There has been much in the news within literary circles lately about literary journals with questionable practices, mostly focused upon submission fees and how these fees are used. No one should question the idea that it is expensive to run a literary magazine with such costs as editing and overhead, and most importantly, not everything about submission fees should be seen as negative. It is possible that when writers must pay a nominal fee to submit their work to literary magazines, they may be inspired to submit a more edited and stronger piece. However, it’s one thing to pay $3.00 to one journal to submit but let’s face it, most writers must submit the same piece to many magazines if they want to increase their chance of having it published. This is why submission fees can really add up. There is also the idea that if submission fees are charged, less submissions will come in and this will lead to faster publication decisions by editors. Like it or not, it does seem that submission fees are here to stay. If we accept that fact, then we must understand some realities about submission fees.
I am not going to name names here, but some well know literary journals have been engaging in practices that are shameful. It’s hard enough and expensive enough to be a writer trying to get work published in literary journals without these bad actors but, unfortunately, they do exist. One well known journal accepted submissions and charged for over a year but had already stopped reading and publishing new word. They later folded and changed their name. I have personally submitted to journals several times only to realize they had gone defunct. I was never able to get my submission fees back. Recently, several well-known journals held contests, charged the high submission fees customary in literary contests, and never announced any winners. Suffice it to say that just because something calls itself a literary journal doesn’t mean it should.
So, what is a writer to do? How can we protect ourselves from unethical practices and scam journals? Here are some practical ideas to consider.
Is the journal listed on reputable databases such as Poets and Writers, Submittable, NewPages.com, Clifford Gastang Literary Magazine Rankings, MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR
Is the journal’s website polished, free of grammatical and spelling errors. Is it easy to navigate? Does is look professional? A poor website design might be a cause for concern.
Do their publication terms comply with normal industry standards. Publication guidelines should always be clear and concise and include all requirements such as formatting parameters.
Be very concerned if a journal is asking for all rights to your work. They should be asking only for first serial rights.
RED FLAG: Is their submission fee unreasonably high? Are they charging $15.00 as an example when most journals are at $3.00. This should worry you.
Do they explain why they are charging a submission fee of any amount?
If they do charge submissions fees, do they also have yearly contests where they offer a monetary prize?
It should never be difficult to find contact information on the journal’s website, and there should be some explanation of who the editors are and what their editorial process is. A journal should have a physical address and an email address.
Look at their publication history. Have they been publishing consistently? Can you purchase copies of the journal on their website? Look at the most recent issue. Look at the quality.
If the journal has a blog on their website, is it being maintained?
Does the journal submit work to contests such as Pushcart Prize or/and O. Henry Awards?
Do they have a social media presence such as Facebook where they regularly promote the work they publish?
Be aware of any unrealistic or boastful claims about readership.
If you are submitting to a contest, look to see if the list of winners from last year’s contest is listed on the journal’s website. It should be.
Be aware if a journal repeatedly pushes back contest deadlines.
I have been submitting to literary journals for many years and have been lucky to have some level of success. Be aware of where you are sending your writing, but don’t let a few bad apples dissuade you from submitting to literary journals!!! The overwhelming majority are ethical to a fault and the writing world would be lost without literary journals. They are an invaluable part of our art form. I read literary journals, subscribe to them, admire them immensely and thank them for all the wonderful writing they bring to the world. So, happy submitting to my fellow writers and the best of luck to you all!
~Ginny
Virginia Watts has been fortunate to have published nearly 100 pieces in literary magazines including CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost Magazine, Broadkill Review, Two Thirds North, Hawaii Pacific Review, Sky Island Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, Evening Star Review and Streetlight Magazine. Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net, in 2019, Watts won The Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction.
Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:
That’s a photo of my local Trader Joe’s, where I was yesterday buying dog treats and ice cream and flowers and frozen gnocchi. I like Trader Joes. I like it because it is small, and what I mean by small is there are limited choices. I can easily super-overload a cart because I am curious… Ooo, what’s that fruit? I should buy six of those! I like Trader Joe’s because it saves me from that. BUT, I hate checking out there. I HATE IT. Why? It challenges all the introvert things about me. Their checkers are trained? told? naturally? forced to be? chatty!
I am horrible at small talk. I am awkward, and dorky. And I am exhausted afterwards (mentally). I am more a fan of self-checkout, but I do feel like I’m taking someone’s job every time I use one. I long for the A&P days, where the checker was (usually) a woman, and she was too tired on her feet to talk, though she’d smile, and be efficient.
Yesterday the TJ’s was fairly empty, so there was no need for a bagger at my check-out, and I always will bag, but the extra person helps diffuse the awkwardness, because then there’s two people to make annoying small talk with. Usually I end up pulling out my phone to show them a photo of my dog, and they pretend to care. My dog is extra cute though, but I still know we’re all pretending.
