the literary lottery

I just spent the last few days getting a bunch of work out to a few of the litmags that read over the summer. I sent poems to Cider Press Review (Pennsylvania), Salamander (Boston), Poetlore (Maryland), and River Styx (Missouri). I was too freaking laz-y to send out earlier (plus, just recently I changed to a laser printer for send-outs and, like the road less traveled by, "it has made all the difference"). My poetry book is still a formatting nightmare, having been cobbled together from various versions of Word, WordPerfect, an obscure word processing program I downloaded from AOL,
and several operating systems, from Mac to Pentium. It is practically a Rosetta Stone of formatting, but hopefully Mr. Strega can sprinkle computer programmer magic sparkle dust on it and bring it to life.

At the risk of sounding a bit like the venerable Andy Rooney, I have noticed a disturbing trend in the biz of sending stuff out to be considered by literary magazine editors. Most are great about sending work back, but I've noticed a disturbing increase in litmags just simply never sending any work back at all, and never informing, not even with a postcard or a note, that there has been a rejection. They just leave the writer to eventually figure it out. Plus, I've followed up with a nice email or postcard when this happens, and never get a response. I realize a lot of literary magazine staff are overworked and often donate their time because they believe in the worth of independent publishing--but still, a response whenever possible would be nice. I have one magazine right now that has been holding my work since October! I assume they've rejected it, but who knows?

Well, now that I've blown off a bit of steam, I want to report that the agave plant has put forth some flower stalks, so tiny they look positively underwhelming at the tip of the 20-foot stem of this thing. However, these
are supposed to develop into yellow or white flowers. There is another agave in the process of blooming at my son's friend's house. It must be the year for symbolic asparagus-like monoliths.

Happy Fourth of July to all my faithful readers, by the way! It was very hard to drive to Chico State this past weekend to retrieve my youngest son, who was at Ethos Music Camp for three weeks, only because there were fireworks stands everywhere, and Ms. Strega can't have any here at the Ponderosa, not even the teeniest, slimmest, most innocent little sparkler. Personal fireworks are illegal everywhere in Santa Cruz County except Watsonville (which is a mystery to me, as there are mountains with lots of dry brush all over Watsonville. In fact, there is dry brush all over Santa Cruz right now, which is why there's a point to the illegality of fireworks here.

My father, of course, used to drive to godforsaken places in Southern California to procure Fourth of July ordnance--we had sparklers, Piccolo Petes, "snakes," Roman candles, and a bunch more we weren't supposed to have. He didn't buy firecrackers, though. One summer, he had a whole fireworks display in the backyard, which left permanent black stains in our pool. Usually we would go to Sepulveda Park to see fireworks, which always ended with the lighting of some luminous tableau at ground level, usually a flag or the Iwo Jima guys. I haven't seen a display like that in decades, and wonder if they even do them anymore.

Nowadays, Mr. Strega and kids and I go to Skypark in Scotts Valley, where they have a whole show. It's kind of fun--we go to the actual Skypark and pay admission; the days of sitting with my kids in adjacent parking lots are over.

So, it looks like it will be business as usual on the Fourth. In fact, right now it IS the fourth of July, so goodnight!