A Short Story

And by short story I mean a quick tale from my true life. I didn't start writing fiction. I have a husband for that.

This story ought to subtly tell you a lot of things about me, my past, and who I am. I just remembered it and chuckled to myself. Maybe not so much a chuckle as a titter.

When I was in junior high, I was in cheerleading. During things like halftime and part of third quarter, we got to take a short break. I of course went and bought a Mountain Dew and probably a Three Musketeers bar from the concession stand, inhaled them, and then went to the bathroom to take a leisurely pee.

As I entered the bathroom with one of my cheerleading buddies, I saw a man standing at the sink, washing his hands. Appalled, I yelled What are you doing in here!?

He turned around to reveal that he was, in fact, a woman. I'm... I'm washing my hands.

All I said back was Oh.

News-A-Palooza

The summer is wrapping up and I have tons of news to report. The school year is beginning, which means I'm starting to work with kids again, teaching them how to be awesome, i.e. teaching them how to read. I've spent this week in a preparatory class for kindergarten, working with five-year-old spitfires who are gearing up for the ol' grindstone. A surprising true fact: two almost-kindergarteners agreed by head nod that a unicycle should actually be called "finger wheel."

There's big news at the end of this post, so if you haven't heard already, keep reading!

Other news: I got my contributor copies of Neon in the mail this week, which are excellent and full of awesome words. You can check it out online or buy a copy yourself! It should be noted that Neon is a British publication, and you can tell because in my poem "The House Does Not Look Burnt" the word "color" has a U in it! I don't know how the Euro/Dollar stuff gets handled, but I would suggest just getting published by Neon, and then you get the copies for free and don't have to do math.

During the last week of July, I had five poems up at fwriction : review. You should check out everything they published in July, because they did a whole poetry month, which is pretty sweet.

In September, I'll have some things coming out in an array of magazines, including Metazen, Bluestem, Writer's Digest, and Specter. The poem I'll have in Writer's Digest is included due to the awesome fact of me winning a contest.

If you haven't checked out Specter yet, go ahead and click on that link right now. It's a great newbie mag that is kicking some butt, and not just because I blog for them.

This post is so full of links!!

Another little piece of news is that September 1 marks the anniversary of One Year, One Hundred Rejections, which I've talked about here and elsewhere. After September 1, I'll make sure to give you a grand total of rejections, maybe along with a little list of the acceptances I've gotten.

And now for the big news. My first chapbook, Ether/Ore, is going to be published in 2012 by NAP! I'm excited, and I ate ice cream today to celebrate. It's book time!

Overdue Blog Post

I am overdue for doing all sorts of things, the least of which is updating this blog, though by far the easiest to remedy, so I'm doing that now instead of an array of other things I ought to be doing.

It is always pleasing to me to go on the stats page for my blog and see the different Google searches that lead people here. It's also thrilling to see that one of my viewers is still using the Yahoo! search engine. I hope that he also still logs into ICQ to chat with his buds.

Some of my favorite search hits that lead people to my blog are "underwater basket weaving," and "angry Jenkins" or "Brett Jenkins angry" or any other combination of my name with the word "angry." Of course I get a lot of traffic from people looking up different kinds of rejections. But I think the most alarming of the hits so far has been "hired brett e. jenkins." Does somebody want to know who hired me? Or does somebody want to hire me? Is my employer looking up potential reasons to fire me? Who can say?

At any rate, keep putting strange things into Google. And also, if you want to hire me, I'm of course living in poverty while I work for AmeriCorps, so you are free to send me money for menial tasks, which can be writing related or otherwise. Nothing that the government is going to want records of, though.

Fledgling Mags and Rejected Rejections

So I've been watching a lot of Buffy, and doing the normal summer stuff: swimming, biking, complaining, night running, clacking away on my trusty typewriter, and reading a ton of lit mags.

I've been submitting to a lot of new magazines lately. I don't mean new to me, though they are that also; I mean baby magazines. The ones on Duotrope that say "fledgling." Ones that don't even have issues out yet.

What are your thoughts on submitting to new publications?

Anyway, all that aside, I've also been submitting to the tried-and-true mags, taking my lumps from the old favorites. Just this month I've added rejections to my pile from Caketrain, Wonderfort, The American Scholar, The Pedestal, and AGNI. It's a slow month, compared to June, when I got nearly twenty rejections. I suspect the editors are out doing the normal summer stuff, too.

Another thing I've been doing is sliding into the groove over at Stymie. I'm really loving this poetry editor gig. I do love reading for PANK, but the one great thing about Stymie is that I read only poetry as, duh, the poetry editor. Poetry is the thing I know about. I can read fiction and react to it, but the fact that I don't write fiction lends some ignorance to my opinions.

Apparently some people don't think my opinions are that valuable in the poetry arena, as just today I received my first rejected rejection, which the PANK editors know all too well. It wasn't an exceptional letter. Filled with the necessary expletives that one is prone to utter in her garage/living room/dorm room/kitchen pantry when she is rejected. The grammar was spot on. I just wanted something... more.

Some of my poems came out this month, too, so hooray for summer (Buffy Summers, ha). Check out two of my pieces in the latest issue of Emprise Review, and seven of my little nuggets at The Legendary. This coming week, check out fwriction : review, where I'll close out their poetry month. And of course, go forth and submit your own writing to these classy journals. And continue to take your rejection lumps without, you know, all the angry letter writing.

Strange Review 7: Joshua Fitzgerald

Today's awesome Strange Review comes to you from mathematician and graph maker Joshua Fitzgerald.

