Plug, plug, plug

I have been one poor correspondent & owe several of you email. I promise to catch up this weekend!

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A couple of quick plugs:

Inch is looking for "tiny poems and tiny fiction." Sounds intriguing! See this post from Little Fury for details.

My good friend and poet-colleague Shana Ritter recently made an appearance on The Poets Weave, the poetry show on our local NPR station. They're now archiving and podcasting this stuff, so you can take a listen if you'd like; she has some nice work. You can nab it from iTunes by searching on "WFIU" or you can go directly to the radio station's website, where it is archived in RealAudio format. (iTunes will have a new episode up in a few days, so if you want to hear Shana, you'd best nab it soon.)

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Got my contributor's copies of the Merton Seasonal, the quarterly journal of the Thomas Merton Foundation, featuring my little whale poem which was awarded honorable mention in their Poetry of the Sacred Contest. They sent me five copies, which is really cool. All in all they run a very good contest: they phoned me to give me the good news, which made it more exciting; the contest results were announced when they said they would be instead of weeks or months later like some contests; the check arrived like a week after they notified me about it; they posted the poems on their website quickly; and the winner & honorable mentions are very nicely showcased in the print journal. And all that from a contest with no entry fee! Check out some of their past winners to get a sense of their generous definition of "the sacred," check out the contest guidelines, and if you have a poem that might fit, I highly encourage you to enter this year's contest. All in all, it's been one of my favorite publishing-type experiences. It's so cool to find a non-poetry organization that recognizes and honors the value of poetry & poets.

So I guess that was really another plug, wasn't it. :)