Writing Activity, June 2025

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 ARE ESPECIALLY TERRIBLE IN THE U.S. RIGHT NOW–make no mistake, the current “presidential” administration is a fascist one), so I hope that my list offers encouragement to others.

The list is basically in chronological order. It was an especially good month.

1. Wrote a haiku or senryu on most mornings.

2. Had two poems published in the May issue of Blithe Spirit (which came out a little late; oddly, the forthcoming issues of Modern Haiku and Frogpond have also experienced delays).

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

4. Had my fourth book,  a good possible year for an apocalypse: poems, published by Red Moon Press!

5. Had seven poems accepted by #FemkuMag as the “Femku Feature” for the forthcoming issue 39.

6. Worked on and submitted two panel proposals for the 2026 Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference.

7. Had three previously unpublished and four previously published poems included in confluence 10, which commemorated a virtual reading by this year’s confluence fellows on 21 June that I took part in.

8. Had a poem published in a confluence of mythology: Haiku Canada Members’ Anthology 2025.

9. Had two poems published in seashores 14, which came out in April, but I didn’t hear about it until this month because apparently they neglected to send me an acceptance email, lol.

10. Updated the Mennonite/s Writing Bibliographies.

11. Submitted fifteen poems to Modern Haiku.

12. Had my essay, “On Postcolonial Mennonite Writing: Theorizing a Queer Latinx Mennonite Life,” reprinted in In Search of a Mennonite Imagination: Key Texts in Mennonite Literary Criticism, edited by Robert Zacharias and published by Canadian Mennonite University Press. You can read the original essay here.