Thanks to Tahoma Literary Review for
publishing my story “Gratitude Journal.”
It’s a rather bitter and angry story, so I’m happy to find such a
delightful home for it…and it’s always exciting to be published in the
inaugural issue of a literary journal, almost like getting to crack the bottle
of champagne on a new ship sailing off to the deep blue ocean.
And thanks to Tahoma
Literary Review for including these sentences in their mission statement:
“We at Tahoma Literary Review are
committed to producing a literary journal from the professional writer’s perspective;
we feel that writers deserve compensation for the weeks or months it takes to
compose a publishable poem or story. A major goal of Tahoma Literary Review is to show that writers and publishers can
support each other not only artistically, but also financially.”
To top it all off, work by one of my fabulous spring
semester Johns Hopkins students, Stefen Styrsky, also appears in this issue: “Men in White.”
While print and Kindle copies are available (and I recommend
you purchase one!), Tahoma Literary
Review also offers free PDF downloads.
Information about getting your copy of the journal is right here. (My story
is on page 24.)
Here’s the opening to “Gratitude Journal”…perhaps you will
get a teeny-tiny glimpse of that bitterness I alluded to??
I’m grateful that—as of today—I am a fifty-year-old woman in America. I’m grateful that when I express distaste for turning fifty, someone will chuckle and say, “Better than the alternative.” I’m grateful that no one listens when I speak—my opinions, my thoughts, my feelings: all are talked over and dismissed—and I’m grateful that a fifty-year-old woman in America might as well be a cockroach, skulking along the dark corners of the culture, something objectionable, an unseen thing scurrying under sudden and blinding light that might illuminate a crepey neck, raised veins, and crow’s feet. I’m grateful for the phrase “crow’s feet” because it’s preferable to have chosen the ugliest, most obnoxious, nastiest bird to stamp all over our faces, so I’m grateful the phrase is not “mockingbird feet” or “chickadee feet.” I’m grateful for birthday cards that joke about adult diapers and being “over the hill” and that claim to have sex secrets for old folks and then open to a cutout mask of a hot blonde twenty year old girl. I’m grateful for my sense of humor because if I couldn’t laugh I would have to find an alternative and that alternative might involve a gun; I’m grateful there are gun laws in my state that make it difficult for me to get a gun because I don’t know what I would do if I had one.
Read
more! And send in your work…Tahoma Literary Review is reading until
September 30.
