It’s been a long time since I last touched this blog! This comes as late news, but I’m happy to announce that after an (unintentional) two-year hiatus while my attention was focused on classroom teaching, I’m back to working on my manuscript and submitting again, and at the end of last year, I was fortunate to be featured in my first journal publication since 2016. In December 2018, I was lucky enough to have two poems picked up by wildness, an exquisite and ethereal online lit mag out of the UK’s Platypus Press.
One of the pieces they took, “Book of Hours,” is the (current) titular poem from my still-in-progress full-length manuscript; it’s an elegy for my dad, one of a number that
The other piece, “A Skein of Geese,” comes out of a fun project that I began over the summer. For the past few years, I’ve been working with middle school writers, and I love to assign them poetry exercises that will spark their imaginations and cause them to think about language in new and surprising ways. Last June, as I was returning to my own writing practice after such a long time away, I decided that it only seemed fair to assign myself the same types of prompts I like to give to students. I practiced writing with “synesthetic description.” I tried writing with more attention to smells (
I’m grateful to Michelle Tudor of wildness for taking a chance on me and my little experiments. And I’m even more thrilled that these, my first published pieces in over two years, appear in the same issue as an interview with my dearest writing friend and LR partner, Mia Ayumi Malhotra. (Whose first collection, Isako Isako, came out last fall and who, as usual, has endless pearls of wisdom to share in the interview!)
If you have a moment this weekend, I’d be grateful if you’d hop over to wildness 17 and give the issue a little love!