One of my favorite calls for submissions came from a now defunct feminist magazine called The Gaze. "We don't want any stories about what a prick your boyfriend is or your eating disorder or starving yourself for your prick boyfriend." Guess what -- I got a poem accepted about my prick boyfriend, but the language was so abstract that people thought it might be about communist Russia. Seriously. Which is not the worst metaphor for that particular relationship. I got married many years ago on the anniversary of Wounded Knee which is today. Strange that I remember the anniversary of a marriage that dissolved many years ago. I was always failing what my buddy Hank referred to as Symbolism 101.
Another favorite submission call is from a magazine called The Struggle which claims not to need plot or character development (fine if you have it! they write), but is mostly interested in labor versus management. The man against the machine. This most excellent journal hailed from my fair city of Detroit, but I never got accepted there because although I'm a labor union girl all the way, none of my stories were the man against the wicked greedy corporate world. I don't know; it's not my thing. I'm not very political in my writing even when I try which is seldom. I'm more interested in the sad damaged world of my own myths, the ones I was born to and the ones I create, a ghost dance to bring back the lost, to find myself.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Don't do anything by half." Henry Rollins
Cocktail Hour
Drinking memoir suggestion: Insatiable: A Young Mother's Struggle With Anorexia Erica Rivera
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday! Will spend today and tomorrow catching up on correspondence (my fancy word for email) and if you have questions, send them in! I'll be donating the money to Backwaters Press for their current fundraiser.
5 comments:
Yes ma'am a marriage on the anniversary of Wounded Knee quite the analogy for disastrous decision and timing.
I'd be your union steward in a heartbeat I miss raging against "the man."
Ah have a been thinking of going into therapy with you but then I never met a therapist that charged by the question. So how much would it cost me to simply take my 50 minute hour in silence?
Or is that a $2 question?
Wait is it $4 now because of the second question?
Oh jaysus you did say I could run a tab right?
Oh Damn now is it $6 or $8 shit!?
Fuck it just put $10 on the tab because I am not saying anything more.
I guess I'm the same as you. I want to explore what filters up in my own head, transformed into wild things by imagination perhaps, but the things inside. An introver behavior, I guess.
With print publications dying off left and right, what, if any, websites have popped up to fill that void?
"I'm a labor union girl all the way, none of my stories were the man against the wicked greedy corporate world."
Ah, but Michelle, as Marx said "Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval."
Or, to put it bluntly, existential nihilism doesn't put food on the table.
I may have mentioned it before, but have you ever popped by the Heartless Bitches Int'l website? You might get a kick out of it.
(BTW, "bitch" means "being in total control, honey!")
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