Life in the (Poetry) Fast Lane--
I feel as if I've sort of abandoned my blog and life and yet, I've been doing to so much recently. Here are a few things I've been up to this week--
1. Poets on the Coast: As you know, this was an incredible retreat, so good, we've decided to do it again next year September 7-9, 2012! It was a ton of work, but incredibly satisfying to me as a poet and as a person.
2. Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry: I spent 12 hours with Annette Spaulding-Convy yesterday preparing this anthology to go out into the world. After that, we worked on our website, Two Sylvias Press. Check it out and if you look around, you might see the cover of Fire On Her Tongue-- it's kind of awesome, if I do say so myself! (Oh and the photo on the cover was taken by poet Nance Van Winckel.)
3. Redoing my own website: Okay, this wasn't planned, but after a glass of wine and the feeling I could do anything, I ended up buying 2 years (at $2.50 a month!) at iPage and starting the transfer process of my website. I've been wanting to do this for years, but haven't known how to go about it, Annette said, "Just do it..." and the next thing I knew, I had 2 years of new web hosting and was transferring my account.
4. Crab Creek Review email submissions: Crab Creek Review now takes email submissions! We are really excited about this, but again, the set-up and the learning how we will all do this has taken some time.
Still, I'm absolutely thrilled we now offer this to our poets and writers! And since our editors are all over the Northwest, this will help cut down in the time we take responding to our submissions. (Note: if you do submit & it's taking awhile for us to get back to you, that's a *good* sign!) Learn how to submit by email here.
5. Applications: One grant and one job application, both still on my list to do.
6. My *own* Manuscript: Okay, it's kind of sad that what has fallen to the end of the list is my own work, but here's the deal--I'm on a week writing residency in October, so my work becomes my only priority for 7 full days.
Here's what I can tell you--
I have two projects in the works--a long nonfiction work that I have written and need to revise and a third poetry manuscript currently without a title and is mostly a poetry ghost floating through my head. I hope to put a body to this ghost and give her a nice hat in October.
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So there I am and what I've been up to.
What projects have you been working on or what are you looking forward to in the fall?
I'd love to hear what everyone is up to, I feel a little disconnected from the poetry world, but slowly tying knots back in the threads...
Congratulations on Two Sylvias Press and its first title, which features a stunning collection of poets. May both be a great success.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Maureen! it's been a lot of work but also very exciting and very fun. This is a recent theme in my life! ;-)
ReplyDeleteRe: email submissions, that's great, but I strongly recommend checking out Submishmash, too. We've been using it for a year at qarrtsiluni and it keeps getting better and better. A huge time-saver, especially when you have more than one editor reading and commenting on a given submission. Work in different genres can be routed to the appropriate editors, resticted to just one file type (e.g. Word), etc.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dave! I've heard about it. I am probably the only poet who has not submitted on it though (I did hear the one bad thing about it for poets is if you submit on it you can see all the places that use it and have rejected you.) ;-)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, good to know! Thanks!
Fire on Her Tongue looks beautiful - and such wonderful poets. Congrats also on your book award news and all of your other poetry goodness.
ReplyDeleteOne of the benefits of seeing those rejections on Submishmash is that it's easy to track what you've sent that got a "no" if you want to resubmit. You can also hide the rejections very easily. :)
What I've been working on -- last April I finished work on a book of poems. The main part of it is a connected series of poems about traveling on the west coast with a poet friend for a few days in 1984. I started work on the poems shortly after I got home from the trip, and it took 27 years and a few months to finish it.
ReplyDeleteSo since last April one of the things I've been working on is typing many of the poems onto my computer (many of the poems have been on the typewriter pages from years ago); and going through the poems and fixing little stuff.
Apart from that, I've been generally writing poems, and posting things on my blog now and then, and waiting for a forthcoming book of poems to come out from my publisher.
Enough to keep me busy...