"Dear internet users in the year 2011:

My name is Dr. Daniel Roberts and I am a psychologist from the year 2048. I have sent you this email from the future (Gmail is quite advanced in our time) in hopes to prevent a pandemic which I believe has the potential to destroy our precious human society. Around the year 2025, my colleagues and I noticed a trend in many of our young patients: many of our youth were displaying symptoms of apathy, boredom, and anhedonia. At first we believed we had simply discovered a new mood disorder that had not yet been classified. As the disorder which came to be known as “Global Yawning” became an accepted diagnosis, we noticed the rate of incidence was rising rapidly--too rapidly to be explained by the increased rate of testing. As the graph below clearly indicates, Global Yawning's rate of incidence is increasing exponentially, (probably the beginning of a logistic growth pattern, a pattern we expect to see from pandemics).

Persons suffering from GY erroneously believe that the world around them is boring. Yawners typically avoid any emotional or intellectual stimulation, as such activities which cause them to become confused. For instance, if my history is correct, youth of your time enjoy listening to rock and hip-hop music, watching action and comedy movies, and reading fiction thrillers. All of these activities have died out in 2048. For example, in our time, Webster's Dictionary is the most bought and read book. The most recent box office success was unedited security footage from a parking garage. The TV guide channel (which, of course, only lists itself) is the only show left on television. Recent college graduates seek jobs only in data entry or mail sorting. Interestingly, the musician John Mayer is still quite popular. The cruel nature of this disorder renders patients unwilling or unable to conceive of any more exciting forms of stimulation. People in 2048 are not actually entertained by these activities; they simply believe, despite our pleadings, that nothing more exciting actually exists.

We believe that Global Yawning could result in a complete breakdown in human culture: no great works of literature or art and no triumphs of engineering or design (for instance, space travel is far too exciting for Yawners). Thankfully, I believe I have discovered a cure.

We currently believe that Global Yawning is a result of decades of boredom, caused by boring books, boring movies, boring jobs, and boring hobbies. I thought that if past generations had found more excitement in the world around them, the desensitization that leads to GY might have been stopped. My colleagues and I looked for the most exciting things that were happening in the year 2011 and I discovered Brett Elizabeth Jenkins' poetry, which we find to be extraordinarily stimulating and the perfect antidote to Global Yawning.

Therefore, I, Dr. Daniel Roberts, implore you to read the poetry of Bejjie (as she is known our time). The future of the human race depends upon it!"

Poems About the Sun

I moved to Minnesota last summer. For a few terrible months, I lived in the city of Austin. I had a nice apartment, met some nice people, and got clawed up by the cutest cat imaginable. But Austin, MN is home to the SPAM factory, and fifty percent of the week, it smelled like dead pig brains. The other fifty percent of the week, it smelled like hickory smoked bacon. Eighty percent of the people I knew there were under the age of five. AND, there were no lakes in Austin. In the land of 10,000 lakes, I picked the one county that didn't have one.

Thankfully, in December, I got married (yay!) and moved to Albert Lea. We live in a little one-bedroom apartment above a law office, one block away from a lake. There's one neighbor who brews and shares his own beer with us, and one Spanish-speaking neighbor who plays loud Mexican gospel and polka music. It's strange, and we love it here. Another unforeseen upside to moving to Albert Lea is that for the remainder of the school year, I had a twenty-five minute commute to work in the morning. It gave me a chance to funnel coffee into my system, listen to classical NPR, and calm down before I spent the entire day hanging out with three- and four-year-olds.

Commuting on I-90 in the winter could be treacherous, but it was also beautiful. I left the apartment at 7:00 every morning and got to watch the sun come up five times a week in January, February, and most of March. I did stop a few times to take pictures of the blood-fire sky, but my little camera could never do it. Incidentally, I started worrying about the sun. Every morning was a tiny, terrible reminder that we are hanging onto a rock that is floating in an enormous universe, kept warm by a gigantic fire burning itself up in the sky.

I didn't notice until March or April that I had unknowingly amassed twenty or thirty poems about the sun. Some of them are worrisome poems; a few of them are not.

Anyway, I thought I would explain why I am about to have four or five poems published about the sun. One of them came out recently in an issue of Right Hand Pointing. Another poem of mine will come out in the next few days in issue 20 of Emprise Review, so check that one out too, if you so desire.

I don't know if anyone else is freaked out when they think too long about the sun. Maybe I'm alone in this. But I'd like to think there are others. Maybe I can join a support group. Or develop agoraphobia.

Here's An Update Already, Jeeze, Stop Hounding Me

Okay so nobody has been pestering me about updating my blog, but I have been busy the past few days, swimming, peeling off huge patches of sunburnt skin, eating tons of food, reading, going through submissions for Stymie, and, oh yeah, blogging for Specter Lit Mag.

What started out as a joke over twitter turned into me being the Lit Blogger for Specter, essentially, as the editor puts it, "taking the news and current events in literature & firing out great content." No pressure. "Perez Hilton goes lit scholar," I joked in my first post. But really. Since then I've posted a few things: some writing tips from my files as a PANK reader, and a Venn diagram comparing me with Charles Bukowski. Who doesn't want to know how Hank and I match up? I think about it all the time.

By the way, if you have any Sports & Leisure-ish poetry, you should make sure to submit to Stymie, and we'll give it a good shake. That link there will take you to our online submission manager.

I also ordered the game The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, which I used to play all the time in elementary school during computer lab. I can't imagine it will be too difficult to beat now that I'm 25, but who's to say? I started playing Freedom! again, after someone told me you can play it for free online, and I've been totally obsessed for two days now. I haven't won, yet. I don't know if it's possible, though I do remember doing it at least once in my formative years. Maybe eight-year-olds are just better at computer games than 25-year-olds.

So that's why the blog has been empty lately. Important stuff. Lit stuff, and elementary school game stuff. Waiting for rejections, and receiving rejections, and even getting a few acceptances.

I have to go play Freedom! now.