I’ve written a lot of things in the past decade. I was thinking I should do a wrap-up of some of my favorite pieces published since 2011, the year I started branching out from my own personal blog into the greater online literary sphere.
Over the past ten years I started a literary zine called Be About It zine, which slowly became Be About It Press with the addition of a blog, chapbooks, e-books, and printed full length poetry collections. I am proud of Be About It and I still believe in the original mission: to publish new and exciting things by writers and artists who are doing interesting work that I think should get more attention.
Check out our blog beaboutitpress.tumblr.com and send your submissions to zinebeaboutit@gmail.com
In addition to running an indie publishing house, I also started to take my own writing seriously. I used to think that I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted to write for Mother Jones. I was only really posting on my personal blog daily and writing a ton of Yelp reviews, and I wanted to build up my portfolio so I decided to find an internship somewhere. Around 2010 I started an SF Examiner account and started posting articles about San Francisco there. In 2011 I started writing for SF Indie Fashion, and in 2012 I started writing for SF Station.
I was writing poetry around this time, but only publishing it on my blog or sending pieces to Fuse Lit, a zine that a colleague of mine from UEA had started and invited me to submit to (which also inspired me to start Be About It zine!).
In 2012 I started writing more poetry and sending it out into the world. I was mostly writing for fun, just to see if I could do it. A lot of it was not very good, but people were seeing and reading my stuff and some of it resonated with others. I wrote a couple little chapbooks one that I published online myself and another I published through an indie press.
In 2013 I wrote my first real poetry collection, I Will Always Be Your Whore [love songs for Billy Corgan] which was published by Punk Hostage Press in January, 2014. This was a huge first step for me, and I milked it. I performed from the book often, hosting events and even putting together a multi-city book tour in 2014. I fell in love with performance, and I wanted to do more with my writing. I started reading a lot more in this period, after realizing reading widely and often makes for more interesting writing.
Since then I’ve written quite a few poetry collections (ten total) and a novel. Some of my favorite things I’ve done include work published in Dusie, Poetry Foundation, Thought Catalog, Spork, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy, Carte Blanche, Fog Machine, Lumen Mag, Berfrois, Fanzine, and various other outlets. I’m proud of all it. Even the stuff that isn’t so great. I’m happy that I am not afraid to be creative. I have fun with my writing, and it’s an added bonus when any other people like my writing.
You can check out a full list of my publications here. What are your favorites from this past decade?
I am looking forward to a new decade of writing and publishing.