Oliver… The Trader Joe’s display photo.
Yesterday the guy checking me out was trying to talk to me, and I was rapidly bagging (I bring huge bags, and try to organize by FREEZER, FRIDGE, PANTRY, but I’ll get desperate to keep up and be done talking, and just start chucking stuff in.). He was trying to talk, but his heart wasn’t in it, and neither was mine because, that checker, he kinda looked like this:
He looked quite a bit like that photo, which is a photo of my brother circa 1978 or so.
That TJs checker looked so much like my brother. A little taller, but otherwise spot on, and I have been checked out by him before, but yesterday it was the light or something, or the quiet between us. I know people not in California think TJs are tripping hazards here, and they’re not. They’re usually a good 20-40 minutes apart, so I kinda wish this guy would get another job. You know what I’m saying? Because there isn’t another TJs close by, and because that checker looks like my brother circa 1978.
My brother died in 2020, in June or July I don’t really want to remember the date. I found out he was dying hours before he did. He was up in a hospital in PA while I was two hours south in DE. Covid was raging, so they were not going to let us come see him. He didn’t have Covid, He had gangrene, probably from a bladder infection he had never fully recovered from, and he didn’t like doctors because they made him feel mortal and dumb, and he hadn’t gone to one for about five months while everything in his body was probably going bananas, and when Covid hit he was really afraid of dying from it, and probably feeling pretty sick most days anyway. My sister-in-law didn’t force him to do anything about it, probably because he was grumpy, and she is an avoider, and they both were potheads and pill heads and whatever when they could get it. They both had a tendency to approach family gatherings with something in their systems to take the edge off of my mother, and, I sometimes think, maybe that is the best way to approach her. Maybe I missed something great about coping there. Which makes me laugh to think of, and would have made my brother laugh his butt off.
My brother was very funny. He raised me to love George Carlin and The Three Stooges. One of the times he most liked in our history together was when he was visiting us in Los Angeles, and I got us all singing narcissistic songs. You take any song that is about romance/lust, etc. and you turn it into a song about yourself. So, Gladys Knight’s classic, “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” becomes [I’M the] “Best Thing That Every Happened to Me.” Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” becomes [When I think about ME] “I Touch Myself.” Get it? We laughed our butts off, and he always talked about it, and we often tried to recreate it, but sometimes with humor the success is situational (you had to be there), and that perfect night was like that. And maybe he was a little high too, and I didn’t know it.
You can’t recreate those perfect moments in life, and trying often leaves you cold. My brother was a great practitioner of trying to recreate the things he loved, trying to hold onto vapor.
Here is his band in the early ’70s:
Bill is in the front right.
So cute. And here they are in the late 2010s:
Bill is in the front left.
Bill is gone, but the ones who are still here are still playing together at the bars local to Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. Most of those guys, living and dead, never got their shit quite all the way together. They could always play, and play well, but they were still partying like the Rolling Stones circa 1968. And maybe still being able to get out there and rock the house is a sort of having it together that’s just a bit different from how I would define it.
I miss my brother, and it’s awkward to have a checker at TJs remind me of him so completely that it renders me unable to make small talk or even flash the photo of my dog. My brother had a lope-y way of walking not unlike Shaggy in Scooby Doo, and this guy moves like that. It’s awkward because grief is awkward and comes casually loping up behind you at the most unexpected times. Someone told me grief is a metal ball in the glass jar of your life, and as you move away from the time of your loss the jar gets bigger, but the ball is permanently there, and rolls around, bumping up against everything, sometimes quietly, sometimes banging the glass hard enough that you think it will crack. Poetry is a very helpful receptacle for grief. I think poetry works well because it is often short, and emotional, and vague, not pinning grief down to a specific grief style or emotion or reason. Poetry might move the ball away from the glass, or give you a little breathing room when your lungs have constricted so much you feel like your ribs have laced up extra tight around them. My favorite brother poem has long been this one, and was so even before my brother winked so quickly out of existence.
But today I found another one. It loosens up the tight ribs too, if by loosening them you mean jabbing an ice pick in there. But ice pick or not, it does what it’s supposed to do, connects you directly to the pain, so you can feel it, instead of dodging it all the time. Then you can move on with your life, even as the brother you miss cannot move on with his, which feels supremely unfair to me, and I really value being fair, so there’s that. But for that day, that moment, at least, you can get back to what you were doing that you are doing because your life is still going. This poem is by William E. Stafford, and is called “Brother.”
We’re so lucky The Poetry Foundation exists, and has this database of poems just waiting to tend to our needs.
