Excuse my absence, a new semester has started and I’m making a valiant try to, well, be around again.  We’ll see how long it lasts.

This past month I’ve been busily making selections with the rest of the staff (of five) of The Laureate,  WMU’s literary magazine.  Technically I’m the Fiction Editor, but we’ve all been reading all of the around 150 submissions, including prose, poetry, and plays.  Going into the job I wasn’t remotely sure what to expect – I’ve never been on the editing end of things.  Being rejected so many times, at first it was exceedingly hard to say no to anyone on a first readthrough.  Unfortunately many of the submissions deserved exactly that – although they were for certain broken up by some gems, and the outlook for the finished magazine is a positive one.  Being an editor is an odd experience.  On one hand, you feel entirely qualified to dismiss or laud the work of any given writer, and on the other hand, you’re constantly reminded that you are really in the same dire straits as them regarding being published, especially when many of the submitters were the same age and class-level as most of us on staff.  It’s been a great experience so far, weeding the good from the less good, and even just hanging around talking writing with the rest of the staff (Who are entirely poets, save me – which has been a completely different perspective.  Weirdo poets!  Kidding, kidding, hi Jen.).

Meanwhile I’m now enrolled in a workshop led by Kellie Wells,  which I already have faith will be much more productive than this past semester’s.  I’ve been working on some flash fiction and still plodding away at my thesis…and of course getting more rejection letters.  I also revamped the site a bit (okay, okay, fine, really all I did was add some nice praise from people I’ve worked with to one of my sidebars so that when I land here putzing around the main page I can see nice things and feel good about myself…) so all six of you who frequent (uh, what’s the antonym of frequent?) can enjoy…or something.