New Poem Available Online & Family Business

80 deg ~ mostly sunny, a good bit of a breeze

Last week I reported on an acceptance from Glass: A Journal of Poetry and how the editors really helped me find the finishing touch for this poem.  In the wonder that is the digital age, the poem, "Flood Plain," is now available!  This is the 7th issue from this journal (Volume 3: Issue 1, technically), and I'm really impressed with the poems and the layout.  I like that the contents remain visible on the margins so you don't have to use the back button to get to the next poem.  Hope you'll check it out.

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As for the family business, I may have blogged about this before, but if so, I've lost track.  In some weird twist of fate, I have two cousins (one maternal and one paternal) who also became bona fide writers.  I say this is a twist of fate because we do not come from a long line of literary families.  We are distinctly middle and working class folks who were born in smallish cities in the Midwest.  We come from grandparents who were farmers, carpenters, electricians, etc.  We come from parents who moved off the farm and into the business world that supports farmers.

All this surfaced again today because I ran across my cousin, Ryan Longhorn's blog.  Ryan and I had lost touch, as he is a bit younger than me and I left Iowa while he was still in junior high, but we recently found each other again on Facebook.  I've know about Ryan's fiction writing for about ten years, but it's been great to start a bit of a dialogue with him again.  He has a horror story about agents and NY publishing houses, but that's his story to tell.  For now, here's his blog, Universal Acid.  I have to warn you, Dear Gentle Readers, that Ryan is in no way the prim and proper Blogger that I am.  He's letting it all hang out...as we used to say, back in the day. 

My other cos. is Marta Ferguson, a poet, a sci-fi writer, and an editor.  Marta and I are closer in age and it was Marta who offered me a room in her house in Columbia, MO the year that I left my professional life and decided to apply to graduate school.  Marta's chapbook, Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Picket, is available from Main Street Rag and is definitely worth the read!  Again, a bit less prim and proper than me, I admire Marta's willingness to tangle with many of the issues I might shy away from in my own work.  By the way, Marta does poetry manuscript consultations through her editorial business Wordhound, if any of you are interested.  She definitely helped me get a handle on Blood Almanac before I sent it out into the world.

So, as the song goes, "We are family!"  I wonder if some future grad student might someday write a paper on our family ties and what literature we made of it.  I'll leave you with this diagram from the University of Manitoba that details how to count cousins.