If someone gave you some paper, scissors, glue, rocks, crayons, clay, wire, papier-mâché, bowling balls, aluminum foil, fabric scraps, paint, sea glass, what would you create? What would your sculpture of grief look like? What medium would you use? What shape would you make? If you were only allowed eight words, one for each day in a week and one extra just in case, what words would you write? How would you arrange them? Would they be poetry, lyrics, a string of obscenities lobbed at the world, or a short burst of prose? Would they be quiet, loud, or snap, crackle, and pop? And would you want them to tighten up your ribs, or let them loose? Could you share it with the world or would it be too awkward for prime time?
Some of us come to that hard, clinking, lurking ball-bearing version of grief mercifully later in life than others. The less time you have to carry it the better: it means you had a longer shot at joy. But it finds us all eventually. I think that when we’re younger we grieve for ourselves: all the things we haven’t put into place yet that we long for, all the things we want to be that we just haven’t attained. As we get older, from any point in space because we all live at our own pace, we grieve more for others, and our missed opportunities to be with them. But Bill was. He lived. I had a brother.
Anthony, you hit a number one. Congratulations! Although Anthony’s poetry is written in English, not Spanish, it does seem that his adopted cultures are loving his work. To read any of Anthony’s work is to know he is an extremely talented author, and now Amazon agrees! I hope readers in the US and in his home country of Ireland agree, and that this will bring readers to Anthony’s work from all over the world, because I really am a fan. And, apprently, so is book reviewer Emma Lee who says:
Jonah’s Map of the Whale is an exploration of self, self-identity and how much personhood is formed by external circumstances, through three different characters. One is pushed along by external pressure and lacks agency. One has agency but fears she carries a hollowness. One is faced by a life-changing experience that he can sink or swim from. Each character feels fully-developed. Anthony Doyle has created a quirky look at a set of beings tackling very different philosophical and physical circumstances, prompting readings to consider who might survive, who might thrive and which one reflects the reader best. It’s a map worth reading.
I live in Los Angeles, and it’s been a little bit unnerving to see what is on the news about us.
When I first moved to Los Angeles I lived in Venice Beach, on the Westside, by the Pacific Ocean. Venice Beach is beautiful, and weird, and has been heavily gentrified even since I lived there, and is now almost evenly split between people living in three million dollar homes, and people living in tents. It’s a problem on both ends of that financial situation. Of course, can you imagine being homeless? You would pitch a tent in a minute if you could, and you would definitely want to be in a temperate climate where people were laid-back, and where there were a lot of other people just like you around, to make you feel less obvious, and safer. I watched a video just yesterday about people who have chosen to live in vehicles (cars, campers) not in Venice Beach, but in the USA, and how they (being very digital) will meet up and hang out in different free camping areas to have a community. And why would people without homes be any different?
Los Angeles has a homeless, or unhoused, people problem.
Los Angeles, and all of Southern California, has a lot of immigrants. Many of them are legal immigrants, some are illegal. Some are only here for work. Many want to get enough money through work here to send home to family in order to eventually rejoin family. I have met many people with that plan from Asian countries and countries south of the USA. Those folks are not wanting to live here forever. They’re trying to make enough money that everyone can live well, back home. But there is no mechanism for that of any workable consequence here in the USA. The visas for work are not for waiters and day laborers. The visas for work are for IT people and doctors, that sort of person. In Los Angeles we know that the Uber driver, the waiter, the grass cutter, is probably not here legally, and not intending to stay. We get it, and I think, for the most part, we’re happy to have the low-cost help.
Then there are other people who want to stay: people who came here fleeing violence, people who came here as babies and have only known here, people who came here as students and experienced so much prosperity and freedom compared to life back home that they don’t want to go back. As Americans we cannot really understand how different life can be, especially for the very poor, and women in general, in other countries, even countries like China or India that we might see as very western. When we were in China (my husband Dave and I) to adopt our daughter in 2009 we met our daughter at our hotel, a huge, lovely hotel, about twenty floors or so, and absolutely where the wealthy and foreigners stayed. As soon as my daughter was placed in my arms I lost the ability to sleep, and so I spent the long nights in the hotel hanging out in the bathroom, so I didn’t wake up Dave and daughter, and it had a floor to ceiling glass window next to the shower, and I could see right down the main street of Nanchang. Next to us was another tall building, and each balcony had laundry and sausages hanging off of it. And if we were on flour fourteen of the hotel, it was probably floor eleven of the apartment building that was completely blown out. I don’t know what had happened there, but it was rubble like you might see in a Tom Cruise movie. And above it, and below it, the balconies had laundry and sausages hanging. Rain or dry, explosion, crumbled concrete or not, the balconies had laundry and sausages hanging. And on the streets, during the day, scores of people stood over lit barrels boiling eggs to sell, any kind of egg you could possibly want: quail, chicken, duck, and probably more I am too American to think of. The eggs came in all shapes and sizes, and the egg vendors huddled over the steamy pots trying to stay warm.
