Writing Activity, December 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.

Writing-wise, this month was a good month! It was very exciting to get four award nominations for my poetry. The list is basically in chronological order.

1. Wrote a haiku or senryu on most mornings.

2. Finished the personal essay about Dungeons & Dragons that I began last month.

3. Had one of the poems I submitted to Frogpond last month accepted.

4. Submitted twelve poems to Blithe Spirit and had two accepted.

5. Submitted ten poems to Haiku Canada Review.

6. Submitted five poems to the 2025 Haiku Canada members’ anthology.

7. Received a Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award for Individual Poems nomination for “pennant race / the cameraman focuses / on the full moon” in #FemkuMag 37 (Autumn/Winter 2024).

8. Received a Red Moon Press Anthology nomination for “when did the magnolia blossoms disappear campus protests” in #FemkuMag 36 (Summer 2024).

9. Received a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Best Small Fictions nomination for my haibun “In my dream they kiss me on the Staten Island Ferry” from Modern Haiku 55, no. 3 (Autumn 2024).