Writing Activity, January 2024

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 genderqueer bisexual 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. and 4. Updated my website to include an Interviews page because I had an interview about my new book published in Sacred Matters Magazine, and I now feel that I’ve done enough interviews that it makes sense to make them more visible as a subgenre of my work.

5. Attended the Modern Language Association’s annual convention and chaired a panel on Samuel R. Delany’s work.

6. Had my memoir manuscript rejected by a publisher.

7. Submitted twelve poems to Acorn.

8. Submitted five poems to a queer love poem anthology.

9. Began writing my presentation for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference, which is next week.