When we went into Nanchang from the airport we started first driving (in the passenger van with the other parents) through marsh, wetlands, dark and stinky, Then the marsh started having bits of high and dry land, and as soon as those appeared, there were tents and carboard shacks on them: people were living there. And as we progressed on (it was a long drive from the airport) there were more shacks. As the land got more livable the shacks got a little bigger, and then there were small villages with tiny crumbling houses, and then towns, and finally cities, and Nanchang was a huge city with underpasses and overpasses and pedestrian tunnels due to there being too much traffic on the eight-lane streets for people to cross safely. And in Nanchang the people lived stacked up twenty stories high in little efficiency apartments where their clothes and their dinner hung outside in the high breeze all year long, hot, cold, wet, dry, frozen or not. In Nanchang the city was so full and so busy that even at three in the morning there was a constant cacophony of car horns blaring below me, way below, fourteen stories below, in the street. The noise was significant, even up as high as I was. It was bumper to bumper car lights all night long. The bathtub in my bathroom was deep, and the hot water was endless, and I could soak and secretly watch the entire world below, all night long as I worried I was going to suck as a parent.
The day after we got our daughter we took the van across the street. The street was so large and so busy we had to take the van to safely get across, and we went to the “adopt your child here” building, which was easily fifteen stories high itself. I remember my ears popping as we rode the elevator up. When we got to the “this is where you give the boxed ginseng from Pennsylvania and sign the forms” floor we got off. It was freezing cold on that floor, and there were no electric lights turned on, so it was fairly dim, on a rainy forty degrees day, as we dipped our thumbs in red ink and signed our papers severing our child from one nation and attaching her to another. Each clerk we dealt with was wearing a winter coat and gloves with the fingertips cut out, over their business suits. I felt, in all honesty, both so lucky, and also that I had saved my tiny daughter from a hard life.
Dave and I ate Chinese food (of course we did) eagerly and with relish the whole time we were there, but there was one afternoon where I had been dragging Dave and our baby daughter exploring around, that we were just tired, and we went to a McDonalds in an eight-story shopping mall. I remember it was elevators only, and people were always waiting, and they would literally leap over you to get in. I think we waited at least three times to get on. When we got off and made our way to the McDonalds the line was about two blocks from the restaurant door. It moved quickly, and as we went inside I saw that they had the tables McDonalds had had when I was a kid, like cafeteria tables with immovable swivel chairs attached. Each chair had three people sitting on it. Let that sink in. One small hard plastic swivel chair, and three butts. Yes, butts in China are very much smaller than in the USA, and that tells you something right there that has nothing to do with genetics.
I remember when all of us (all across the world) who had submitted our paperwork in March of 2005 were talking in a Yahoo group about everything China-adoption related. It was common for people from the same month to design a t-shirt to wear in China so that they could spot each other (as if white people with Asian babies wasn’t enough of a clue). And I remember a whole passel of American members got up in arms because our group wanted a rainbow on the shirt, and those up in arms didn’t because they did not want to be associated with anything “gay.” And I remember thinking, in that moment, as if a lightning bolt had hit me, You may have been able to check a box for a gender preference, but even that wasn’t a guarantee, and what if your child turns out gay? Are you not open to whoever your child turns out to be? It wasn’t the first or last time the adoption process has taught me lessons about how little control I have in life. But what really hit me then was how it made me view those parents-to-be both as dumb, and unkind.
If you have not experienced life in a place with real poverty, you cannot imagine what people would do to get their families out of it. Could you sit all day in the cold, trying to sell your steaming eggs alongside hundreds of other people steaming eggs, baby tied to your back, little dog on a newspaper on the ground, everyone trying to stay warm and have enough to eat?
Los Angeles is okay, folks. It’s fine today, and it was fine last week, even with the homeless and all the immigrants of varying status. It’s actually a place where, rich or impoverished, people are generally in a good mood and kind and a heck of a lot more pleasant than my Philly neighbors used to be. (No disrespect Philly; you’re a great town, and you have your reasons.) We’re not bothered by immigrants at all. We are bothered, in many different ways, by some homes costing three million and some homes being cardboard shacks like in the marsh in China. But the current administration is not helping us with either of those problems. And it is potentially creating a lot more that we don’t need or deserve simply because most of us in this county voted for the Black woman.
But in this moment, what difference can I make? What can I do to help?
It is another hard lesson to learn that sometimes the only thing to do is to witness, to see, and to report back, honestly, on what you saw. There are many things that feel out of control right now, and many that you, also, probably want to stop, even if your list isn’t the same as mine. Take a picture, with your phone, camera, or mind, and share it. Write it down, make a picture with your words. Share it, and accept other people’s experiences too. You’re not playing fair if yours are the only right ones.
