Hi all,

A rock smacked our car yesterday while we cruised down M-5, so as I kill time waiting for a new windshield installation, you get a Mitch publications update that you didn’t ask for. So it goes.

I didn’t submit as much work in 2023 as I have the last few years, but I got lucky and still had some fantastic acceptances and publications (and plenty of rejections, too). My work seems to have this weird tendency to, no matter when it was sent out or accepted, all come out at the same time. This just happened again, so there’s a late-2023 blast of new work from me. 

Shout-out to Kirsti MacKenzie for starting Major 7th, a great new lit mag focused on the impact songs have on us. The whole magazine is like a writing prompt for me, so in one of my quicker idea-to-publication turnarounds ever, here is “‘I Go to Work‘ by Kool Moe Dee.” 

After a two-year pause, I have a new piece of fiction out. (I was talking with someone recently about how I started out with fiction, but parenthood and the short chunks of personal time it allows drove me more toward poetry.) “How Many Times We Pray” published recently on Psaltery & Lyre, and a huge thanks to the editors for taking this short story. It’s one that means a lot to me, and the handful of you who know the backstory may recognize it. I took the basic premise of what happened to some family who are near and dear to me and turned it into a short story. My brother-in-law was indeed solo in an RV while their family evacuated, but the rest is fictional. Writing it probably helped me process my worrying about loved ones. Literature will do that for you, huh. Also, shout-out to dogs. 

Last and far from least, UCity Review is now publishing short folios to put the focus on poets’ breadth of work instead of just a couple poems. So, here are a dozen (yep, 12!) poems from me that just published there today. Big thanks to the UCity Review crew and to the amazing list of fellow poets in the issue. 

I’ll probably do a full year-in-review post later this month too, but if not, or either way, thanks as always for reading any of this!

~Mitch