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. Updated the Mennonite/s Writing Bibliographies.
3. Submitted three poems to an anthology on the body.
4. Worked on my novella and submitted it to a press’s chapbook open reading period.
5. Received a rejection for a personal essay that I sent out about a year ago and had honestly forgotten about submitting because it wasn’t through Submittable.
6. Got booked to do an interview with Casey Plett at McNally Jackson Books’s Seaport location in November.
7. Agreed to serve as an associate editor for a new haiku journal.
8. Received a Best of the Net nomination for my poem “winter sky smell of leather in the dungeon” from the Autumn 2022 issue of Heterodox Haiku.
9. Received the full cover design for my forthcoming book Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature.
Daniel Shank Cruz 
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