I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who responded to my poem “To Someday Whisper” that was published last weekend on Stone Circle Review. Most of you are writers yourselves, so you already know the weird solitude of this writing and publishing game. Anyone who bothers with submitting does so because they imagine a reader for their work, so when a piece gets even a few likes or gets reposted once or twice, it’s energizing. Thanks for that!

Better-known poets will get hundreds of interactions, but for a small timer like me, a couple dozen was pretty cool. Anyway, it’s funny that this was the poem of mine to get a bigger-than-average response (for me, anyway) because it’s also the last one coming out for the foreseeable future. I have only 4-5 batches of poems out on submission (and most are from last year still) and none accepted waiting in queues anywhere. That’s not to say I’m giving up or anything, just that I haven’t written hardly at all in the last year or so, meaning there’s no new Mitch Work™ coming down the pike.

I still write a little, but far less than I was for a long time. There are many factors behind that. Parenthood, work, parenthood, the hecticness of 21st-century life, work, parenthood, and more, like, for example, work & parenthood. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my lack of recent writing is at least partly a response to how my first two manuscripts have garnered positive rejections but no publisher for several years now. (Oddly enough, “To Someday Whisper” was the titular poem of one of my manuscripts for a while before I retitled it.) My third manuscript magically found a publisher almost immediately, which is awesome (and huge shout out to ELJ–forthcoming November 2025!), but still, the last couple years with so many book rejections have me trying to reframe my writer mind back to how it was in the ’90s-early 2010s when I didn’t even think about submitting and wrote for the fun & craft of it. I’ll get there, but it’s taking a minute. (Besides, I have no right to whine because publishing a few dozen poems is more than that ’90s me would’ve imagined possible.)

A special thanks goes to Lee Potts, the editor-in-chief of Stone Circle Review, who saw me post that I had a poem accepted at a journal I was excited about only to have that journal fold before putting together their last issue. Lee asked if I wanted to send this poem his way for a read. I’m grateful he wanted to publish it, and I’m happy to see it in Stone Circle, another great journal I’m excited about.

So, thanks again. It was cool to see that poem spark some reactions, and it was bizarrely well-timed. You all are the best.