Tag Archive | publishing poetry

Accepted!!

Jan26

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

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Why I Don’t Publish My Poetry on My Blog

Dec3

This is something I have been asked many times in person, even if so far it has not yet come up on the blog itself.

“Why don’t you publish your work on your blog? Don’t you want people to read it?”

Of course I want people to read it. I want that very, very much. But there is the very sticky issue of “previously published work” to deal with.

Right now I am working to find a place for my poetry in literary journals, both online and in print. Later, I hope to work toward a chapbook or a full-length collection. Publishers of books often don’t mind terribly if some of the poems they are publishing in a book first appeared in journals. It’s a combination of having a resume of your work as well as knowing that the readers of those journals have already seen your name, which might help in marketing. But publishers of journals, in most cases, want to be the first to show off your work. Many journals pride themselves on providing content never-before-seen. If a reader could go online to a blog or read a social media post and get the same content, why would they read or subscribe to a literary journal?

So unfortunately you will not see my work published here. This blog is for my musings on the process of writing and the process of publication, as well as other things that catch my fancy, both literary-related and not.

If at any time you would like to see where you can find my work, the Publications page will always be kept updated. For print journals and anthologies it will link you to a location to purchase that particular edition. For online journals and anthologies, you will find a link directly to my work or to the home page for that issue.

I hope this clears up for anyone wondering why I never post poetry. With any luck, the Publications page on this blog will continue to grow and you can find me there!