THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE HUCKLEBERRY

The rewritten "All About Jane" has already been rejected by a magazine called Chestnut Review which collected a fat $5 fee for considering it. They took all of 5 days to consider it. Fair to say I get rejected a lot. Most writers do unless they have huge name recognition, but 5 days and $5? Makes me think it could be a scam. Easy... form a magazine, put it into Poets & Writers Magazine and charge a $5 reading fee. Publish the magazine online for very low cost and make at least pocket money rather than lose money as I did publishing George & Mertie's Place. Most magazines these days use Submittable to handle mss and Submittable gets $3 to handle a ms. Fair enough, but $5? I'm tearing up my file card for that market. Too suspicious. 

by rob mulally @unsplash

Good news on the other hand. One of my poems has been accepted by current Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna. It appears on the map. You will find the poem by clicking on the red button about 2/3 of the way on Interstate 90 from Spokane to Seattle. A very handy blip on I-90 occurs just below the red dot. The dot represents Huckleberry Mountain in the North Cascades whose name is in the title of my poem "Group Encounter at Huckleberry Mountain".

SILENT & WIFE RECOGNIZED FOR ZINE AND DIDN'T KNOW IT

Had a pleasant surprise last night. To further our aim of getting someone other than myself to publish the best selling novel, Manning, I'm currently writing, I decided to get myself on the "Directory of Poets" listed by the prestigious Poets & Writers Magazine. To qualify for the list, a poet (or writer) must have earned twelve points. Poets earn 1 point for every recognized anthology or journal their work has appeared in.

The key word is "recognized". I have enough publications (caution—still in process), but the application took hours of entering data and scanning the table of contents of publications not on the web when my work went in. In the process, I had to go to Poets & Writers list of authorized publications each time, and there was our pleasant surprise. Out of curiosity, I looked up the monthly microzine that Mertie and I published and I edited for 6 years from 1995 thru 2000. George & Mertie's Place: rooms with a view was on their list of authorized publications. 

"Of course it is," I happily told myself. It was a fine production with little resources. I created funny cartoons and wrote a comedic "Horroscope" [sic] for it, and we laid out the microzine carefully. Eventually, we were getting work from new, now established, writers and established names too. At first, we paid our writers a pittance. The checks we wrote were little more than symbolic gestures. Eventually we offered a $50 prize (instead of little sums to each) which we named the "Diver Award" (after F. Scott's Dick Diver in Tender Is The Night). 

Finding our microzine on Poets & Writers Magazine was a happy moment. Being pleased as punch, as the archaic saying goes, we want to thank those among you who submitted the microzine to the list and to Poets & Writers for recognizing our work in the list.