Happy (almost) Tax Deadline Day! Hope you have your return prepared and that you are receiving a refund. Also hope you did not wake to snow as we did in Chicago. It’s odd certainly to get snow in mid-April and odder still to hear that baseball games are cancelled because of snow. Facebook has been in the news. I have used this spot previously to discuss my qualms about social media. Sometimes, more often than it used to be, I am tempted to quit Facebook etc. But in … [Read more...]
Mourning in Kalamazoo and other news
Hello. I missed writing to you. But a project came up that needed my immediate attention. Besides, I haven’t much to report. To tell you the truth, socializing has taken up a lot of time recently. I can always talk myself into going out because human relations are what count in this lifetime. So why say no to a nice lunch? No doubt, you heard about the shooting in Kalamazoo, MI. Elizabeth Kerlikowske (who wrote two poems in Solace in So Many Words) has written about the … [Read more...]
Submit locally . . .
If your holiday activities don't overrun your schedule, consider these local calls for submissions. C. J. Laity of ChicagoPoetry.com is doing another anthology: JOMP 19: Poetry of Protest. Here are the details. Deadline is 2/28/16. Measure, Cleave, Silver -- these are the three elements needed in your submissions to be considered for the Spring issue (#10) of 3Elements Review. Submission guidelines are here. Whitney Scott's Outrider Press in affiliation with … [Read more...]
Bugbears and bugaboos
The two things that work against me as a writer are distraction/ procrastination and dealing with rejection. I thought had 15 rejections in a row but then I counted and it’s more like twenty. Usually I can shake off a rejections, realize it is nothing personal but a business decision, not a reflection on my writing per se so much as on the journal's content . But you know what it’s like. Sometimes you place a little more hope in a submission, and you think: maybe this … [Read more...]
Mother’s Day
Happy Mother’s Day. This past week, the weather in Chicago has been extreme. Monday night we wore gloves. Thursday was in the 90s. The spring plants are late; some tulips just now blooming. The flowering trees are coming into their own. So far today’s weather in Chicago is near perfect. I don’t know if it’s the barometric pressure or allergies but I’ve had a persistent dull headache; so there, that’s one reason I haven’t been keeping up with timely posts. But the main reason … [Read more...]