Skip to main content

Kind Rejection

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Why Can't You Be Discreet?"

  How non-affirming theologies re-traumatized me - a sexual assault survivor - when I came out as queer and polyamorous to my family: I was raised in a protestant church. I was sexually abused multiple times by multiple Christian men when I was 13 to 15 years old. I did not understand that I was being abused, and I absolutely blamed myself for what was happening to me.  When I talked to my mom about just a portion of it, while it was ongoing, I asked her what we were going to do about it. She said, "We're going to pretend it never happened." For half my life, I lived by that. I did my best to pretend it never happened. I did this, partly, for the comfort of my family members. I did not want my parents to know about everything that had happened to me, because I did not want them to blame themselves for not protecting me. I did not want to tell any of my family members, because I did not want them to be hurt or upset or have strained relationships with people in the church....

Literary Provocation

Literary critic Juan Vidal wrote a  piece  for NPR Books entitled Where Have All The Poets Gone? In it he   says, " The Beat Generation is dead, and literary provocation in America, I submit, is at a low." He hungers for a time when poets were at the forefront of marches and rallies, speaking out against injustice.  I don't know what the world used to be like. I don't know if poetry used to have a broader audience than it does now.  Allen Ginsberg died when I was six years old. I've never marched for any cause. But maybe that's because when people in my generation support a cause or are enraged by an injustice, we don't take to the streets. We go to social media. We raise awareness by sharing youtube videos. We try to change minds by blogging.  All the great poets aren't dead and gone. They're online. After Michael Brown's death,  Sarah Kay  shared the poem  not an elegy for Mike Brown  by  Danez Smith  on facebook. Poets a...

Pilot

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...