Writing Activity, June 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, and partly as an archive that I can look back on in the future. As such, I 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. Submitted ten poems to Blithe Spirit and had two accepted.

3. Submitted a micro-chapbook of poems to a press.

4. Continued taking an online poetry workshop, Poetics of Resistance, and had my second piece workshopped.

5. Had a poem, “daffodils / opening / the drawer of old maps,” published in Frogpond 47, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 2024): 9.

6. Had a poem, “twilight / the glow / of her text,” published in Modern Haiku 55, no. 2 (Summer 2024): 22.

7. Submitted a fellowship application to a journal.

8. Worked on some revisions to my memoir manuscript.

9. Had an essay on Diane di Prima’s haiku that I submitted to a journal several months ago accepted for publication in their fall issue.