The reason I wrote this post is not because of what is happening in Los Angeles, actually. It is because my fellow member and friend Nadja shared The Gaza Poets Society Substack with me. When Hamas kidnapped those people from Israel it hit me in the heart. I’m of an age that indicates that I, and my fellow kids of the 70s and 80s, were raised on The Diary of Anne Frank as a big thing in school, and I went on, as a child, to order many other Holocaust-related books from the Scholastic catalogue. I read so many that I sometimes couldn’t sleep as I tried to plan how I would help my family escape from the Nazis (and I’m not Jewish by nationality or religion). And the first book I edited professionally was a Holocaust memoir. I just felt that Jewish people needed a place to be safe from the rest of us, and the kidnappings in 2023 underlined that.
But in college I read an interview with Yassar Arafat that changed how I thought about Palestinians. Though I still felt that Jewish people needed a place to be safe, I began to see that Palestinians also needed a place. Since the kidnappings happened in 2023, it’s been hard to watch the fallout. But, like the administration sending Marines we don’t need to Los Angeles to try and break it, there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about what the kidnappings unleashed.
Still it is important to know, to witness, to not turn your eyes away from something because it’s intractable, no matter what you think or feel is truth. And so I wanted to find a way, in this post, to share that Substack with you. The poetry is both well-written and moving. And as all writers share the feeling of “writing into the void,” I think the one thing we could give them is eyes on the page. It doesn’t mean we turn our back on one group for another. It does mean we take a look at all that is going on in the world of poetry. People in the USA often say, in the years since 2016, that not everything is political. But that is not true by a long shot. There is a reason some people in China shiver in a cardboard house in a marsh and some shiver next to a pot of boiling eggs in an actual metropolis. There is a reason why some people died of Covid and others did not. And in the USA, where most of us in this group are, the people in the nation do not (as a sweeping generalization, of course: so many shades of grey) easily understand how dangerous and revolutionary poetry often is in the rest of the world. Revolutionary precisely because it is a way of witnessing.
It seems not at all odd, to me, to hear that bombs are falling in Gaza, to see it on the news. Sadly it doesn’t shock me at all. But it does shock me to hear that there has been a mass shooting in Austria, and it does shock me to see that Marines are in downtown Los Angeles. It’s a matter of degree, of what narratives and images we are accustomed to versus those we are not.
As for what you see on the news, that’s not what I’m experiencing here, though I can hear helicopters for twenty-four hours now. It would take me about an hour, in good traffic, to get to where the news is taking its pictures, and it’s important to understand there is no one photo that can give you a true picture of all of Los Angeles. Can you imagine that it might be the same in other parts of the country and the world too?
Keep your spirits up, however you can. My recipe is potato chips, coffee, crosswords, and walking the dog. Check out the poetry on The Gaza Poets Society Substack. And don’t stop witnessing.
Please join OSP in congratulating Anthony on his wonderful collection of poetry and art!
Dive into the mythic in Jonah’s Map of the Whale and Other Poems, a daring and dazzling collection from Anthony Doyle (author of Hibernaculum). In the submerged world of Flounder— part everyman, part flatfish—shipwrecked longing, philosophical wit, and lyrical precision converge.
Doyle’s sea-born metaphors shimmer with heartbreak, absurdity, and revelation across the tide pools of memory and myth. From underwater boathouses to data-streamed cubicles, Doyle threads ancient voices through postmodern pulses. Featuring Flounder, Blundra, Alex Iden Gray, and more, this collection drifts between high poetry and sly humor, from trenches of despair to flickers of grace. Jonah’s Map of the Whale and Other Poems is a poetic deep-sea dive into the soul accessible to poetry and literature fans alike.
We’re looking to add members to Old Scratch Press! Here’s the deets: Old Scratch Press (OSP), a poetry and short-form collective sponsored by Current Words Publishing, is seeking two new members to join us starting at the end of 2025. Your book would be slated for publication in 2026–2027, pending a successful trial period.
OSP is a collaborative, grassroots press focused on uplifting fresh, bold voices in poetry, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction. We publish three books per year, along with Instant Noodles Lit Mag (3 issues/year), which is curated and edited by our members. To learn more about our work, we invite you to explore past editions of Instant Noodleshttps://instantnoodleslitmag.com/ and OSP-published books https://oldscratchpress.com/catalog/.
As a member of OSP, you will:
Receive a free publication of your manuscript (poetry, short prose, hybrid, or a mix of writing and art).
Get 10 free copies of your book and keep 100% of your royalties.
Participate in monthly OSP meetings (except December and August).
