Two poems to be published by The Louisville Review

I am thrilled that two of my poems have been selected by The Louisville Review for inclusion in the Fall 2020 issue. 

The poem "Scorpions and Grasshoppers" was first drafted for a class at Chatham University, during my MFA, but it was never completed. I finished the poem this summer--about fifteen years later. The Louisville Review was the first journal to read the poem, as they do not accept simultaneous submissions.

The second poem, "Requiescat," is a short poem that has been one of my favorites for the few years I've been kicking it around, trying to make it click. I felt a real sense of accomplishment in getting it to a place where it was ready to send out to editors; I am so pleased it has found a home here.

I plan to come back to talk about craft with at least one of these poems, once they've been published and I can comfortably share parts of them here. They are both quite brief; I like the short poem as a form.

The Louisville Review 

Rejections are also a fact of life.

I don't want to give anyone a false sense of what an easy, breezy time I'm having with finding publication homes for my poems. 

In case anyone needs a dose of my personal “one step forward, two steps back”—I received five rejection letters in three days this week.

 

All in all, I have received nineteen (19) rejection letters since July 25th of this year. I am not discouraged by them. A few have welcomed future submissions, but the bulk of them were emails that had no real detail in them at all. I learned long ago not to take rejection letters personally, and I don't. I always look for advice or encouragement (that is rarely received), and I usually re-read and often revise the poems that were rejected.

Then, they're sent out again. : )

"The Language of Sisters" is selected for publication by The Gateway Review

I have to be more diligent about blogging, if I'm going to use this to record my progress with my own written work. That being said, I have good news! A new poem of mine, "The Language of Sisters," will be published in the next issue of The Gateway Review: A Journal of Magical Realism.

I am always reluctant to classify anything I write as genre work, so I am pleased that the editors in this case agreed with me that this poem has a place in a journal that focuses on magical realism and fabulism.

I feel really good about this acceptance--the poem has not been read by another editor; it was brand new when I sent it off to The Gateway Review as a single-poem submission. This was a much-needed boost of confidence regarding my newer work. I feel like what I am writing this summer is my best work yet, but it's easy for me to say that.

I will add a link to the issue when it is available, and I will add the poem once it has been published. 

The Gateway Review