Since January 2021, I’ve been keeping a list of my writing activity for each month (here’s last month’s). I do so partly as a form of encouragement for myself to show that I am still able to do some writing despite the energy-sucking terrors of our times, and partly as an archive that I can look back on in the future. As such, I will include negative happenings (e.g., receiving rejections), not just positive ones.
I think that it is important for me to share my list publicly as a queer disabled Latinx writer because mainstream discourse tries to either pretend voices such as mine do not exist or actively tries to suppress them. Whether one is part of a marginalized group or not, writing is an essential act of resistance in these terrible times, so I hope that my list offers encouragement to others.
The list is basically in chronological order.
1. Wrote a haiku or senryu on most mornings.
2. Worked on my novel.
3. Submitted eight poems to Frogpond.
4. Had one of the poems I submitted to Modern Haiku last month accepted for the next issue.
5. Had a review of Sofia Samatar’s The White Mosque published in the new issue of Mennonite Life.
6. Had a personal essay, “Writing the Storm,” published in Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice, edited by David Luis Glisch-Sánchez and Nic Rodríguez-Villafañe (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2023), 29-32.
7. Updated the Mennonite/s Writing Bibliographies.
Daniel Shank Cruz 
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