The year’s ending & no one can quite believe it, or maybe we’re meant to ritually rehash this sentiment—the whole notion of a year, or linear time at all, being (bong cough) an ungraspable concept.
I came to the last Track Changes reading of 2025 with a swirl of energies. Onset of the “holiday season”—when, in the great collective spirit of fucking off from whatever grind, plans get flung in every which direction—& adjacent or unrelated money worries, etc. But also the fitfulness of waiiit, what have I done all year? Should I peek at screenshots of Mexico City flights for NYE in the group chat? Spark of pleasure-seeking synapses, & the experiential discretion that only sporadically muffles them.
The night before, I saw Patti Smith play acoustic & read from her new memoir, Bread of Angels, in a symphony hall that’s built like the body of a cello & wrapped in mahogany wood, resulting in heavenly acoustics. I had to close my eyes a bunch to keep from actually reeling. Every time I opened them & glanced at Gina, her face matched the awe & contentment I felt.
What counts toward my spiritual reserves are moments—however long they last—of stunned aliveness that yoke me to our collective cosmic deal. Feeling fully there, warm-blooded, part of something. Those are too ineffable to innumerate or tally toward a year-end list of accomplishments (but each to our own ways of accounting.)
All to say, I came to the event still wrapped in this earnest cloak, & maybe in part because of this, or something else that isn’t for me to identify, it felt like everyone had a similar aura. People hugging in the candle glow, coats & scarves flung over books & phones.
Sam broke our hearts about Sinead O’Connor all over again & didn’t read from The living god but instead a great essay about, among other things, the trolley problem. Austyn asked if it would be okay to lay her head down on the table when we played her song selections, these layered electronic ambient tracks, & I felt so glad that she did. Everyone leaned closer when she read the hypnotic first chapter of Hothouse Bloom, as if to adjust for the volume with their bodies.
I left feeling warm about how people seem to take this space as meant for however they show up. It is! Candidness about one’s love of musicals; coming a little or very sleep-deprived after a breakup; leaving early to put a kid to bed or huddling in the alley after to plot a nightcap.
Track Changes 003 playlist: Sam Heaps & Austyn Wohlers
Non-exhaustive list of topics discussed: pros & cons of text tattoos, Mormon hymns, earnestness is back (you heard it here first), writing in silence, the so-called taste freeze that happens when you turn 33, touring as a writer vs. touring as a musician, the liminality of green rooms, secret chapter titles, the false allure of productivity rituals
If you’re ready to (Bob Seger voice) turn the page & start planning midwinter slump antidotes, join us on January 6 for Grady Chambers (Philly) & Devin Kelly (NYC)!
✧ ✦ Tickets & more info ✦ ✧
Grady Chambers is the author of the novel Great Disasters (Tin House Books) and the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions). His poems and stories can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Joyland, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and he lives in Philadelphia. Find him online at gradychambers.com.
Devin Kelly is a high school teacher in New York City. He writes the newsletter Ordinary Plots, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Longreads, LitHub, The Year's Best Sportswriting, and more. His first novel, Pilgrims, was published in 2025 by Great Place Books.
See you on the other side–
♡ Alina