The Writing Path Blog

I’m very sad that my supposedly commercial-grade web hosting service, www.aplus.net, has been inaccessible and unreachable by phone for more than six hours. I thought that paying a premium price would guarantee good support, information by phone in case of outages, enough backup redundancy to prevent long outages — say, like six hours! — to justify paying double what many web hosting services charge. Recently, they put us through a laborious server upgrade, which cost…

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Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess, has written a review of the anthology Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv. It’s up at poemeleon. Gailey had exactly the same first thought I had: “I have to admit when I first heard about this anthology project I felt…dubious.” She ends the review with a great summary of the reading experience: “… I like this anthology mostly for representing so many voices, so…

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Here’s an interesting response from a well-respected journal to which I submitted poems three days ago: Thank you for submitting your work to Meridian. While your work was carefully considered, we are unfortunately unable to accept it for publication at this time. Best,The Editors CAREFULLY considered? Ridiculous. How carefully could it have been given due consideration in three days?! I sent the batch of poems on October 17. I received the note on October 20.…

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I was delighted to have an acceptance of two poems this week. The poems “Squabble” and “Airplane Poem with Mystical Guidance from Starboard Wing Signs.” They will appear in Georgetown Review, published by Georgetown College in Kentucky. The poems are from my manuscript collection, Gods of Water and Air. For those of us in the San Francisco area, it’s Litquake time again. There aren’t that many multi-day, multi-event poetry festivals around the country, and this…

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Dream Horse Press has been added to my website page of Non-Contest Poetry Publishers. The press accepts unsolicited queries throughout the year. I hope this is the start of a trend, as the list had become pretty thin last year. I understand the economics of contests — understand it all too well — and the dismal sales of poetry books. But there has to be a better way to sustain small presses than essentially running…

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It’s finally happened — a new technology to aid you in printing your blog in book-form. Blog2Print from New York custom book-maker SharedBook makes it possible to turn your columns into a print volume. Of course, the average blog book costs $50, so you really have to want to save them, I guess. In other bloghopping news, I got an email from Copper Canyon Press to let me know that they should be on my…

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Just read the new issue of Switched-On Gutenberg – still going strong after fifteen years. That kind of long life as a litmag demonstrates that online literary magazines may have more staying power than much that’s in print. For example, my poem, A Pot of Humuhumunukunukuapua’a, appeared in the journal’s fourth year, the Hunger issue. It’s still in the archives, as you can see from the link. I wonder if anyone reads the archives, but…

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I am both a poet and a fundraiser and grants consultant. I have often found the two worlds as far apart as different planets, though both involve writing. But recently I began to research grants for arts organizations and artists, both for myself and my own ventures in poetry, and for poetry organizations with which I’m connected. Digging into the possibility of finding funding for the arts during the most severe economic downturn I’ve ever…

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I’ve always felt that to hire an editor to work with me on a poetry manuscript would be something like admitting defeat. So the experience of working with an editor was illuminating. It wasn’t humbling in the way I thought, rather it made me want to expand my horizons, take more workshops, read more widely, work harder, and take more time with the publishing process. It also gave me better ideas about the marketing of…

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Mike Chasar’s excellent Poetry & Popular Culture blog has a guest entry up on Gumball Poetry, my little contribution. Writing it made me nostalgic for the audacious idea of combining poems and gumballs, one of the most original approaches to popularizing the art I’ve ever heard of. Alas, Gumball Poetry, and its cool poem-in-a-gumball machines, are defunct. We can only hope that someone will revive this idea. In the meantime, I still have three poem-gumballs…

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