Proofread and support fellow members’ books and contribute to blog and promo efforts.
Be invited to monthly marketing meetings hosted by Current Words Publishing.
Join a supportive community of working writers committed to mutual aid, creativity, and literary growth.
We’re looking for:
Members who are kind, reliable, and team-oriented.
Writers with a completed or nearly completed manuscript ready for publication in 2026–2027.
People who can commit to at least two years of active participation.
Writers who reflect diversity in identity, perspective, or experience—including (but not limited to) people of color, LGBTQ+ writers, disabled writers, and others underrepresented in publishing.
Applicants who are not full-time creative writing faculty. We aim to support writers who do not already have institutional resources or access.
Writers who have a track record of publication (a few poems, flash pieces, essays, etc.), and a clear desire to communicate something meaningful through their work—someone we can respect as a fellow writer and collaborator.
A note about our trial period:
New members will begin with a six-month trial period before we formally commit to publishing your book. This ensures a good fit and gives everyone time to build rapport, share work, and participate in OSP activities.
To apply:
Please send the following:
A brief cover letter introducing yourself, why you’re interested in joining OSP, and how you’d contribute to the group.
A short author bio (3–5 sentences).
A brief personal essay (500–750 words) about your writing journey. Feel free to include publication history (with links or footnotes) and anything you’d like to share about the manuscript you hope to publish.
A sample of your manuscript-in-progress (up to 10 pages).
Applications will be reviewed collectively by current OSP members. Finalists will be invited for a short conversation via Zoom.
If this sounds like your kind of creative home, we’d love to hear from you!
Here I am with Linwood Jackson, President of the Delaware Press Association.
On May 1, I was awarded a Second Place in the Delaware Press Association Communications Awards for my book, The Song of North Mountain. This was my veryfirstever book released solely under my name, and the award presentation was exactly one year after the book hit publication.
I am quoting the judge, whose name I don’t know, in their comments regarding the award. “This is a beautifully crafted collection of poems that takes readers on a journey through nature, personal reflection, and the deep connection between the land and the human sprit. With vivid imagery and emotional insight, You (sic) capture the essence of the North Mountain landscape, blending personal growth, exploration, and the rhythms of life. The poems are rich with sensory details and metaphor, drawing readers into the natural world where every “rustle of leaves, shift of light, and breath of wind carries meaning.” I find that your writing, both introspective and outward-looking, intertwines the inner and outer worlds, exploring themes of solitude, contemplation, and the passage of time with tenderness and reverence, giving the collection a meditative quality.”
Many of us, particularly of my generation, suffer from imposter syndrome, that feeling that we’re really just pretending to be . . . smart, kind, good at what we do, talented, strong, etc. I’ve been writing since I was a teenager. Mostly doggerel, lines about angst, loss, imaginary friends, and wry observations. As I’ve aged and matured, so has my writing. I’ve discovered poets other than those I was raised on (Longfellow, Holmes, Browning) and many who write in rhymed and metered verse.
College introduced me to more complicated poetry – Ferlinghetti, Hopkins, Stevens, Auden, Eliot, Yeats. And then, foreign writers, like Rumi, whose ideas were so very different from those I had been immersed in.
So, I still wrote, but still privately, only sharing sparingly, for I still did not consider myself a “good” poet.
Well, I guess I am now. This anonymous judge really liked my work! The DPA, in their wisdom, selected judges that were not from Delaware. Delaware, being such a small state, is one where everyone knows everyone else, especially in communications and writing. So all I know about this anonymous judge is that he or she is not from around here. And, they liked my work.
Being a creator, whether in writing, arts, crafts, or just about anything, we have the angels and devils on our shoulders. One says, “Perfect. Absolutely PERFECT. Don’t change a thing!”
The other angel is the voice of the imposter. “Really? You expect anyone to like this? What balderdash! This is ROTTEN!” So we hide our creation away, or simply refuse to edit it.
I think we’ve all been there. The fact is, creating is a matter of taking risks. Making changes. Wondering if what we have written can be said better. And having the courage to play with it. Editing. Changing the recipe. Adding a stroke of color.
I can certainly attest that every single poem and sketch in this book was analyzed, edited, and reworked (and rethought) at least 5 times.
Ghost Light, the poem I included in my last blog, was awarded a Second Place, also. This judge commented that “Your evocative, photographic-like details set the ghost-like mood and scene from the beginning. . . .” And, ‘the last stanza is particularly well-turned — “by chance or intent,/ catch the moment, . . . in a sudden shaft of dawnbreak.’”
The judge noticed. They noticed the internal rhyme, the alliteration, the combining of words to create a new meaning. These are ‘tools’ I labored over, hoping the reader would listen to these words and how they created an atmosphere, a feeling, a response.
