Publication Success

After a string of rejections this year, I just got some really magnificent news: my poem, "There Are Bright Signs in the Crystal Ball--I'd Say Yes," was picked up by The Minnesota Review. It won't be coming out until the Spring of 2014, but omg thank you!

I was starting to feel a wee bit dejected, despite my best intentions, and second-guessing myself, so this is a really big redemption for me.

Also there's the fact that this is one of my family poems, which I consider the core of my thesis, so that made things especially rewarding. This particular poem is about my aunt Debra, who passed away before I was born. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to come into possession of her purse last year. Besides being filled with letters to her friends and ex-boyfriend, it also had a secret compartment where she'd kept those fortunes that the mechanical fortune tellers in boxes print out for you. There were really bizarre, kind of sexist fortunes in there, so I wanted to kind of pair them against the letters to her ex and recreate what I imagined bits of her life were like. This is just reassurance to me that I'm on the right track, and I was glad to pay homage to a part of my family that was taken too soon.

So now I'm feeling revitalized and optimistic again. Yay!