Feeling Is First

I just received a very kind rejection email from the editors at 5x5 Literary Magazine . (Read their most recent issue here ) They seemed genuinely grateful to me for submitting work to them for review, which makes sense. If writers don't submit work, literary magazines have nothing to publish. In any case, their gratitude was a nice touch. I also appreciated their relatively quick response time of about 2 months. That's not bad at all. So I thought I'd share that 5x5 is a nice place to submit work.

I'm enjoying my first small successes as a poet. A poem of mine has been published by The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly  , and it resonated with Bill Cameron ( a writer whom I have never personally met) so much that he wrote a very nice blog post about it. Thanks kind stranger! I've had other small successes as well. I wrote my first spoken word poem and performed it for a group of close friends. They were all speechless. One of them said, "I would listen to that on repeat." This same friend keeps a poem that I wrote for her on all her electronic devices. A friend of hers (a stranger to me) saw the poem about her and said, "I'm stealing this and reciting it to my girlfriend." How crazy is that! Strangers want to recite my poetry to their girlfriends! Needless to say, these little victory moments have renewed my excitement for writing. I have two main goals in writing this particular blog. The first is to pay it forward. It made me so happy to see that Bi