We all too often hesitate to read out loud, to ourselves or to anyone else. But it is important. Whether we read to a child, or are read to, there is a chance for us to escape into the word picture created by the author. That’s what I try to do — create word pictures for you to explore.
Above you see Don Paterson’s take on the titular poem, with a poem where the title is the whole poem.
A titular poem is a poem where the title is part of the poem, a line in it. In my own poetry I have really liked using this device, and often use my titles as the last line of the poem, the conclusion to the whole action of the poem. I have been described by my teachers as a narrative and magical realist poet. In my defense against these allegations I will let you know that I grew up listening to songs like “Jolene,” by Dolly Parton, “Ruby,” by Kenny Rodgers, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot, “Dark Lady” by Cher, and the oddest one of all, “Angie Baby,” by Helen Reddy. My formative years were two-to-three decades of songs with strange narratives in them. It isn’t my fault!
I have written many titular poems, some remarkably more successful than others, but I will share with you today one that is probably my personal favorite. This was written when I was in graduate school for my first writing degree. I had moved back in with my family. My house was helmed by two working parents, both too ready to have a drink, both too generous with money and not much else, and both not great at respecting boundaries. But I was able to go to school for my Master’s Degree and teach at the school part time, which pretty much took up 10 hours of each day, but made about one third of what a person needed for rent in those days, so, without my old room, I never could have done it. There were a lot of challenges though, one of which was a mother who was threatened by education, and really tried to impede it even as she envied it. My most repeated story, and least believed, was the one where I went up to my room to work on a paper due the next day that had to be twenty-five pages. My mother burst in to the room, my dad in tow, and began to lay out sheets of wallpaper over my (yes, I’m not kidding) word processor and desk. “We’re wallpapering the bathroom,” my mother announced. “What, now? Tonight? It’s seven,” I said in disbelief. “We have to do it now,” she said. “Right Vince?” My dad looked at me and shrugged. What could I do? I went downstairs, and waited. They finished a little after eleven, and I finished the paper a little after four the next morning. Yes, I should have probably written it sooner, but that aside, who competes with their kid with wallpaper? Sigh. No one I shared my graduation program with ever believed my stories. So, one day I wrote this poem to see if it could explain it to my fellow authors that my stories were true. As you read the poem remember… this is a titular poem, so see if you can understand how the title works as the title, and also as the last line of the poem. Yes, there are obscenities in the poem that some may find offensive. I’m a salty old girl, and, once, I was a salty young one.
A Few Dry Old Peas Rattling Around In A Waxed Paper Dixie Cup
Jesus fucking Christ goes through my mind as I sit here, trying to read the poems from my poetry workshop, and my brother, who doesn’t live here, appears suddenly at the front window like an unwelcome trio of Jehova’s Witnesses, causing my dog, who had just been whining at my leg for my bagel to bark loudly and repeatedly at the window as the phone rings, making me jump like a bean, and I answer it, all the while looking in exasperation at my beloved bother of a brother, who is unaware that I am here, and if he comes in the house will joke, as if he were the opening act for the Jerry Lewis Telethon, “Still in your pajamas? Ah you and that school racket,” while I say, “Hello” the the phone with my voice trying to sound pointed and pissed and my mother’s voice says, “Read me what the calendar says my dentist appointment is,” and says, “I know you’d like nothing better than to put my wash in the dryer—how ’bout it?” and says, “Don’t just sit around; do your windows,” and says, “You’re home todays so I won’t be home to let the dogs out,” although she wants to be ’cause she thinks I don’t do it right, and tells me again how to do it before she hangs up, but my brother has not come in, has disappeared, so I go back to reading for two seonds because here comes the dog again, whine whine bagel bagel scratch me, and I stamp at her; she looks at me—Big whoop—says her scroungy toothless expression, and I hear a loud banging, so I look up and a strange truck, a truck that would have turned up the noses of Sanford and Son and a man who obviously was designed with the truck in mind, are in the driveway, and he is pulling a gigundous lawnmower off the truck while I try to think and come up with Jesus, shit! Don’t unload that! Did I ask for that thing?! and Who the fuck is this toothless guy? and wonder for a scared second if he’s a relative I don’t recognize which is usual for me, when I see my brother coming ’round the side of the truck and I run upstairs thinking, What the hell is that guy here for? Bill is going to bring this strange man to see me in my pajamas, and the dog is lifting off the floor now in little hydraulic barks—I am thinking Christ Bill, now you’re going to wake Lee and I am giving up on reading poetry; I’ll write some instead, and I retreat to my room and start typing trying to ignore the barking of slamming truck parts and lawnmowers out front, but I am right, my brother does wake my sister, and when she gets up, by opening her door she releases another dog to bark, and it runs downstairs to join in, eager to catch up, while my sister walks into the bathroom and pees loudly with the door open, and does not flush, puts on striped spandex, and goes tour-de-fourcing down the stairs where, like a swift grifter, she switches out the tape in the VCR for an aerobics tape and turns it up up “Lift ’em up! That’s grrrreat! You can do it!” but I can’t do it because I can still hear my brother and Mister May-Be-A-Relative, so I am able to hear another voice added to theirs as my mother says, “Oh, I wondered if you’d be here. I just came home to let the dogs out,” and my friends wonder why I’m tense and why I never want to visit the zoo, and I think, Dad must be coming home any minute to tell us all the jokes he’s heard today, like, “Duck walks into a pharmacist, says gimmee a Chapstick and put it on my bill,” or the one about the Avon lady who farts in a elevator, after which he will laugh that long, wheeze, Lou Costello laugh “Hey Abbott” and somehow, in this rapidly escalating cacophony, a small sound, like a maraca gently shaken, is in my ears pulling me to it, causing me to think one final thought at the end of my morning study time, because, pricklingly familiar, I think I’ve heard that small hollow sound before, and I think I now know exactly what my brain is like.
