How I feel right now:
Now where’s my ocean and pretty sunset?

While also being the name of one of my favorite comedy films, today I can announce that after three years of submitting my work I have been accepted in a journal! I want to say a MASSIVE thank you to Chantwood Magazine for accepting my poem “To Inari” for their 12th issue, just published today. You can go here to find this issue (and past issues) on their website.

I received the acceptance offer from the magazine just before the year rolled over to 2018. That was an awesome way to tie up an otherwise rather stressful year.

It also feels really special for this to be the poem accepted out of everything I sent out last year. It’s one of the ones dearest to my heart and has a whole lot of me mixed into the batter. In fact it’s the first poem I wrote when I sat down to begin the collection I have in mind. It’s a poem in which I definitely tried to sound like no one else but myself. So it feels really, really good to see someone else believe in it too.

I first started submitting my work toward the end of college (2009-10), but it was rather sparsely done and kind of half-heartedly. I still had my mind on being a great fantasy novelist so poetry was just a side thing I did only when the urge really gripped me. I tried submitting again in 2012-13, but again only a few things here and there. I still wasn’t very focused on writing poetry just yet.

I didn’t really start submitting my work until 2015, and only got truly serious about it in 2017, when I finally gave in with my whole brain and said to myself, “Okay, you’re a poet, let’s do this.”

My only real goal for 2018 is to write more, submit more, and dedicate myself to poetry more; that includes my own, reading the work of others, and trying to be a bit more a part of the ‘community’, either online or otherwise. I’m not entirely sure where poetry is taking me, that’s what this blog is around to document, but I think I’ve committed myself to the ride.

I’m starting 2018 with a publication. I’m thrilled and ever so grateful. My hopeful goal is to see at least one more publication credit happen this year, but that is out of my hands, so instead I’m going to do my best to write, write some more, and submit, submit, submit…

*Photo by user jill111 at Pixabay, creative commons usage