dream weekend. Time away in a beautiful place during a frenetic time of year to meditate, write, exercise and eat healthy food? Take me back. But this business of reading my half-baked writing aloud to strangers (however kind) felt wildly uncomfortable. I understand the irony here, trust me. A big part of my job involves reading and evaluating the writing of strangers — it’s how we find a substantial percentage of the work Cog publishes. I also share personal tales in this newsletter a few times a month. But it’d been a while since I was on the soul-baring side of the reader/writer relationship, at least in such unedited form.

You can imagine what happened next. People eventually found their courage, as we read the reflections we’d scribbled in our notebooks. (Me too.) And I was reminded, for about the millionth time, how making oneself vulnerable can be powerful for the writer — and also for the reader, who can sometimes relate in a visceral way. It’s the act of seeing and being seen.

We spent a lot of time during the retreat honing our ability to “notice.” At Cog, this oft-quoted Mary Oliver line is a beacon: “To pay attention / this is our endless and proper work.” Dani gave me a new quote to lean on, which comes from a Hebrew Sabbath prayer: “The days pass / the years vanish / And we walk sightless among miracles.”

In their own way, these essays help us avoid staggering through life without really seeing it.

We published 245 pieces of original writing in 2024, by nearly as many contributors. In their own way, these essays help us avoid staggering through life without really seeing it. In Cog’s best stories of the year, our authors wrote about politics and heartbreak, mass transit, running the Boston Marathon and navigating an empty nest. They did their best to capture what they knew in the moment — as a way to mark time, and perhaps, to help us all make some order out of life’s chaos.

Thank you for reading and writing with us.

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