Did you make it to the end? Could you see how the titular title ended the poem? I must admit I’ve always felt that the title must work as the title, of course, but should also resonate at the end of a poem, because our eyes, having reached the end, especially of a long poem, will zip back up to the top to refresh, remind us of what we were reading in the first place.
Have you ever written a titular poem? If so, I’d love to have you share it in the comments. Have you ever read one that you especially liked, or that flummoxed you? Let me know.
All these years later, through many different rounds of education at many schools, through being a life-long adjunct: always running place-to-place, through infertility and a trip to China to become a mother, through a few trips back and forth across the country with a full car and a moving van, through working with so many different and wildly talented authors, I do still feel a bit like I’m a plate-spinner with a brain that might like a long vacation on a deserted island. Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll share back something titular.~ Dianne
Dianne Pearce is the publisher and main editor at Current Words Publishing. She also designs and formats each issue of INSTANT NOODLES LIT MAG, and had to learn how to work computers to do it!
Don’t miss the second submission period for INSTANT NOODLES 2025. Submit today!
by Nadja Maril, a Founding Member of the Old Scratch Press Short Form and Poetry Collective
We’ve got onions, potatoes, and peas growing in our garden this year. The peas will be ready for harvest six weeks from now, according to my husband who planted the newly sprouting seeds.
In another part of the yard are the tomato plants, still very small. We got a late start. Perennial herbs: sage, oregano, rosemary, thyme, mint and dill made it through the winter. I’m waiting for my fresh basil and cilantro.
Dill,Thyme and Oregano
Each year the line-up of vegetables is different. New vegetables. New challenges on how to best use these fresh ingredients. This year for 2025 we’ll be harvesting lettuces, spinach, beets, broccoli, peas, leeks, and peppers.
Always we must have tomatoes. They do well in Maryland and they are versatile both raw and cooked. Home prepared tomato sauce, gazpacho and tomatoes off the vine with fresh basil are the best.
My chapbook,RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN, published by Old Scratch Press, is partially a tribute to herbs and vegetables. If curious about poems that are also recipes visit this link.
At the end of March and start of April we were lucky enough to enjoy our own asparagus! Yes, you are supposed to wait until the third year after planting and this is only the second year, however, it looked good and tasted great! We only took a few stalks. The rest we are leaving to enable the plant to go through its cycle of developing leaves and establishing a good root system.
first season asparagusSecond Year Asparagus Crop.
So what is the best way to cook asparagus? I would suggest as minimally as possible. My mother and grandmother would put it in the pressure cooker until it became soft. Too much flavor is lost when asparagus (Gus) is overcooked and the texture borders on mushy. Steaming a few minutes, or a coating of olive oil and a few minutes under the broiler or on the grill rotated half way through the process to keep the temperature even, are my favorite ways to enjoy Gus. You can also cut it up for use in a veggie stir fry or sauté with garlic, tomatoes and scallions to dress up a pasta. Top with fresh grated parmesan.
You’ve been invited to a dinner. What are they serving? What do you notice on the table? How does it taste? How are the other guests reacting to what is being eaten and to what is being said? This can be fictional or it can be a memory, but select the details that clearly bring the scene into focus. Write for fifteen minutes. Read back what you’ve written. Is there a sentence with power that pops? Take that sentence and start again maybe adding an action such as a glass is broken, there is a knock on the door ie something happens to change the scene slightly. Have fun with it and maybe you’ll develop it into a poem, story or essay.
Here is a piece of short prose inspired by the ingredients of an unusual stew. Enjoy.
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