Writing Activity, November 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 (which were especially terrible this month!), so I hope that my list offers encouragement to others. If you, like me, have been having a difficult time since the U.S. election, you may find Bethany Karsten’s Trans Literature Preservation Project helpful as one set of concrete steps you can take to prepare for the horrors that might be coming.

The list is basically in chronological order.

1. Wrote a haiku or senryu on most mornings.

2. Submitted fifteen poems to Modern Haiku and had one accepted.

3. Submitted seven poems to a food haiku anthology and had one accepted.

4. Submitted my novella manuscript to a press and had it rejected.

5. Submitted eight poems to Frogpond.

6. Had the second of my commentaries on my fellow confluence fellows, on Nicky Gutierrez, published.

7. Began working on a personal essay about Dungeons & Dragons.

8. Had three poems, “pennant race / the cameraman focuses / on the full moon,” “early evening sunset the color of whiskey,” and “giving blood the nurse’s cologne,” published in #FemkuMag 37 (Autumn/Winter 2024).

9. Had two poems, “cloudless day on the steps the skateboarder’s shadow” and “too early to identify the birds outside my window jetlag,” published in Blithe Spirit 34, no. 4 (November 2024).

10. Had a poem, “bottom of the glass / mixing up / my wives,” published in Humour: The British Haiku Society Members’ Anthology 2024, edited by Alan Peat.