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.A. RIGHT NOW–make no mistake, the current “presidential” administration is a fascist one), so I hope that my list offers encouragement to others.
It was a good month, highlighted by a book manuscript acceptance! The list is basically in chronological order.
1. Sent some rejection emails in my role as one of Frogpond‘s haiku/senryu co-editors.
2. Had a good possible year for an apocalypse: poems assigned in a college course.
3. Submitted eight poems to seashores.
4. Submitted fifteen poems to Acorn and had one accepted.
5. Had a poetry collection manuscript that I sent to a publisher’s open call accepted for publication later this year.
6. Had six poems accepted by a forthcoming saijiki project.
7. Submitted five poems to Haiku Canada’s 2026 members’ anthology.
8. Participated in a Zoom meeting announcing the results of the Haiku Poets of Northern California’s 2025 San Francisco International Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka contest, for which I judged the senryu category.
Daniel Shank Cruz 