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 (which were especially terrible this month), 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 an oppressed 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. Received a rejection of my memoir manuscript.
4. Submitted the full manuscript of my memoir to three more presses and a proposal to a fourth.
5. Revised my website.
6. Got asked to contribute an ekphrastic poem to an anthology of artwork celebrating Anabaptism’s 500th anniversary in 2025 (the anthology will be published at the end of 2024), and accepted the invitation.
7. Had a haiku, “May Day another book ban,” published in Modern Haiku 54, no. 3 (Autumn 2023): 19.
8. Had three poems I sent to an anthology on the body last month rejected.
9. Had three poems published in the October issue of Kingfisher.
10. Submitted fifteen poems to Modern Haiku.
11. Submitted six poems to a haiku anthology.
Daniel Shank Cruz 
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